From Dracula to Lara Croft: The transferable exhibition at Derby Museums

Presentation abstract

Abstract

When Hamilton Deane’s stage Dracula premiered at Derby’s Grand Theatre in 1924, it gave the world the cloaked, evening-dress Count later carried into film by Bela Lugosi. Derby Museums took that claim; the work of the AHRC-funded Dracula Returns to Derby project and built an exhibition around it. Dracula Returns to Derby: 101 Years and Counting ran at Pickford’s House from May 2025 to June 2026, drawing loans from Dacre Stoker, the Dracula Society and the Hammer Script Archive, among them Christopher Lee’s Hammer cloak and a cane owned by Deane. Over its run the house’s annual footfall rose by 15 per cent and shop income rose sharply, in what became the museum’s longest single exhibition.

This paper asks what the exhibition proved and what it left to be tested. Its argument is that Dracula can anchor a successful regional-museum show when a research claim gives it a place to stand and significant collections lend it weight. The proof was practical rather than rhetorical: footfall, income, national press and an audience the museum had not previously reached.

The clearest evidence of a working model is that it transferred. A Tomb Raider Derby fan group, seeing the Dracula exhibition, asked for the same treatment for Lara Croft, made in Derby in 1996. Lara Croft: 30 Years On opens at Pickford’s House for twelve months on the Dracula show’s blueprint, its visitor and income targets the benchmark and its audience ready-made.

The paper reads this as a regional museum learning to treat its own late-twentieth-century culture as exhibitable heritage, and sets out what the university partnership, the lenders and the fan community each contributed, and what a museum needs in place before the model will carry a second time.