Vampire hunters suck new blood out of Bram Stoker’s legacy

As the festival of ghost, ghouls, and all things spooky, Halloween has provided the perfect opportunity for Dublin company Haunted Planet Studios to release a vampire-hunting smartphone app.

Appropriately, the game, Bram Stoker’s Vampires, was launched during the inaugural Bram Stoker festival in Dublin last week. The company aims to create an army of vampire hunters in the capital for Halloween but, within a year or so, Haunted Planet founder and director Mads Haahr wants to see the Dracula search go global.

The game, one of two produced by Haunted Planet on foot of several years of research, is a location-based augmented reality game which casts players as ghost or vampire hunters, and allows them to use their phones as paranormal detection devices.