London Connect

Halloween is fast approaching - and so is the second 'Twilight' movie, 'New Moon', which opens in cinemas across the world in November. The perfect time, then, for me to get up to my neck in vampire movies and sort the great ones from the also-rans. Here, we present our Top 20 vampire movies ever made. Fangs for the memories...

20. Twilight

(Catherine Hardwicke, 2008)

Outrageous, adolescent, wish-fulfilment tosh ‘Twilight’ might be, but as the most commercially successful vampire movie ever, it bears much of the responsibility for the genre’s current pop culture resurgence. Hardwicke’s film of Stephanie Meyer’s novel puts a supernatural spin on that perennial fantasy object, the aloof, alluring bad boy. Kristen Stewart is the awkward new-girl-in-town audience proxy, Robert Pattinson the scion of a goody-two-shoes vampire clan that tries not to hurt anyone. Wusses.

Read our review

Watch the trailer

19. Blood for Dracula

(Paul Morrissey, 1974)

Created under the Warhol brand, this Dracula story is all sex, drugs and politics. In search of “wirgin” blood, the Count – Udo Kier, introduced in New York drag style sitting at a dressing mirror in which he is not reflected – decamps to Italy. There, he finds an impoverished nobleman with four daughters and a rutting handyman (Joe Dallesandro) and inadvertently prompts Marxist ructions. Silly but gorgeous, with cameos from Vittorio de Sica and Roman Polanski.

Read our review

Watch the opening sequence

18. From Dusk Till Dawn

(Robert Rodriguez, 1995)

This collaboration between Rodriguez and writer-star Quentin Tarantino is a precursor of ‘Grindhouse’: unapologetic genre exploitation and a game of two halves. The movie opens as a sneering, kick-ass road-movie-crime-thriller, with killer brothers Tarantino and George Clooney (a star-making turn) kidnapping pastor Harvey Keitel and his kids. In a great what-the moment, the Mexican bar they hole up in turns out to be a vampire den and suddenly we’re in a sneering, kick-ass monster movie. Fun!

Read our review

Watch the trailer

17. The Lost Boys

(Joel Schumacher, 1987)

‘People are strange, when you’re a stranger…’ For genre fans of a certain age, nothing says ‘vampire’ like that Doors song, Kiefer Sutherland in a blonde dye-job and the two Coreys – Haim and Feldman – rigging holy-water booby-traps. Santa Carla, California, is the coastal town plagued by delinquent bloodsuckers not entirely dissimilar to those that would pester Buffy’s Sunnydale a few years later. Schumacher keeps the shocks and the laughs in decent proportion.

Read our review

Watch the trailer

16. Shadow of the Vampire

(E Elias Merhige, 2000)

Less a remake of ‘Nosferatu’ than a fanciful film à clef, this posits the daft but witty notion that Murnau’s star, Max Schreck, was in fact a genuine vampire. The production process therefore demands both the coddling required by a prima donna and the precautions necessary for animal-wrangling. It’s all a bit stretched, but Willem Dafoe and John Malkovich have great fun as the monster and his director respectively and there’s some nice silent-movie formal pastiche.

Read the review

15. The Hunger

(Tony Scott, 1983)

It might not make a lot of sense, and it might have inaugurated the career of Tony Scott, but in its delicious superficiality, ‘The Hunger’ is perhaps the archetypal ’80s vampire movie. Catherine Deneuve is the ageless bloodsucker, David Bowie her current squeeze, coming to the end of an extended lifespan, and Susan Sarandon the young doctor she sets her sights on next. The preoccupation with ageing links vampires and movie stars like never before.

Read our review

14. The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires

(Roy Ward Baker, 1974)

When it comes to Hammer horror, Christopher Lee’s starring turn in 1958’s ‘Dracula’ is the iconic presence. But for sheer perversity, you can’t beat this genre-hopping collaboration between the British horror stable and the Shaw Brothers’ legendary Hong Kong studio. Peter Cushing returns as Van Helsing, who detects Dracula’s hand behind the terrorisation of a Chinese village. The bizarre collision yields some genuinely uncanny sequences, even if the results never really cohere into a convincing whole.

Read our review

Watch the trailer

13. Bram Stoker’s Dracula

(Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)

As its title suggests, Coppola’s heady, grand-scale picture returns to the original novel for its plot but spins off in all kinds of gratifyingly bonkers directions, from Aids metaphors to riffs on the birth of cinema. It’s pretty unforgettable thanks to its bubbling sexual hysteria, outré gothic-rococo production design and Gary Oldman’s hell-for-leather central performance, which skitters from crone to beast to Lothario. Just don’t mention Keanu Reeves’s Jonathan Harker, wooden as a stake.

Read our review

Watch the trailer

12. Nosferatu the Vampyre

(Werner Herzog, 1979)

Herzog’s tribute to Murnau’s classic is a strange piece, paying homage to the expressionist film in some ways – notably Klaus Kinski’s portrayal of the vampire and Herzog’s recreation of certain iconic shots – while opting for a historical-realist approach at odds with the original’s dreamlike poeticism. The setting is nineteenth-century Germany and intimations of plague, Faust and Freud are everywhere, while Kinski’s Count seeks relief from a century-spanning ennui.

Read our review

Watch the trailer

11. Let the Right One In

(Tomas Alfredson, 2008)

Adolescent alienation and romantic yearning are the underpinnings of last year’s weirdly touching Swedish vampire tale. Set in the 1980s, it mostly avoids blood and gore, opting instead to yoke an introverted 12-year-old to a semi-sympathetic bloodsucker in the form of a girl his own age, and have them forge a bond against the outside world. But the conclusion makes clear that for this monster, the most devious attack comes with open arms rather than bared fangs.

Read our review

Watch the trailer

10. The Addiction

(Abel Ferrara, 1995)

‘Have you read “Naked Lunch”?’ Christopher Walken’s veteran vamp asks neophyte Lili Taylor in Ferrara’s grungy, gritty horror flick, set in contemporary New York. To be a vampire here is to be a junkie-philosopher whose diet includes Nietzsche and RC Sproul as well as A- and O-negative – scenes of extreme bloodletting notwithstanding, ‘The Addiction’ is a wonderfully pretentious essay on individual morality. It also boasts striking monochrome photography, a killer soundtrack, Annabella Sciorra and Edie Falco.

Read our review

9. Vampires in Havana

(Juan Padrón, 1985)

This raucous Cuban animated feature is not currently available in English, but it’s a corker. The story revolves around Joseph Amadeus Dracula, a Havana trumpeter who discovers he is a vampire. Thanks to his uncle’s experimental formula, he’s able to live as a human but is soon on the run from both an American crime family and a European commercial cartel. The political-economic subtext is blatant, the tone ribald, the music a treat.

Watch a clip

8. Dracula

(Tod Browning, 1931)

Although not Browning’s most accomplished or unnerving work – see instead ‘Freaks’ or ‘Devil Doll’ – this first official adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel remains an essential vampire film. There are numerous imaginatively creepy visual coups and in Bela Lugosi, who had previously starred as the Count on Broadway, film found its defining Dracula, debonair and diabolical. The picture’s success demonstrated the viability of horror as a genre with mass appeal, inaugurating the Universal horror cycle.

Read our review

7. Rabid

(David Cronenberg, 1976)

This might not strictly be a vampire movie but its zombie-like killers’ predilection for gorging on blood makes it a near miss. Cronenberg’s perennial interests in transgressive body horror, social discord and black humour are evident as former porn star Marilyn Chambers succumbs to an unusual strain of rabies that has her develop a phallic underarm protrusion with a taste for blood. The infection spreads and before long, Montreal is not a good place to be.

Read our review

6. Martin

(George A Romero, 1977)

Although best known for his zombie cycle, Romero also contributed this intriguing entry to the vampire genre. Martin is a young man prone to drinking blood but not, he insists, a bloodsucker like the ones in the movies; he even has fantasy sequences that pastiche Hammer-style lore to prove the difference. Instead, Romero deploys real Pittsburgh locations and plausible psychological-medical factors to disquieting and satirical effect. Not without its credulity-stretching moments, but ambitious and provocative.

Read our review

Watch the trailer

5. Cronos

(Guillermo Del Toro, 1993)

In his debut feature, Del Toro used vampire tropes to feel out ideas he has repeatedly explored, from melding the organic with the mechanical to sympathy for the devilish, and indeed the casting of Federico Luppi and Ron Perlman. Luppi plays an old chap who comes across what looks like a gold pocket-watch but is in fact an animate immortality device. Reinvigorated and pumped with lust and bloodlust, he relishes his new potency while trying to maintain his family relations.

Read our review

Watch a trailer

4. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

(Guy Maddin, 2002)

Adapted from a Royal Winnipeg Ballet production, Maddin’s exquisite work melds dance, expressionist design and silent-movie pastiche to intoxicating, poetic effect. Playful, fractured and dreamlike, it offers both ethereal beauty and earthy irony, sometimes in the same scene: Lucy, for instance, performs a captivating dance of death before being decapitated with a spade, sound effects included. Primarily an aesthetic experience, it also calls itself ‘a troubled dream of immigrants’; Zhang Wei-Qiang’s Dracula certainly counts as Other.

Read our review

Watch a clip

3. Vampyr

(Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932)

For his follow-up to ‘Joan of Arc’, Dreyer turned to vampires – ‘fashionable things at the time,’ he later said – for this utterly mesmeric feature with surrealist overtones. An original story based on a broad sampling of horror fiction, it’s set in France and overflowing with intoxicating, beautifully composed images ranging from animate shadows to the lead character’s vision of his own live burial. It’s also unusual in having an old woman as the vampire ringleader.

Read our review

Watch the opening sequence

2. Near Dark

(Kathryn Bigelow, 1987)

Like ‘The Hunger’ and ‘The Lost Boys’, ‘Near Dark’ claimed vampires as contemporary rather than mythic-romantic figures, drawing on Western iconography more than horror. It stands up better than those do thanks to its powerful plot and grisly, muscular action. Adrian Pasdar is the young Oklahoman nobbled by a vampire gang that includes Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton and Joshua John Miller as Homer, a child monster pre-dating those in ‘Interview with the Vampire’ and ‘Let the Right One In’.

Read our review

Watch the trailer

1. Nosferatu

(FW Murnau, 1922)

Perhaps the most beautiful and uncanny of all vampire films, Murnau’s expressionist classic should by rights be lost: Bram Stoker’s estate won a copyright-infringement lawsuit requiring its destruction. Luckily, it survived. The film’s continued potency stems both from its supremely creepy imagery – slithering shadows, swarming rats – and from Max Schreck’s Count Orlok who, with his pointy ears, fingers and nose, is both grotesque and pathetic, a challenge to biological as well as social and sexual norms.

Read our review

Watch the trailer (as it might have been)