In 2025, I finished the first draft of a new novel. The details are unimportant here. What is important is that one of the supporting characters is a tattooed astrophysicist with a penchant for all things vampire.
As research for her narrative arc, I started to watch and rewatch a raft of vampire movies and TV series, as well as reading a number of modern literary takes on the vampire myth. It led me to reflect on the way each new contributor to the genre adds new elements and strips away ideas considered sacrosanct by previous creators.
I started to think about a vampire story in which the protagonist moves through different versions of vampire myth whenever he feeds. In one incarnation, he would be able to move around in daylight. In the next, he would be visible in mirrors. Or unable to cross water after midnight.
I had already written a slew of stories for my Rupture series, in which the walls between reality break down and people move through time and possibility, sometimes intentionally, sometimes via random events and outside forces. Realms Undead, as I called the story, fits well into that world.
It’s a decent story of maybe 80 pages. Not quite as I intended it. Vampires, other than being sensitive to sunlight, exist in reasonable harmony with the laws of physics. Most of the myths around mirrors, crucifixes and the like are just that: myths. So when these bits of lore start to seep into their reality, it sends the vampire community into a panic. When they realise our protagonist is the unwitting cause of it all, he is forced to go on the run.
Anyway, writing Realms Undead led me into watching and reading even more examples from vampire culture. As such, I thought I would write a review of everything I have watched and rewatched, read and reread. In doing so, it completes a kind of vampire trilogy for my writing.
I have organised the following items into roughly the order in which I went through them. However, for reasons of space (and not testing your patience), I have grouped together things like the Hammer Horror movies and the various versions of Nosferatu, Salem’s Lot and Interview with the Vampire.
There will of course be plenty I have missed from this list. If you have a favourite vampire film, book, or anything else that isn’t included, feel free to leave a comment.
Ultraviolet
Ultraviolet stars Idris Elba before The Wire and Jack Davenport before Coupling and the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Indeed, Susannah Harker was probably the most recognisable name at the time after her turn as Mattie Storin in the original House of Cards series. Her great-great grandfather was the set designer Joseph Harker, from whom Bram Stoker took the name for Jonathan Harker in Dracula. She and her sister, Caroline Harker, chose their famous relative’s surname as their stage name.
Ultraviolet’s big contribution to vampire lore is vampires are not only invisible in mirrors and other reflective surfaces, but are invisible to all recording devices. They do not show up on camera. Their voices cannot be recorded by microphones. In order to communicate by telephone, they have to use Stephen Hawking style voice boxes.
The show almost certainly couldn’t be made today. Not when camera phones and selfie-taking narcissists are everywhere. The vampires of Ultraviolet would be discovered about thirty seconds after entering any public space. Which makes it a perfect trope as one iteration of Realms Undead. The danger factor. The need to hide even more in the shadows. It is a show very much of its time, existing at the edge of the new millennium and the social media age.
The other thing about Ultraviolet is it’s British. Which means one thing: Six episodes. That’s it. That’s your lot. The single season ends in a way that suggests a sequel was to come. However, writer/director, Joe Ahearne, only ever planned it to be one stand-alone season.
“That's the great thing about British TV.” as Britta says in Community. “They give you closure!”
It’s creepy and atmospheric. Like the best horror, most of the gore happens off screen and the details are left to our imagination. It also saves on the effects budget (again, it is a British show).
Indeed, the flesh and blood characters in Ultraviolet are just as unpleasant as the undead ones. It is a show I have watched countless times over the last twenty eight years. Any excuse to watch it again.
'Salem’s Lot: Stephen King Novel, 1979 & 2004 TV Movies
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A couple of years ago, I went through the entire Dark Towers series, which is a masterpiece. The thing about The Dark Tower, and most of King’s novels, is that it has connective tissue to other novels in the King-verse. So after reading The Shining (the differences between the book and the Kubrick film are an essay in themselves), I went back and read the books featuring characters and places that reappear in The Dark Tower. First on the call sheet, King’s second novel: 'Salem’s Lot.
The book is fine. Not as good as his debut, Carrie, which I read recently and was surprised by just how experimental it is with its mixture of narrative chapters and extracts from memoirs and magazine articles written years after the events. 'Salem’s Lot is a fairly straight up vampire tale with most of the usual tropes you expect to find in a vampire movie. Indeed, King wrote it as a modern retelling of Dracula.
I had seen the 1979 TV movie, starring David Soul, when ITV showed it over two nights in the 1990s. The most recent version from 2024 hadn’t yet been released. Instead, I stumbled on another TV movie miniseries made in 2004 and staring Rob Lowe.
It's safe to say that this is one of the worst things I have watched on this list. It’s dreadful. The whole thing is framed with a voiceover, which is always a bad sign. It’s Avatar bad. It’s Harrison Ford’s deliberately terrible voiceover for the original Blade Runner release bad. It turns what is supposed to be a story of a vampire laying waste to small town America into a soap opera.
On paper, this should be a triumph. Andre Braugher is in it. Donald Sutherland is in it. James Cromwell. Ruger Hauer. But it’s just so bad. The only thing that saves it is that by all accounts the 2024 version is even worse. Think I’ll give that one a miss.
Instead, I went back and rewatched the 1979 version. It has its issues, not least that David Soul is far too well known as a tough guy to be playing Ben Mears. He’s Hutch from Starsky and Hutch for fuck’s sake. Mears getting beaten up by his girlfriend’s ex is the least believable thing that happens.
Other than that, it’s good 70s horror. The vampire looks like Nosferatu’s Count Orlok rendered in blue polystyrene, but you can’t have everything. The kids tapping at the window is still disturbing, as is the reanimation scene in the mortuary. It’s other big star is James Mason, but there are plenty of actors that make you go: Oh! Them.
No doubt someone will try and make a new version in another twenty years. I would suggest if you’ve tried three times in forty years and haven’t improved on the first attempt, it’s probably time to let it lie.
Stephen King adaptations are always a mixed bunch. Some brilliant (The Shawshank Redemption), some terrible (Maximum Overdrive), some so far removed from the source material, all they retain is the title (ahem, The Running Man). The 2004 version is in the terrible batch, the 1979 version somewhere mid-table of the brilliant.
King went on to create his own supernatural creatures and there aren’t many other vampires in his oeuvre. Yet there are plenty of other vampire writers.
Let the Right One In - John Ajvide Lindqvist: Novel & 2008 Movie
Let the Right One In is about a lonely, bullied boy growing up in 1980s Stockholm. He befriends a girl who has recently moved into his apartment block. She only comes out at night. We all know enough about tropes to see where this is going.
Meanwhile, there are a number of grisly murders taking place in the neighborhood. Again, we’ve seen this film before. Yet all is not quite as it seems. I won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t read the book or seen the film.
Book and film are indelibly linked. John Ajvide Lindqvist adapted his own novel into the screenplay. It shows. There are changes and omissions of course, but the film is relatively faithful to the novel. There is one major change, which the makers go out of their way to signpost with a particularly graphic and completely unnecessary shot. Again, I won’t ruin it. However, in these increasingly transphobic times it is pretty unforgivable.
Despite that, book and film are brilliant. The film feels especially grounded for a horror movie. The book has the edge, but I am always going to chose a book over a film. It’s just who I am. Still, both versions sit near the top of their respective lists.
There was an American remake, but I’m not going to watch that any more than watch the most recent 'Salem’s Lot adaptation. A remake couldn’t possibly add anything to the Swedish version: only subtract. I will always choose a foreign language version over the English remake. A foreign film means I get to watch a movie and read: Bliss!
Byzantium
2012’s Byzantium is a funny one. Is it even a vampire film? Then we could ask the same of Let the Right One In. How much of vampire lore does a cultural item need to include before it crosses the line? It’s like the famous experiment of adding single drops of black liquid to a pool of white. Where is the threshold?
Byzantium was directed by Neil Jordan, who directed the 1994 Interview with the Vampire film (see below). If that was unconventional, this is even more so.
Two women, Gemma Aterton and Saoirse Ronan, are on the run from religious zealots. They have been on the run for centuries. They end up in some nondescript English seaside town, staying in the titular Byzantium Hotel.
They are not really vampires. More revenants. They need blood to survive, but they can move about in daylight. Rather than the iconic fangs, they have retractable nails in their thumb for piercing the veins of their victims.
To be honest, if you are someone who hated Louis and Lestat in Interview with the Vampire, you are going to find this is more of the same. Byzantium is as much a period piece, as the younger Eleanor realises they have been to this place before and flashbacks reveal her and Clara’s history together. Secrets are slowly revealed.
I have to say, I like this one. But then I also like Interview with the Vampire. It offers something different. How many vampire stories are about women, except as harridans for Dracula or some other alpha male vampire? Not many. It’s a very British film. There aren’t many of them either.
Certain Dark Things - Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Next, a couple of books set around the Mexican-United States border.
Certain Dark Things answers the question, what if Mexican drug cartels were in fact vampires? It would explain a lot.
Atl is on the run from a rival narco-clan after they wipe out her family. She hides in the chaos of Mexico City and befriends a street kid who offers her refuge and blood. With gang members and the police on her trail, Atl looks for a way to escape the country for good.
It’s a decent novel, playing once again with vampire tropes. Though I have to say if you’re going to read one Moreno-Garcia novel, I would recommend Mexican Gothic, which isn’t a vampire story, but is, as the name suggests, a gothic horror novel in the finest tradition of the genre. If you read a second Moreno-Garcia novel, Certain Dark Things is probably a good bet (they’re the only two I’ve read so far). Like a lot of items on this list, I would criticise it for defanging its vampires for the sake of plot, but it’s hardly unique in that regard. Overpowered characters are the eternal enemies of narrative.
Vampires of El Norte - Isabel Cañas
Vampires of El Norte is another item on the list where you have to question whether it is even a vampire novel in the strictest sense of the term. Set in Mexico in the 1840s during the Mexican-American War, the novel is as much about the battle for land and forbidden love between master and servant as it is a straight up vampire tale.
Indeed, the ‘vampires’ here are not even human, but wild creatures that live in the deserts of the south west and feed on those unlucky enough to wander into their territory. Most of the usual vampire tropes don’t apply, except the basic bloodlust and the possibility of being infected by their bite, which is as much a werewolf trope as it applies to vampires (you usually have to actually drink their blood).
We could also I suppose factor in the legend of chupacabra (goat sucker). However, chupacabra is a recent introduction into folklore. It dates from the1970s and wasn’t even named until the 90s (and even then as a joke by a Puerto Rican comedian). Yet it is another indication that the ‘vampires’ of El Norte are a mishmash of various supernatural archetypes.
For all that, it’s a good novel, especially when thought of as a historical romance rather than a horror novel. Lower your expectations over how much horror to expect and you should enjoy this one.
Dracula: 1931
Okay, so let’s look at some of the classics. Until recently, I hadn’t seen the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula from 1931. Now I have, all I can say is, what is this mess of a film?
Seriously. I could deal with the rubber bats and the total lack of anything horrific taking place (it was the 1930s after all). What is less forgivable is that no one on screen should have ever, ever, ever been allowed in front of a camera. There isn’t a single person in the cast who could act with a gun to their head (or a fang to their neck). That goes double for Bela Lugosi. No wonder he ended up in Ed Wood b-movies towards the end of his life.
More than that though, it just feels like half a movie. It runs to an hour and a quarter and so much of what is set up in the opening act fails to find any resolution. We see Dracula’s bevy of vampire beauties and then they are never seen again. Lucy is turned into a vampire and wonders around for a bit, but she doesn’t return.
Was there more that was cut, or is this it? For a supposed classic of horror cinema and vampire cinema, it’s the absolute pits. Even the abysmal Hammer Horror Dracula sequels (see below) have more life to them than this dog’s dinner of a film. Thank the undead realms for Christopher Lee.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula: 1992
Talking of vampire movies that are a mess, there is “Bram Stoker’s” Dracula. The difference is Coppola’s 1992 version is a glorious mess. I remember seeing this when it came out. I was at college doing media studies at the time (don’t judge me). I was so engrossed by Coppola’s copious use of practical effects and camera tricks that I had to ask my then girlfriend if the film was any good. I’d completely zoned out of the plot.
Let’s face it, Coppola’s Dracula is not the Godfather. It’s not even Apocalypse Now (the very definition of a glorious mess). It’s big, bombastic and dumb. But it is also so much fun. Gary Oldham is clearly having the time of his life. As is Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing. Winona Rider’s English accent is hardly any better than Keanu’s (How’s it hanging, Dracula dude?), but my god, she is so beautiful and diaphanous, you can understand why anyone would cross oceans of time to find her.
People talk about comfort movies and I always struggle to name very many (I have comfort shows rather than movies). However, of everything on this list, Bram Stoker’s Dracula qualifies as a comfort. There are better vampire films, but its aesthetics and the way it was filmed are what give it staying power. It doesn’t seem to have aged. I doubt many films made today will be able to say the same.
Dracula: Dead and Loving It: 1995
I’m just going to go ahead and say it: This might be the worst thing on the list. I am a big fan of Mel Brooks early work. The Producers is hilarious. Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein are two of the greatest comedies ever made.
That said, Brooks has been treading water for the last forty years. I know this is bordering on the heretical, but I don’t even think Spaceballs is that good. It has its moments (“We ain’t found shit.”), but a lot of it just feels lazy. The jokes feel like rejects from the much better Airplane II: The Sequel. I don’t know. Maybe as I have soured towards Star Wars over the last twenty years, I find Star Wars parodies leave a bad taste.
Then again, when you look at Dracula: Dead and Loving It, you start to see the problem. Essentially Mel Brooks just takes the same worn out jokes and applies them to a new genre he wants to parody. What if Blazing Saddles was set in space? Spaceballs. What if Spaceballs was a vampire movie? Or, more accurately, what if The Naked Gun was a vampire movie? Hire Leslie Nielson and hey presto: Dracula: Dead and Loving It.
The film was promoted as a satire of the Bela Lugosi film, but come on. This is three years after Coppola’s Dracula and clearly it is an attempt to cash in on the success of that film. Like Queen in the 1980s, Brooks is chasing trends and simply isn’t quick enough to catch up in time. By 1995, Interview with the Vampire had been out for a year and whatever you think of Anne Rice’s vampires, they were the version fixed in people’s minds for the next decade. Coppola’s Dracula was already old hat.
I sure there will be someone who tells me they love this one and think it’s hilarious and who am I to disagree? People like what they like. I just find it lazy and painfully unfunny and a waste of the talent of everyone involved. The Bela Lugosi Dracula has more laughs, unintentionally, than the Brooks version. AI could write a funnier script. The dead could write a funnier script. Have I mentioned how much I dislike it?
Nosferatu: 1922 & 2024
Where it all began. Cinematically at least.
I don’t know if I’d seen Nosferatu before. I’ve certainly seen bits of it. Everyone knows the image of Count Orlok; he has been copied and parodied enough times over the last century ("Monster, monster monster.").
It is a miracle we can even watch Nosferatu today. Bram Stoker’s widow successfully sued the film makers for copyright infringement and all copies of the film were ordered to be destroyed. It was only because several copies had already been sent to the United States that it survives into the present day.
I’m not literate enough in silent cinema to say if Nosferatu truly is a masterpiece. It’s good for what it is and certainly more chilling than a lot of films on this list that are trying too hard. It’s also quite silly in places, but so are most silent films to our modern eyes. It’s certainly less silly than the Bela Lugosi version. Count Orlok remains genuinely creepy.
Nosferatu, it should be pointed out, was the first vampire film to depict a vampire being killed by sunlight. That element isn’t found in Stoker’s novel. By 1992, seventy years later, the destructive power of sunlight had become so ingrained in vampire lore that Coppola’s ‘version’ of Dracula couldn’t just pass over it with a wave of the hand. They had to address directly, via Van Helsingr’s voiceover, that vampires can go out in daylight.
In writing Realms Undead, I couldn’t avoid making reference to Nosferatu. However I stumbled into something of a weird coincidence.
Most of the action of Realms Undead takes place in Hamburg. The main character flies to Lübeck, a city near Germany’s Baltic coast. In the current reality, vampires can become bats. I picked Lübeck as a random place on the map that he could realistically reach during the hours of darkness.
The city turns out to have a couple of unexpected connections to my work. The writer Thomas Mann was born there, whose novel, The Magic Mountain, is something of a cornerstone for the novel I was writing when I started all of this.
More than that though, Lübeck is where much of Nosferatu was filmed. The city contains a large number of medieval buildings and has been a common filming location for as long as cinema has existed. While our man is there, he feeds and all the vampires turn into versions of Count Orlok. I wrote this before I realised Lübeck is where Nosferatu was filmed. A meaningless coincidence, but a coincidence nonetheless.
I haven’t seen Werner Hertzog’s 1979 remake, Nosferatu the Vampyre, but I understand it’s very good. A lot of it was again filmed in Lübeck. I’ll add it to the last.
I have, however, seen Robert Eggers’s version from 2024. You certainly have to have seen the original 1922 film to fully appreciate it. It has its own style and aesthetic sensibilities, but F. W. Murnau’s version is holding the reins as it gallops through the familiar twists and turns like the demon coachman found in most versions of the Dracula story.
Bill SkarsgÃ¥rd is brilliant as Count Orlok, chewing up scenery with even more relish than Gary Oldham’s Dracula. The film has the usual cavalcade of buttoned up, highly string Victorian characters, but that’s why many of the best vampire films are period specific. Who better to face unrestrained bloodlust than the neurotic, white supremacist Europeans of the Victorian Age? I’m sure there is much to say about Dracula, Jeckyll & Hyde, The Hound of the Baskervilles and the rest as projections of colonialism and the 19th century European middle class mindset.
That being as it may, it’s a great film, a great horror film and a great piece of period drama. One of the highlights. Let’s see what we can dredge up from the bottom.
Near Dark: 1987
Only joking. It’s not that Near Dark is bad, just odd. What if we took half the cast from Aliens and made them vampires? Lance Henriksen (who I always want to call Henrik Larsson). Bill Paxton. Jenette Goldstein. What if Paxton’s whiny Private Hudson was instead a psychopathic vampire? You half expect him to shout, “Game over man.” at some point.
Farfetched? Well director (and co-writer), Kathryn Bigelow, later married Aliens director, James Cameron. Also, Michael Biehn, who played Hicks in Aliens, as well as roles in many Cameron movies, including The Terminator and The Abyss, was offered the part eventually played by Henriksen (but not Larsson). Biehn found the script confusing. I know what he means.
Like I say, odd. I know it’s all make believe and you have to factor in the suspension of disbelief. Yet how this band of vampires survived without detection for more than five minutes, given their trail of destruction, is a little too unbelievable. As is the ‘cure’ for the hero characters turned into vampires against their will. It’s one of the sillier solutions cinema has placed before our eyes.
It’s ok. No more preposterous than any other action movie from the 1980s (I’m looking at you, Arnie). Essentially a chase movie, it doesn’t really know what it is. It’s one of those movies that wouldn’t fundamentally change if the central premise was discarded. Like Minority Report, which you could set it in the 1930s and the grand conspiracy elements would remain the same.
It was Bigelow’s directorial debut and she did go on to direct Point Break and Strange Days in the next decade, so I think we can forgive her a slightly shaky start. I’d watch it again. Probably not much more than that. 1987 has much more enticing vampire material.
The Lost Boys: 1987
There was a time during my mid-teens when The Lost Boys was my favourite movie of all time. Don’t judge me. I was young. I hadn’t seen the Godfather and Ridley Scott had yet to unscramble the mess that was the theatrical release of Blade Runner into the masterpiece it became.
That said, The Lost Boys sits proudly at the top of this list as the best vampire movie of all. Maybe it’s the time in which I saw it. I once showed it to my then partner, who was a huge vampire fan, and she thought it was crap. We stopped speaking a long time ago.
I think The Lost Boys is something of a perfect storm. It’s essentially a teen movie that, consciously or unconsciously, borrows elements from 1984’s The Karate Kid. Single mother who moves her family to the Californian coast. Bullied son who takes on superhuman powers. Ok, that last one’s a stretch, but you get the point. It sits very much inside the pocket of 1980s teen cinema.
The Lost Boys other great strength is it’s a meta-vampire movie. A decade before Scream redefined slasher movies with its in-film dissection of horror movies, The Lost Boys was already there. It uses just about every vampire trope ever conceived and sends them up as it does so. The idea that inviting a vampire into your home makes them visible in mirrors and immune to garlic and holy water is a definite plot hole (especially when Michael is subject to those things in his own house as he turns in a vampire), but I can just about overlook it.
Apart from a few quibbles, it’s largely flawless. Kiefer Sutherland is perfect as David. As is Corey Haim as Sam. He died far too young. I read just recently that Sam is arguably coded as gay. I can see that and it only makes him more compelling as the heart and centre of the film.
It very much depends on when you experience these cultural items and how they worm their way into your skull for all time. The Lost Boys is special. Unique. It’s the only vampire film that made me want to be a vampire. Again, I was a teenager and an idiot. I also thought Queen’s album, The Miracle, was a great when it came out. Some things we grow out of. Others not so much.
All Souls Trilogy – Deborah Harkness
Back to books. I’ve been reading a couple of vampire series.
The All Souls trilogy (A Discovery of Witches, Shadow of Night & The Book of Life) is set in a world where vampires, witches and demons live amongst us. Diana Bishop, academic and daughter of witches, finds a strange manuscript in Oxford's Bodleian Library, which sets off a chain of events that lead her to fall in love with a vampire and travell into the past of Elizabethan London.
They’re decent books, but you do have to temper your expectations if you’re looking for strong vampire archetypes. The vampires of All Souls are low powered on the Top Trumps Vampire Trope score sheet. They drink blood and live for centuries, but they don’t seem to have a lot of power beyond that. The witches of All Soul’s outmatch them. If you think the vampires of Anne Rice are pouty aesthetes, they ain’t got nothing on Matthew Clairmont and his family of French aristocratic blood suckers.
Get past that, as well as the Diana’s-parents- were-murdered-when-she-was-a-child derivative Harry Potter backstory (which, to be fair, was hack by the time she who must not be named was doing it) and they are enjoyable books. At times as much gothic romance as they are vampire literature. I imagine if you like Harry Potter (never read them, never will), this series is probably for you. There are a couple of sequels beyond the original trilogy, as well as another due for publication. I imagine I will read them all eventually.
Night Watch/ Day Watch - Sergei Lukyanenko
Set in Moscow, where the forces of light and darkness police each other’s activities, Night Watch and its sequels are not All Souls.
Each book is essentially a series of three stories that connect to one another. In the first book, Night Watch, the focus is on those from the light who patrol the nighttime world and enforce the law. In Day Watch, the focus shifts to those who regulate the day. There are three further novels in the series, but these are the only two I have read at time of writing.
They are certainly unique in the annals of vampire culture. It’s not quite Dostoyevsky (wrong city for a start), but they have the same sensibilities you only find in Russian literature. They are also a window onto that interim Russian period between the fall of the Soviet regime and the rise of Putin. It will be interesting to see how much changes in later books.
There are all the usual vampires, necromancers, shape-shifters and sorcerers, but the strength of the series comes from the relative powerless of its main characters. Don’t get me wrong. If you want overpowered vampires, you will find them in spades in Lukyanenko’s work. It’s the political hectoring between light and dark that renders the point of view characters powerless. They are pawns being used by the higher-ups to push their advantage.
If you like a mishmash of vampires, detective drama, noir and Russian literature, Night Watch is definitely for you. I’ve really enjoyed the two I’ve read and am saving the final three in the series. The final book, New Watch, came out in 2012, so I imagine that is the end of the road.
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night: 2014
Of all the films on this list that I have watched for the first time, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is a revelation. Written and directed by Iranian-American, Ana Lily Amirpour, the film is set in some nondescript Iranian town (it’s name renders in English as Bad Town), overshadowed by oil dikes and religious oppression.
With Byzantium (see above), we talked about the relative lack of front and centre female vampires in cinema and vampire culture in general. Here we have ‘The Girl’, who roams the streets at night, covered in the veil all Iranian women are required to wear by law, as she preys on the men who own the night. You don’t have to be a student of cinema or Middle Eastern politics to pick up on the social commentary.
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is shot entirely in black and white, which is very much an artistic choice. The action is slow paced, almost glacial at times, but that gives the film its power. The blockbuster vampire movies give you action, action, action and blood, blood, blood. Very few ever try to imagine the realities of being a vampire. When you live for centuries, years would pass like days, but the nights would feel like centuries. A glacial pace is more realistic than an action packed one.
I love A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night and if there is one film on this list you haven’t seen and want to watch, this is the one. It is in many ways the antithesis of Near Dark. The shots of The Girl floating down dusty, dark streets, a skateboard concealed beneath her skirts, are worth the price of admission alone.
Cronos: 1993
Cronos is another film where you are forced to ask, is this even a vampire movie? Directed by Guillermo del Toro (his Spanish language debut), we can therefore expect weirdness from the start. Many familiar del Toro’s elements and tropes are present from the beginning. That includes Ron Perlman in a largely English speaking role.
The story isn’t that complicated. A Mexican antiques dealer finds a device in the base of an artifact that pierces his skin, takes his blood and makes him youthful. The fountain of youth trope is one we have seen countless times, from H. Rider Haggard She to Countess Dracula (see below). There is also a Faustian pact that must be paid before the story ends.
So much, so ordinary. You have the terminally ill billionaire who has been searching for the Cronos device (Cronos McGuffin?) for years and Ron Pearlman as his enforcer and right hand man. There is very little that is vampyric in nature, other than developing a taste for blood (the scene on the bathroom floor is worthy of John Walters for grossness). The Faustian tradeoff is he slowly turns into one of the undead, but even with the focus on blood, his becoming a vampire isn’t clear. He is as much Jeff Goldblum’s Fly as he is Dracula.
Cronus is a curiosity. Likesay, many of the familiar del Toro elements are there, not least the stop motion animation you find in everything from Hellboy to Pinocchio (which, if you haven’t seen it, is mind blowing). It’s not Pan’s Labyrinth, but few movies are. Is it a vampire movie? Technically, yes. Actually, no. It’s del Toro movie. Which is reason enough to watch it.
What We Do in the Shadows: 2014 Film & 2019 TV Series
Dear Mel Brooks, this is how you spoof vampires. Indeed, Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement‘s 2014 film, What We Do in the Shadows, does for vampires what This is Spinal Tap did for (or to) rock music. Little surprise that Clement is one half of musical comedy duo, Flight of the Concords.
The set up is simple. Four vampires share a house in Wellington, New Zealand. A documentary film crew come to film their day to day (or night to night) activities. It’s The Office and its clones taken to the next logical step. Although unlike many of those mockumentary shows, the camera crew are a real part of the chaos and not just forgotten about for large parts of the action.
I have to say, I was skeptical when a friend insisted on showing this to me a year or so after its release. But What We Do in the Shadows works because it is so low key. Wellington isn’t the first place you think about when you think vampires. That the vampires are each based on cinematic vampires (Louis, David, Dracula and Orlock), but they get the bus into town to feed is inspired. Only Kiwis and maybe the British could take such high status creatures and render them as low status as possible.
Like Spinal Tap, What We Do in the Shadows is almost entirely improvised. A script was written by Waititi and Clement, but they didn’t show it to the rest of the cast. More than a hundred and twenty hours of footage was shot, cut down to ninety minutes over the course of a year. They keep threatening to make a sequel, based around the werewolf rivals of the vampires (led by the brilliant Rhys Darby), but it has been delayed and delayed. Maybe it’s too late to have the impact it might once have had. Though perhaps the TV version has kept people interested (dare I say, satiated? – I dare).
An American remake of a non-American show is usually a recipe for disaster. You only have to look at the various attempts over the years to do an American Fawlty Towers, or the terrible pilots for Red Dwarf and The Young Ones (amongst many others).
The only success of note is the American version of The Office, which in many ways eclipses the original. Though that stretched credibility beyond breaking point by the end with at least six camera crews following the various characters of one small paper firm. That said, if anything was going to replicate that success, it would have to be another mockumentary.
The TV version of What We Do in the Shadows works for two reasons. The first is they resisted the urge to make the characters higher status than their (low) kiwi counterparts and set the whole thing in Staten Island. Which I guess is the New Zealand of New York.
The other reason it succeeds is the analogue characters to Viago, Vladislav and Deacon are all played by British actors. Matt Berry as Laszlo is basically playing a version of himself as always. Natasia Demetriou as Laszlo ‘s wife, Nadja, is the star of the show. Kayvan Novak as Nandor the Relentless is probably the funniest of the three.
Casting British actors works because it gives them a certain amount of detachment from the world outside (they came to the New World to conquer it and have barely left Staten Island in centuries). The surrounding characters can then be played by North Americans, who are more connected to their own continent.
Harvey Guillén as Guillermo is more fleshed out as Nandor’s familiar than was possible with Jackie in the film version. Mark Proksch’s energy vampire, Colin Robinson, is a new character (Colin is to What We Do in the Shadows what Dwight was to the US Office). Pytr, the Orlock looking vampire in the film, then becomes Baron Afanas (played by the wonderful Doug Jones), who comes to America is see how they are getting on with conquering the New World
I love the film version of What We Do in the Shadows, but I love the TV version even more. It has become a comfort show. The earliest seasons, which are all still on the BBC iPlayer, I have watched at least half a dozen times in the years since the series first aired.
What We Do in the Shadows finished in 2024 with its sixth season, which is pretty good in these days when TV has been overrun by venture capitalists who only care about the latest shiny new thing and don’t give shows time to breathe (though to be fair, the series ended because the creators didn’t want it to become stale). Unless you’re an Apple show, five seasons is the best you’re going to get (if you’re on Netflix, they’ll probably cancel you two days after the first season premieres).
The final season was perhaps not as good as the first five, but there are enough great episodes to carry the load. Local News from season five is a particular highlight. As is On the Run, guest starring Mark Hamill. But you can’t really argue with The Trial from season one as the best episode of the series. Managing to round up some of the most well known screen vampires from recent history, including Rachel Wood, Tilda Swinton and Wesley Snipes, as well as Taika Waititi, Jemaine Clement and Jonathan Brugh form the original movie, was a stroke of genius. After that, they could do no wrong in my eyes.
To be honest, I’ll probably watch the whole thing again before the end of the year. It avoids most of the usual clichés of American TV, where every character has to grow and achieve some version of the American Dream. The vampires are still in the same run down house at the end as the beginning. Although it is a scripted show, it never strays far from the sensibilities of its source material. Often that is the best you can expect from any cultural item.
Dracula – Bram Stoker
Eventually, you have to return to the source material. Stoker wasn’t the first to write about vampires, but he was the one to popularise them. Everything flows from what Dracula put out into the world.
I hadn’t read the book in twenty years. In returning to it, I think what is most remarkable about Stoker’s 1897 novel is how no-one has yet made a successful adaptation. Not Coppola. Not F. W. Murnau. Certainly not Bela Lugosi.
We’ve talked about how different creators mix and match which bits of vampire lore they choose to include. That goes doubly for versions of Dracula. F W Murnau was trying (unsuccessfully as it turned out) to make a version of the story that evaded copyright claims. Coppola called his version, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which is a classic piece of Orwellian misdirection (always deal with the tricky part in the title). Including a plethora of dialogue pasted from the novel doesn’t make it any closer to the text than Nosferatu.
Hammer, meanwhile, just reduced everything to the battle between Dracula and Van Helsing (ergo, between Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing - see below). Which is ultimately the problem with any attempt to film Dracula. It's a four hundred and fifty page novel, which is far too long to fit into a two hour movie. So everything but the horror elements are discarded and what’s left is boiled down and reduced to the bare bones.
I still think there is a four or five part series to be made out of Dracula the novel. I could well imagine the BBC making a version beyond the Gatiss and Moffat reimagining (see below) in the mould of costume dramas like Pride and Prejudice and Poldark. The horror purists would complain when there was an episode where little to no horror took place. Yet that is the reality of the novel.
Dracula, at the end of the day, is a Victorian adventure story as much as it is a horror novel. If there is anything to which it bears comparison, it is the Sherlock Holmes stories that came out in serialised form either side of Dracula’s publication (no wonder the makers of Sherlock turned their hands to Dracula after the former was concluded). Is it high literature? No. Neither is The Hound of the Baskervilles. What both novels are, however, is fun. There are also novels in which the main character (Dracula and Sherlock Holmes) are absent for large parts of the narrative.
We talked about Ultraviolet (see above) sitting on the cusp of the 21st century. Dracula sits at the edge of the 20th. Dr Seward ‘writing’ his journal diaries on a phonograph and recording them on wax cylinders. Passing reference to telephone calls. This is not the London of Dickens. Indeed, it is quite depressing to see how quickly Van Helsing can travel between London and Amsterdam and seemingly return the same day. I’m not sure British transport links could manage that today. Not by land and sea at least.
The framing of the novel, told through journal entries and ancillary sources, is perhaps a little cumbersome, especially when their coming together into one manuscript must be explained. Authors these days wouldn’t even bother. It would be accepted as a framing device without the need for artifice. Dracula is hardly unique in this regard. After all, that other foundational horror novel of the 19th century, Frankenstein, is told as a series of nested tales in Robert Walton’s letters home to his sister.
Of the two, Frankenstein is the better novel and the one I prefer. Frankenstein is an example of high literature, comparable to Moby Dick or Middlemarch. Yet it’s influence on culture, while significant, is slight compared to Dracula (though Young Frankenstein is still a colossus compared to the weedy Dracula: Dead and Loving It). There can be few novels that have spawned the sheer volume of imitators as Dracula. Whatever you think of it as a novel, Dracula gave birth to an industry. Whitby, the Yorkshire town that inspired Stoker during his stay there in 1890, is kept thriving by its annual festival and events related to Dracula, vampires and gothic literature in general.
So yeah, it’s a decent enough book. Will I read it again? Probably not. Twice is enough (FYI, I’ve read Frankenstein maybe half a dozen times over the years and will read it again at some point). Still, it’s important to remember from whence all of this came.
As above, so below. Let’s return to what others reaped from what Bram Stoker sowed.
Dracula: 2020 TV Mini-Series
Mark Gatiss and Steve Moffat’s Dracula mini-series, broadcast on BBC1 over three nights during Christmas 2020, might be better described as Dracula Deconstructed. What if we took all the familiar elements of the Dracula story and separated them out from one another in place and in time? What if we used the devices that made our Sherlock series a success and applied them to Bram Stoker’s novel?
Does it work? Yes and no. Of the three ninety minute episodes, the middle one is easily the best. Yet it is also the one that is almost completely an invention. Taking place on the Demeter (a good joke on the part of Stoker, if you know the Demeter and Persephone myth), most filmmakers deal with the journey of the ill-fated ship carrying Dracula to Whitby in two minutes of screen time. Gatiss and Moffat give it its own episode and turn it into a kind of murder mystery (in that there is a mystery and a lot of murder). It’s the episode that works best.
Either side of that are the Castle Dracula and modern day episodes. I do like this idea of leaning into one specific section of the novel. In my idea for a proper four or five part serialisation of the novel, the first episode would of course be entirely set in Transylvania. About the first fifth of the novel is Jonathan Harker’s journal entries while trapped there.
The problem is that once you’ve spent one episode at Castle Dracula and another on a minor part of the novel, that leaves a hell of left to tie up in the concluding part. Jonathan Harker and Mina Murray have been dispensed with in the opening episode. Doctor Van Helsing is now a nun and exists across time. Yet the final episode feels somewhat rushed and like it doesn’t really know where it’s going. It’s a bit like the final episode of Sherlock in fact.
The other main problem with this iteration of Dracula, I’m afraid to say, is Dracula himself. Did we really need Dracula as a mockney? Do we really need this level of hamming it up? Rather than Dracula Deconstructed, at times it feels more like Carry On Vamping (Carry On Camping would also work). Dracula is either killing or quipping. The only thing worse than a one-note villain is a two-note villain.
I don’t dislike Claes Bang as the titular count. He’s certainly better than Bela Lugosi. When he’s playing the character for straight up charm, he’s very good. It’s everything else that jars. When Christopher Lee’s Dracula dies, you feel a sense of relief (at least in the first film – it gets tedious the 8 times after that). When Gary Oldham’s Dracula dies, you feel glad to know he has finally found peace. When Claes Bang’s Dracula dies, all you feel is, meh.
Dolly Wells as Sister Agatha (Van Helsing) on the other hand is excellent. Some of the anachronistic lines she’s given to speak have diminishing returns, but she plays both iterations of the character very well. Mark Gatiss could only really be Renfeld and he does it well enough. But again, when he shows up in the third episode, there isn’t enough time to develop his character and take him to his unnatural end.
Lydia West is a decent Lucy, very much leaning away from the novel and towards the sensualised version of Coppola’s film. Her postmortem horror is one of the most disturbing parts of the entire series. I’ve seen reviews from people who loved the first two parts and hated the third episode, not because it was rushed, but because it became, for want of a better word, woke. The same people are always angry at anything that isn’t wall to wall white people. Lucy and her friends very much represent modern day London.
I really don’t mind that they set the final episode in the present day. It’s the Sherlock formula in reverse (I also quite like the Abominable Bride episode of Sherlock, set in Victorian London, although the rationale for its existence was unnecessary). Lucy is 20 in the novel. Of course she would be out clubbing and posting everything on social media in the present day. All of her ‘suitors’ in the book are at least 30, so they have to be youthified to make it seem less creepy by today’s standards. Arthur is cut out completely and replaced by Quincey. Again, the final episode is so rushed, even the characters who are retained from the novel don’t have time to do much.
What this version of Dracula needed was a fourth episode to draw out the modern day scenes. As it is, it goes: Dracula lies dormant at the bottom of the North Sea for a hundred and thirty years, returns to life, jollies around London for a few months, then takes his own life. Big whoop-de-do. Why should anyone care? Dracula is at all times the weak link, which, in a series called Dracula, is not great.
I said previously (see above) that I don’t really have comfort films, but comfort shows. Sherlock is a comfort show. There are some of the earlier episodes I’ve seen at least a dozen times over the last fifteen years. Dracula, not so much. I saw it when it came out. I watched it again as part of this project. Like the original novel, I’m glad it exists. Like the novel, it’s not something I really need to experience again.
Dracula Deconstructed is an interesting idea, but Coppola already did it and did it better, even as messy as that film is. This is as much Mark Gatiss and Steve Moffat’s Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula as it is anything else. Which is far too conceptual even for me. Cut out the middle men and watch Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula instead. It’s probably as close to the novel as we ever need to get.
Only Lover Left Alive: 2013 Film
Jim Jamusch’s 2013 film, Only Lovers Left Alive, is for people who think the characters in Interview With the Vampire’s didn’t mope around enough. The word ‘vampire’ is never used (though ‘zombie’ is to describe humans). The characters don’t hunt for blood, but bribe doctors to provide them with supplies from blood banks. The film originally contained some action sequences, but when the studio asked Jamusch to include more, he took them all out. It’s that kind of film.
If you’re looking for the vampire movie antithesis to Near Dark, this is pretty much it. It’s a film for people who like artistic cinema, but don’t really like vampires or horror in general. It’s for people who want to spend two hours staring at a screen where not much really happens.
The thing is, I quite like it for all that. It’s not the best item on this list, but it’s also a long way from being the worst. It’s just one of those films where at the end you think, well what was the point of all that? Like Superman’s decision to become mortal in Superman II. The resolution is somewhat satisfying for vampire fans as the vampires remember how to behave like vampires (I’m not condoning such behaviour, but vampires aren’t real and this is just a movie and that is what they’re supposed to be doing).
Tilda Swinton shimmers on screen, as she always does. Tom Hiddleston plays the world weary aesthete well enough. Their characters are called Adam and Eve, not taken directly from the Bible, but from Mark Twain’s short stories, collected together as The Diary of Adam and Eve (I read them about fifteen years ago and have a copy somewhere).
You could also argue they are the vampire equivalent of mitochondrial Eve and chromosomal Adam, given that Adam is supposed to be about six hundred years old and Eve closer to two thousand. Our theoretical most-recent-common-ancestors are separated from one another by millennia (and like Adam and Eve, are probably entirely fictional).
Here the similarities to Adam and Eve end. Swinton and Hiddleston’s characters are not the progenitors of mankind and despite having known poets, musicians and scientists down the centuries, including the ever-living ‘Kit’ Marlowe, played by Jon Hurt, they seem to be fairly ordinary vampires. It is suggested that Adam was once John Keats, the English poet who died from tuberculosis at 25. Given he now lives as a reclusive musician on the outskirts of Detroit, it seems he has been avoiding the limelight for centuries.
Other than that, there is not much to say about this one. The plot can be summed up in five short sentences. Adam and Eve live on different continents. Eve comes to visit Adam. Eve’s sister turns up. She kills someone in the house and drinks their blood. Adam and Eve dump the body and flee to Tangiers. That’s about it. The film is more than two hours long.
I mean, if I wanted to watch one vampire movie, this wouldn’t be it. If I wanted to watch an art house movie (yes, I know it isn’t an art house movie) tangentially connected to vampires, I might watch this. To be honest, I’d probably still choose A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. It’s good for what it is.
Martin: 1977
George A Romero’s 1977 Martin is another odd one. Is Martin really a vampire movie? Yes and no. Martin isn’t really a vampire. He is really a common or garden serial killer. A serial killer who thinks he’s a vampire.
This one has been on my radar for decades. Ever since Jonathan Ross’s TV series, The Incredibly Strange Film Show, was shown on Channel 4 in the 1980s, I have been meaning to watch Martin. Romero was the final filmmaker featured on the series (it’s British, so it only ran for two, six episode seasons – Edgar Wright credits the Sami Raimi episode as inspiring him to become a director). I have a memory of Martin featuring heavily in the episode, but I am sure Ross mostly concentrated on the Night of the Living Dead and its sequels. Many of the episodes are on YouTube, so I’ll have to rewatch the Romero one.
Martin is to B movies what Only Lovers Left Alive is to art house: Not quite there, but not far off. A lot of the acting is fairly wooden and a scroll through the actors’ profiles on IMDB shows that many of them didn’t appear in much before or afterwards.
That said, Martin is one of the most unique items on this list. The plot concerns a superstition that in each generation of Martin’s family, a handful of vampires are born. He is sent to live with his much older cousin to curb his murderous instincts. However, he commits his first onscreen murder on the night train to Pennsylvania. Also, his cousin’s proviso is that if he going to kill, he must not do so in the neighbourhood. Not exactly vigilant behaviour.
The film then is as much about how serial killers come to be. Are they born or are they made? Does this family ‘curse’ compel Martin to become a murderer or was he always destined to do so? The films offers no answers. Thank fuck. I’m sure if it was remade today, there would be a bucket load of psychobabble and a definite answer at the end of it all.
During the murder scenes, the colour images are intermixed with black and white sequences in which we see Martin’s idealised vision of himself as the iconic vampire in cloak and frilly shirt, hunted down by villagers with pitch forks and flaming torches. His victims all desire him and entice him to drink their blood.
The reality is very different. As serial killers go, Martin is quite inept. He is almost caught on a number of occasions. This is not Buffalo Bill or Hannibal Lector. Indeed, more than a decade before The Silence of the Lambs and it’s clones, Martin was already commenting on stereotypical ideas about serial killers.
I have little to no interest in true crime, but I imagine most serial killers are not evil geniuses. They are opportunists who avoid detection largely through luck, as well as the indifference and incompetence of the authorities. There is a reason why so many serial killer and slasher movies are based on people like Ed Gein (Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Silence of the Lambs, to cite the three most famous films based on Gein). Gein was active in the 1950s, which I think goes to show how much of what our culture depicts conforms to how we want serial killers to be rather than how the majority of them actually are. The enduring (and distasteful) fascination with Jack the Ripper after a century and a half speaks to this.
Martin is a corrective to the Hollywood cliché of a serial killer. Sure, he is not a killer who is likely to last very long. The irony is it is the suicide of his married lover, Mrs Santini, that leads to his downfall. Even as he stares at her body in the bathtub, he knows no one, least of all his cousin, will believe he didn’t kill her; especially as she takes her life in the same manner as Martin uses to stage his victims deaths as suicides.
Yes, Martin is a B-movie, but so were many of Romero’s films and most of them have aged reasonably well. Martin is very much a 70s movie. Lots of full frontal nudity and untrimmed bush. The following year, Romero would release Dawn of the Dead, which for many is the definitive zombie movie (I tend to agree). Martin lives in its shadow, but I think this is an intelligent, low budget take on slasher movies and vampire lore in general.
If Cronos is a vampire movie, Martin certainly is. It might not appear on everyone’s roster of greatest vampire movies, but I would gladly kick the Lugosi Dracula off the list to make room for Martin. It might lack Dracula’s influence, but it lends breadth beyond the usual vampire tropes. How many movies in the genre shine a light on the prejudices that inspired vampire stories? Not many. For that, if nothing else, Martin deserves to be included.
Dracula et al.: 1958-1974, The Vampire Lovers: 1970, Countess Dracula: 1971
And so we come to Hammer Horror.
The British film studio’s take on Dracula and vampires in general is unique. It is one of the longest running series of Dracula movies in film history. Even Hollywood couldn’t sustain such a run, with nine Hammer Dracula films over sixteen years, as well as a handful of other vampire movies. I have watched everything from the former, but only a couple of the more salacious entries of the latter. Although as we shall see, Countess Dracula is not only not a Dracula movie, it isn’t even a vampire movie.
The curiosity of the first Dracula movie Hammer made is how tame it all now seems. When it was released in the UK in 1958, it received an X certificate. No one under 18 could see it at the cinema. When a new print was released in the mid-2000s, the British Board of Film Certification reduced the certificate all the way to U, or Universal for All. I went to see it with my then partner (the one who didn’t like The Lost Boys) as part of a Valentine Day’s showing. It had become a film for dating couples. It goes to show how much attitudes can change in half a century.
Of all the Hammer Dracula movies, the original remains the best of the bunch. Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are at the peak of their powers. Some of the effects haven’t aged well (eliciting laughter at the cinema), but the battle between two giants of British cinema remains compelling. If only they had left it there.
Hammer Horror is a case study in the law of diminishing returns. The fact that Dracula is killed at the end of every movie and resurrected at the beginning of the next one reduces the threat level considerably. You know Lee’s Dracula will be defeated by the end of the film and back to sucking blood in the next one. Not only is there not much threat, there isn’t much in the way of closure. The same is true of Hammer’s Frankenstein series and the mummy films. Hammer was at its best when it was doing one off films like The Devil Rides Out, which, with the possible exception of Quatermass and the Pit, is the best film they ever made.
Having watched nine Hammer Dracula movies, they all blur into one and it’s hard to differentiate between them. Was James Mason in one? No, because that’s the 1979 version of Salem’s Lot. You’re thinking of Geoffrey Keen in Taste the Blood of Dracula (co-starring Peter Sallis, better known as Cleggy in Last of the Summer Wine and the voice of Wallace in Wallace and Gromit). Keen has some of the same energy of Mason, playing a 19th century moral crusader who frequents brothels in the evening and rounds off a night of debauchery with a blood sacrifice to bring Dracula back to life. Not the worst in the series. Still not very good though.
Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968) isn’t terrible, although the method of the Count’s resurrection is particularly comical. A Monsignor who comes to exorcise Castle Dracula hits his head during a fall and the blood drips through the ice (i.e. plexiglas) and onto Dracula’s dead lips. If only he had left well enough alone. Like a metaphor for the Dracula sequels themselves.
Other than that, it’s a film with a high body count and more threat than many of the other entries in the series. One of the many sequels not to feature Peter Cushing as Van Helsing, but the battle between Dracula and the Monsignor is almost as good.
Indeed, when Hammer finally did reunite Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in Dracula 1972 for the first time since the original movie, it was for the worst film in the series. As the title suggests, Hammer preceded Moffat and Gatiss by several decades in dragging Dracula into the modern day. If the latter has its issues, they are nothing compared to this mess of a film.
To be fair to Dracula 1972, it does use some very minor plot threads from Bram Stoker’s novel. Which is about the only nice thing you can say about it. It’s a 70s B movie through and through that makes a group of 20 something thrill seekers its central characters. Unfortunately, it feels like no one behind the camera was under 40 and the clichés of youth culture run high (yeah, daddy-o).
Mainly though, the plot makes little sense. It begins in 1872 with Van Helsing chasing Dracula through Regent’s Park on horseback. The action starts in medias res and instantly confuses the viewer into wondering if you’ve missed an entire film in the series. Dracula is impaled on the spoke of a carriage wheel and turns to dust. An acolyte arrives to fill a phial with his ashes and buries them in unconsecrated ground.
Fast forward a hundred years and the same acolyte, or someone who looks very much like him, is now dressed like a Carnaby Street reject and embedded himself with our group of 20 something thrill seekers. Is he meant to be the same person (he now goes by the ridiculous name of Alucard, or Dracula backwards)? He is able to move around in daylight, so he isn’t a vampire. No explanation is ever given.
From there, we learn that one of the group, Jessica, played by a young Stephanie Beecham, is the granddaughter of a direct descendant of Professor Van Helsing. He is of course played by Peter Cushing. Dracula is resurrected during a blood sacrifice at the church where Dracula’s ashes were interred a century before. Bodies start to pile up, though not so many as Dracula Has Risen from the Grave.
The police involve Van Helsing. He finds the church where Dracula is embedded, but in a classic plot hole to allow Jessica to be kidnapped, he doesn’t stay there to wait for Dracula to return. Some more bollocks, a final confrontation at the church. Dracula is dead (again) and we’ll see you in a year for Satanic Rite of Dracula, the direct sequel to Dracula 1972, with Jessica this time played by Joanna Lumley.
One of the odder decisions in Dracula 1972 is the use of a new trope, where vampires can be killed by clear running water. Vampires can sometimes be blocked from crossing running water, but I don’t remember it ever being deadly. This is just so they can have Alucard, now a vampire, killed by getting caught under the shower head in his apartment. This despite him already being under the glare of direct sunlight via a skylight. Neither turn him to dust. His body just floats there in the filling bathtub, a slight silver sheen over his face. I don’t think it was worth the new trope.
Satanic Rite of Dracula isn’t much better, but at least it dispenses with the yoof characters. Even Jessica is more mature than the previous film, with Joanna Lumley warming up for her stint as Purdey in The New Avengers two years later.
The plot, however, is arguably more ludicrous than Dracula 1972. Spoilers (like anything could spoil this more than actually watching it), but Dracula is now the head of a large corporation that has miraculously come into existence in the two years since he was killed in Dracula 1972. A large office block has been built on the site of the church where he was killed. It’s the only time we don’t actually see his resurrection, but how long was he dead this time around? Five minutes? Even then, did he hypnotise an entire construction company to build him a brand new office building in under two years? In Great Britain? In London? In the 70s?
With Satanic Rite of Dracula and the last film in the series, it seems like Hammer were trying to pivot to new genres of film. This feels more like a spy drama, like they were trying to make a vampire James Bond or Harry Palmer movie (or the aforementioned Avengers). Unfortunately, the whole thing is far too cheap and at times looks more like a TV pilot. Some of the camera pulls have all of the flawless execution of a live TV soap opera.
Satanic Rite of Dracula also wins the award for the worst opening credit sequence, certainly on this list and maybe in the history of cinema. If you haven’t seen it, imagine some grainy, stock footage of central London (Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus etc.), but every shot contains a badly drawn silhouette of Dracula with his cape held outwards filling up the bottom right portion of the screen. It’s bad. Really bad.
In its defence, Satanic Rite of Dracula does predate
Ultraviolet by a quarter century in having Dracula be invisible to photographic
paper and security cameras. His diabolical plot to unleash a new strain of
plague on the earth is also similar to an Ultraviolet subplot (as well as being
further evidence Hammer were trying to ape James Bond). It isn’t enough to save
it, but it does make it marginally better than Dracula 1972.
The final entry in the series, The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, is certainly something. If Satanic Rite of Dracula was supposed to be James Bond meets Dracula, The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires is Dracula meets Bruce Lee and the Fists of Fury. Actually, as Dracula barely appears and is played by a completely different actor, it’s more like Dracula meets Game of Death (the film completed after Bruce Lee’s death with stand-ins who look nothing like Lee to pad out the roughly ten minutes of footage Lee actually filmed).
With The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, we are back to the early 1900s. Van Helsing is on a tour of Hong Kong. He is recruited by a band of 7 brothers and their sister, all trained in martial arts, to defeat the 7 golden vampires who have taken over their village and are terrorising it. To Fists of Fury and Game of Death, add The Seven Samurai and/or The Magnificent Seven (although I have taken to calling this film, Seven Brides for Seven Draculas).
All of which is an excuse for a series of extended kung-fu fight sequences. There is more than a whiff of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, where our star turn is too old to be exerting himself and the action is passed off to a new generation. Dracula is an afterthought, only appearing at the beginning and the very end.
As a kung fu film, it’s fine. As a vampire film, it’s god awful. The make up for the 7 golden vampires is terrible, as is their army of vampires. The whole thing was filmed on location in Hong Kong, but the whole thing was so poorly planned it was only when the English production crew arrived in Hong Kong they discovered no one in the local crew spoke English.
Christopher Lee not only turned down the part after reading the script (though he apparently had no problems with the previous two), but he tried to talk Peter Cushing out of taking part. Peter Cushing had recently lost his wife and felt a change of scenery would do him good. I wonder.
Dracula’s eventual dispatch takes all of thirty seconds. It’s an ignominious end for such an iconic character, whatever the individual quality of the films. For onscreen portrayals of Dracula, there is Christopher Lee and then there is everyone else. He became more cartoonish as the series progressed. I don’t really remember him speaking after the first film until Satanic Rite of Dracula, where his generic Eastern European accent is embarrassingly bad. Lee’s natural speaking voice (as anyone knows who’s seen The Devil Rides Out, The Man With the Golden Gun or The Lord of the Rings trilogy) is so deep and commanding, you wonder why anyone would ask him to use anything else.
You know you’re off to a bad start with this one when the apparently 18th century mansion we see at the start of the film has what appear to be concrete tennis courts next to it, surrounded by a distinctly 20th century looking chain link fence. It’s hard to concentrate on anything else after that.
As previously stated, Countess Dracula is neither a Dracula film or a vampire movie. The titular countess (once again played by Ingrid Pitt with her dialogue dubbed) is based on the 16th century Hungarian Countess, Elizabeth Bathory, who was accused of bathing in the blood of young girls. The veracity of these claims is hotly debated. Even if she was, as some claim, the most prolific female serial killer in history, she almost certainly did not bathe in blood.
But why let facts get in the way of a good story? In Countess Dracula, Countess Elisabeth Nádasdy not only murders her victims and bathes in their blood, but she does so to regain her youth. The magic is temporary and she has to bring more and more victims to her home to dispatch them. She claims to be her own 19 year old daughter when rejuvenated. Events spiral as bodies are inexpertly disposed of and more people have to be killed to prevent discovery.
With these Ingrid Pitt films, you suspect Hammer started with the obligatory full frontal nude scene and then worked the script around that. There is a definite increase in nudity as the Hammer films progressed (as we saw with Martin, it was the 70s). They aren’t terrible movies and certainly a lot better than many of the Dracula films.
In spite of everything, I have a soft spot for Hammer Horror, having watched many of them in the 80s when they were shown late night on BBC2. That scene in Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb, where the decapitated hand crawls by itself to strangle its victims, scared the bejesus out of me. I still think about that image a lot more than I should. I should probably rewatch it, laugh my ass off at how terrible it now looks, and go about my day.
Indeed, I have been watching and rewatching a lot of Hammer besides the vampire entries. I’d much rather watch Hammer than the Saw movies or any of the other artless torture porn of recent years. Even Dracula 1972 seems like a masterpiece compared to 90% of that dross. Let’s move on.
Fright Night: 1985
This one I hadn’t seen until literally the day before writing this. Fright Night is possibly the 80iest film that ever 80ies.
I imagine if I’d seen this when it came out on video in my early teens, I would have placed it on par with The Lost Boys as one of my favourite films. But a bit like The Princess Bride, it loses its magic when seeing it for the first time in your late 40s or early 50s. As with The Lost Boys, a film’s impact is in large part dictated by the time in which you were first exposed to it.
It doesn’t help that the vampire (Jerry Dandrige) is played by Chris Sarandon, who I only previously knew as the hapless Martus Mazur in an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9. He was of course Prince Humperdinck in The Princess Bride, which doesn’t help, as well as the voice of Jack Skellington in The Nightmare Before Christmas. As a result, even when he’s in full demonic vampire makeup, he doesn’t seem particularly scary to me. It feels like many of the scenes were filmed on the same set as 1989’s The ‘Burbs, which is scarier (and underrated in my opinion).
If memory serves, Fright Night received a 15 certificate when it was released in the UK. I can only assume this is for the brief topless scene near the beginning, because there is really nothing here that is any more graphic than Ghostbusters or Raiders of the Lost Ark or any number of PG rated films from the 1980s. It’s another of those films where you could remove the vampyric elements and it wouldn’t fundamentally change the plot. Jerry Dandrige could be a common or garden serial killer (which are ten-a-penny in the US) and it would be much the same film. Even then, it’s not exactly Psycho or Silence of the Lambs.
Again though, I am analysing an 80s teen movie as a man in his 50s. It isn’t terrible. It’s a lot better than many films on this list. It’s just not going to challenge any of the films I remember fondly from my teen and preteen years, even if they are not objectively any better (is The Goonies really a good movie? Is Young Sherlock Holmes?). I simply missed the window for this one. If you saw it at the right time and still love it, good for you. I’ve seen it now. That’s as much as I can say about it.
Thirst: 2009
I have never so much as opened ChatGPT or any other chatbot. I stopped using Google altogether because results default to its chatbot and the only way to disable it also disables address bar history searches, which I need all the time when I’m writing.
There is a quote attributed to Einstein: Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Likewise, there is a level of convenience beyond which we should not go. AI might destroy us, not by becoming self-aware (which isn’t going to happen during any of our lifetimes, if ever), but by making us ever more lazy, stupid and incurious, until society itself collapses. Science fiction has been warning us about this inevitability for decades.
It is indeed a stroke of genius to take Zola’s1867 novel, Thérèse Raquin, about a woman and her lover who conspire to murder her husband and are then torn apart by guilt and recrimination, and turn it into a vampire movie. This is my version of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Thirst predates the Jane Austen adaptation).
I like a plot that develops and changes over the course of the movie. Thirst starts a million miles away from Emile Zola or Thérèse Raquin. Catholic priest ,Sang-hyun, volunteers to help find a cure for the fictional Emmanuel Virus (a cross between leprosy and smallpox). He is the only survivor out of 500 patients, but the blood transfusion that saves his life also turns him into a vampire.
Sang-hyun returns to his work, administrating prayers and last rights to patients at the hospital. In doing so, he becomes reacquainted with a family who were kind to him when he was growing up in the local orphanage.
Here we start to lean heavily into Zola. Tae-ju (a Korean rendering of Thérèse) is married to the son of the woman who raised her (in the novel, Madame Raquin is her aunt and her husband her cousin). Sang-hyun starts to visit them after Tae-ju's husband recovers from cancer. He and Tae-ju soon start an affair.
Aside from the vampyric elements, the film is actually very close to the plot of Thérèse Raquin. However, this is a piece about vampires and not Zola, so let’s talk about Thirst as a vampire film.
Sang-hyun of course struggles with the conflict between being a priest and being a vampire. He takes blood from a patient in a coma and later from people who wish to take their own lives, perhaps believing that by killing them he is saving them from eternal damnation (I am an atheist, but I’m not sure it works that way – the hoops people will jump through to try and find a loophole in the things they believe to be divine revelation are hilarious). Eventually he leaves the priesthood and the last vestiges of the plot that began the film are cast away.
Another element of Thirst tailor made for me is the dark humour. After the couple drown Tae-ju’s husband, (a vampyric twist on how it occurs in the novel), his ghost returns to haunt them. He lies between them in bed, soaking the mattress, manic grim on his face, beneath the large rock Sang-hyun placed on his chest to keep him from floating to the surface.
Of course it is inevitable Sang-hyun will turn Tae-ju at some point and set up the final act. She becomes Claudia to Sang-hyun’s Louis, relishing the hunt and the lust for blood. Zola and vampires combine for one last time to bring them to their unavoidable end.
Maybe I’m a pretentious arse, but it’s interesting that my three favourite movies on this list I hadn’t seen before are all foreign language films (Let the Right One In, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night and Thirst). Or maybe it’s just that Hollywood and even British cinema lean into the same lazy stereotypes. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is innovative, but based on the novel. Can you imagine trying to explain the concept of Zola meets vampires to a Hollywood executive?
Korean cinema in particular hits differently and makes me realise I need to watch more from that country (I still haven’t seen the second half of Park Chan-wook’s most famous film, Oldboy – I became… distracted).
Is Thirst perfect? Probably not. But is it perfect for me? Definitely. And who’s writing this, me or you? It’s me, isn’t it (random Bad News quote). So let’s move on to some films that were definitely not made with me in mind.
Blade, Blade II, Blade Trinity: 1998, 2002, 2004
I gave up on Marvel movies a long time ago. When a new Spiderman or X-men film came out every couple of years, they were entertaining enough (X-Men: Days of Future Past is a genuinely great movie). But as they have turned into an invasive species, like the cinematic equivalent of Japanese knotweed or Dutch Elm disease, wiping out everything before them, they have become hazardous to life. Not to mention extremely boring.
I remember a friend bringing around the first Blade movie on VHS not long after its release. He was in love with it. Me and another friend spent the entire time taking the piss out of it and laughing in all the wrong places for all the wrong reasons (in part just to wind him up).
I know it’s based on a comic book, but the whole thing seemed particularly cartoonish and overblown. And yes, you could say the same thing about the first Matrix film, but that at least that had style: panache. The Matrix sequels became equally cartoonish, with plots so over complicated that a room full of philosophers and physicists couldn’t figure them out (nor would it be worth the expensive research grant to bring them all together).
Watching the original Blade a quarter of a century later and it hasn’t got much better. It’s a better movie than many of Marvel’s recent attempts. That isn’t saying much. The Avengers movies are like watching a video game on demo mode, but with a tenth of the plot. I lasted as far as Infinity Bores (or Infinity Snores) and couldn’t tell you a thing that happened half an hour after watching it. Oh, except the bit where half of sentient life blinks out of existence. I remember that, because I remember wishing I was one of them so I wouldn’t have spent two hours watching this turd of a movie. Give me Dracula 1972 any day.
Blade II is better, but with much of the same unintended comedy. The way they have to retcon the first movie to bring Kris Kristofferson’s character back to life is particularly amusing. It does at least have del Toro behind the camera to give the script, such as it is, some oomph. Of course you know it’s a del Toro film, because Ron Perlman is in it (Ron Perlmaning all over the place).
Blade Trinity is much of the same. All three films feature antagonists so ridiculous they are impossible to take seriously. To introduce Dracula for the third one is particularly hack, especially when he doesn’t really do anything. It’s the classic trope of introducing an overpowered rival to battle the hero characters and then killing them off extremely cheaply. The defeat of The Night King in the final season of Games of Thrones is the most egregious example from recent memory.
I can suspend my belief as well as the next person, but I wonder if it isn’t time to retire the supervillain trope. If you look at the real villains in the world today in politics and tech, it is their banality and just how dull their ambitions are that are most disturbing. They have no monomaniacal plans for world domination by releasing a virus or nuking the San Andreas Fault. Their only motivation is money and power for their own ends. Superheroes movies have become hollow attempts to distract from the real problems we face as a society.
Blade is important as a black superhero and all representation is important. However, like Black Panther, he was created by white comic book writers, and like Black Panther, it seems that featuring black main characters is an excuse to spend about $3.40 on a script (I stopped watching Black Panther halfway through, because an hour into that film, I could tell you minute by minute what was gong to happen during the second hour).
The nicest thing you can say is it’s good the black community has its own boring ass Marvel movies to go with all of the other boring ass Marvel movies. I would just prefer to have more superhero and vampire movies that were actually created by black writers. Given the real life villains taking over the entertainment industry, that seems increasingly unlikely.
Interview With the Vampire: 1994 Film and 2022 TV Series
Aside from Twilight, I doubt there is a more decisive version of vampire lore than Anne Rice’s series of books. My friend will happily rant about how mopey and pathetic her vampires are whenever he’s had a few drinks. To be fair, he does the same with Twilight.
I have read the first handful of novels. The Vampire Lestat is definitely the best. The Queen of the Damned is ok (the film was terrible – as with Dracula, you can’t reduce a 450 page novel to two hours without cutting out most of the plot). I read a couple more beyond that, but soon lost interest.
Yet I loved the film. I saw it at the cinema and later owned it on video in one of those overpriced VHS boxed sets they used to sell with some glossy postcards thrown in to justify charging twice as much as the regular version. I wouldn’t exactly describe it as a comfort movie like Coppola’s Dracula. It’s never going to usurp The Lost Boys as my favourite vampire movie. That said, I would still place it on near equal standing with the other two. A triple bill of The Lost Boys, Dracula and Interview With the Vampire would be a hell of a showing.
As discussed above, Interview With the Vampire was so successful it became the default version fixed in people’s minds for years to come. Other than From Dusk Till Dawn, nothing else touches it before the millennium. Look up 90s vampire film and TV on IMDB and the only thing with a higher rating is Ultraviolet. As it should be.
Having watched the film again recently, it holds up. I don’t know if I’d realised before that Anne Rice wrote the screenplay. It’s well done. Like Let the Right One In, novels adapted by their authors are better than the usual slash and hack of outsiders. Another screenwriter might have leaned too heavily into Louis’s voiceover. Voiceovers are almost always hack, but I think Rice finds the right balance. It never quite crosses over into cliché.
As my character says in Realms Undead, the most unbelievable thing about Interview With the Vampire is how good looking the vampires all are. Cruise, Pitt and Banderas are all far too attractive to be members of the undead (Stephen Rea is closer). Cinematic short hand is the best we can say about this. Real vampires would rely on charm and praeternatural animalism rather than good looks to seduce their victims. Christopher Lee remains the perfect encapsulation of the vampire in that sense.
Interview With the Vampire, the film, is iconic. The recent TV adaptation surpasses it. For a start, making the show in 2022 means being able to do things with the characters and their relationships that Neil Jordan and Anne Rice could never have gotten away with in 1994. While the film is heavily queer coded, Pitt and Banderas all but kissing in their final scene together, the series makes the relationship between Louis and Lestat an actual love story. There is no innuendo or subtext this time around. It’s all there on the screen.
The timeframe is updated from the late 18th to early 20th century. Louis has gone from white slave owner to black New Orleans brothel owner, played by Jacob Anderson, best known as Grey Worm in Game of Thrones. Yet another example of a British actor doing a more than passable American accent. And unlike Tom Cruise, Australian born Sam Reid is believable as the French accented Lestat.
The other innovation that makes the TV series so compelling is that it takes place in the present day but with the events of the book and film still having taken place. That is, Louis met Daniel Molloy (played by Christian Slater in the film) more than fifty years ago and has now invited him to Dubai for a do over. The validity of what Louis told Daniel during that interview is called into question, as is what actually happened between them. The fact their encounter took place in San Francisco takes on increased significance.
The aged and bitter Daniel is here played by Eric Bogosian, who I was amused to see playing a TV host at the beginning of Blade Trinity. His belligerence throughout the first two seasons drives the modern day scenes.
The star of the show however, at least in the first season, is Bailey Bass as Claudia. They have made her character a couple of years older than Kirsten Dunst’s film incarnation, as well as black. Yet she is still a teen and still as bloodthirsty and bitter at never being able to become a woman. Bass’s gives an incredible performance. Unfortunately, scheduling conflicts meant she was unable to reprise her role for the second season. Delainey Hayles replaces her for season two. She’s not quite as good, but still plays the role well.
With season two, we come to the end of Interview With the Vampire the novel. Season three moves on to The Vampire Lestat. At time of writing, I am only halfway through the season and don’t have time to finish it before publishing this screed on Halloween.
From what I have seen, The Vampire Lestat is a different beast. I read the novel more than twenty years ago and don’t remember much of it. However, the changes made to Interview with the Vampire have significantly altered the plot; certainly the modern day scenes. It has the feel of being influenced by more recent vampire incarnations. Certainly you feel the influence of Sinners (see below) and maybe even the TV version of What We Do in the Shadows (see above) in its humour. I also detect a faint whiff of Only Lovers Left Alive (see above) in the general ambience.
The Vampire Lestat is more disjointed than Interview with the Vampire, but then Lestat is more disjointed as a character than Louis. More prone to embellishment and outright lies; as we see when his narrative to Daniel says one thing and the flashbacks to his childhood and youth show something completely different.
Lestat’s narration is in direct opposition to Daniel’s publication of his interviews with Louis (the titular Interview with the Vampire). Against even that we have Lestat's more accurate narration, recorded on vinyl and sold at auction to the highest bidder many years later.
I do know the next series moves on to The Queen of the Damned, which appears to go even further off track from the novels. I intend to finish the series over Halloween. So far, it is not as good as the first two seasons, but that is no sleight, given how good they were.
The weird thing is it was my friend who rants about Anne Rice’s vampires who recommend I watch the series. It was on my radar, but I wasn’t rushing to the BBC iPlayer to watch it. But if he was raving about it, I thought it must be good. And it is. I look forward to seeing if they can maintain the quality in future seasons.
Ganja and Hess: 1973
This is a weird one. Again the age old question presents itself. Is this even a vampire movie? Not really. There is blood drinking. There is imperviousness to blades and bullets. There is even the turning of one character into a blood drinker by the other. There isn’t much else vampyric that occurs.
To say this is an impressionistic film would be an understatement. Classified by many as a blaxploitation film, it doesn’t really have any the elements I associate with that genre (but hey, black cast, black writer, black director, it must be blaxploitation, right?). Can it really be a blaxploitation film if Pam Grier isn’t in it (I’m joking of course)?
It’s certainly low budget. The version I watched on YouTube is grainy and the audio drops out at various points. I imagine a lot of the dialogue was improvised and it shows. At times it feels like some weird 70s porn film with all of the sex scenes cut out (almost all). There’s so much ambiguity that it’s hard to work out what is going on a lot of the time. It was only in reading an online synopsis that I realised the Hess character becomes a ‘vampire’ during the movie. That is far from the only confusion.
I honestly don’t know what to make of this one. There isn’t really a plot to dissect, more like a series of scenes that often seem disconnected from one another. It is regarded as a cult classic and I guess most cult classics have the commonality of being confusing to many. It’s one of those film where the best I can say is I’ve seen it now. Maybe I’ll come back to it in a few years and see if it makes any more sense.
Sinners: 2025
The most recent film on the list and one of the best. It’s another one of those vampire movies that AI might have written to appeal to me. Vampires meet deltas blues with a guest appearance by Buddy Guy. What’s not to like?
Director Ryan Coogler (Black Panther) was partly inspired by From Dusk to Till Dawn. There is certainly crossover between them. A juke joint in an old warehouse is attacked by vampires on its opening night. Though that is really only the final third of the film. There isn’t even a sniff of a vampire until the end of the first hour.
We talked about Dracula, Jeckyll & Hyde and The Hound of the Baskervilles as projections of 19th century colonialism (see above). Here, the symbolism of a black club attacked by white vampires doesn’t need much in the way of dissection. Or that the vampires are rednecks who show up with banjos and fiddles, playing Scots-Irish folk ballads (growing up, The Spinners, Corries and Dubliners were played all the time at home and I know the songs sung here word for word). The inclusion of the KKK is almost overkill, but this is Mississippi in the 1930s and they can hardly be avoided.
The fact the vampires are all psychically connected and know everything each other knows is a nice touch. Part vampire, part Borg (or Pluribus). Again, the Borg and other zombies can be read as a metaphor for communism and there is something distinctly communistic about the perfect community the main vampire, Remmick, wants to create. Although given he is Irish and claims to have been alive since before Christianity came to Ireland, you have to wonder what’s stopped him creating this perfect society for the last fifteen hundred years.
It’s not a perfect film. There are some definite plot holes. Most of the vampire origins go unexplained. Remmick is first seen being chased by first nations peoples, who we then don’t see again. What’s that all about? We never know.
On the whole though, Sinners is strong movie in its own right, quite aside from being a vampire movie. The acting is all top notch. It definitely mirrors From Dusk Till Dawn in being a different movie in the second half from the first half. One to add to the pantheon of great vampire movies. Definitely one I will revisit in the foreseeable future.
Abigail: 2024
Another recent film and another one where I’m not sure what to make of it. The premise is certainly novel. A gang kidnap a rich man’s daughter to hold for ransom. The twist? She’s a vampire.
In many ways, it’s quite a bog standard haunted house, locked room, slasher movie. You know five minutes in that everyone but ‘Joey’ will be dead by the end of it, because that is how these films work. Melissa Barrera’s character is Ripley in Alien. Only she will survive.
It’s not a bad movie. There’s a few nice twists at the end to provide an extra level of threat. It’s just all been done a thousand times before (and done better dozens of times before) that gallons of blood and gore can’t conceal.
That is perhaps Abigail’s biggest crime, that it relies on the overuse of viscera to create horror rather than being able to rely on plot, script and the acting. It’s a common complaint of much of modern horror films. It’s not even particularly effective. The scariest moment I’ve seen in any film remains when Richard Dreyfus investigates the sunken boat in Jaws. The body poking out of the hole. Simple and horrific.
The whole thing feels a little too much like the haunted house episode in the fourth season of Community. That episode and Abigail both feature Giancarlo Esposito. Abigail isn’t quite that bad (Community’s fourth season was the only one not to involve creator Dan Harmon– it answers the question, what if AI wrote a season of Community?). It’s just fine. Kind of average. Not going to be challenging The Lost Boys anytime soon.
From Dusk Till Dawn: 1996
I have a difficult relationship with Quentin Tarantino. Some of his films, like Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, I love. Some, like Reservoir Dogs, I can’t stand. Others, like the Kill Bill films, I can appreciate while finding them overblown and immensely silly. The man obviously has an encyclopedic knowledge of world cinema and each of his films is a homage to film. The problem is it can also leave his movies feeling muddled and without a single, coherent narrative voice.
By the time of Inglorious Bastards, when Tarantino started fighting battles on behalf of other demographic groups, I was done. I can’t help but think if he’d spent less time making revenge movies on behalf of the Jewish and African American communities and more time policing the behaviour of Harvey Weinstein, Hollywood (and the world in general) might be a better place.
With 1996’s From Dusk Till Dawn, I remain extremely ambiguous. I don’t like it as much as Pulp Fiction or Jackie Brown. Nor do I dislike it as much as Reservoir Dogs. But as we can see it as essentially a movie of two halves, I definitely prefer the second half to the first. The second half is less a Tarantino movie and more the vision of its director, Robert Rodriguez.
Even then, this is never going to top the list of my favourite vampire movies. It’s all a little too silly. It reminds me of the second Evil Dead sequel, 1992’s Army of Darkness. Army of Darkness is big and dumb and stupid. It’s also a darkly comic masterpiece. It succeeds in a lot of the ways From Dusk Till Dawn never quite manages.
Like the fine line between clever and stupid, what makes a good or bad Tarantino movie is whether it crosses the line between pastiche and parody. From Dusk Till Dawn straddles that line without ever quite landing on one side or the other.
Indeed, I wonder if the film would be as highly regarded as it is without the tonal shift between its two halves (or the whole Salma Hayek sequence). The first, Tarantino led, half lends credibility to the second, Rodriguez led, half and allows it to go batshit crazy (almost quite literally).
I know people love From Dusk Till Dawn. They are probably the same people who love Fright Night. Which is fair enough. Likesay, I don’t dislike it. It is however telling that it is the one film on this list I didn’t rewatch in its entirely. I watched a couple of YouTube reactions. Apparently that was enough.
What it does remind me is what an underrated actor Juliet Lewis is. For all of the big name stars like George Clooney and Harvey Keitel, Lewis carries the movie. Between this and Near Dark, I have a real hankering to rewatch Strange Days. Lewis is again a supporting but pivotal character (it was made the year before in 1995). An underrated classic. Unlike From Dusk Till Dawn, which I think is held in a little too much reverence. It’s fine. It’s certainly influential (it inspired Sinners - see above - which is a plus). That’s as much as I can say about it.
30 Days of Night, 30 Days of Night: Dark Days: 2007, 2010
I saw 30 Days of Night when it was released in 2007. Coming back to it twenty years later, it seems a strange artifact of early 2000s cinema. For a start, it’s based on a graphic novel at a time before every third film was a Marvel movie. Within a year of its release, we also had V for Vendetta, 300, The Dark Knight Rises and Watchmen. Who knew at the time we were living through a golden age of comic book adaptations? A time before the knotweed strangled the life out of everything.
Indeed, 30 Days of Night plays out like a comic book. It’s not quite Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, but not every film has Edgar Wright’s genius behind the camera. Yet when it opens with explanatory text placed top and bottom over aerial footage of the Alaskan tundra, the visual language of comic books is there for all to see.
30 Days of Night is also comic-like in its graphic depiction of the gang of vampires as they lay waste to the town of Barrow during the arctic winter. It could be artless, but the understanding this is an adaptation of a graphic novel makes it seem more acceptable (although we have to note the story was turned into a graphic novel because it was initially rejected as a film script).
The vampires of 30 Days of Night are like nothing we have seen in cinema before. They are more like the feral beasts of Vampires of El Norte, killing for the sport of it rather than the basic need to drink blood. Are they like the inverse of bears? Do they hibernate all summer and come out during the months of total darkness to stock up on blood for the year? I haven’t read the books, so I don’t know how much of this is explained.
I’m surprised to see how low the IMDB ranking is for 30 Days of Night (6.6), because I think it holds up as a film. It has some derivative elements. The estranged marriage of Eben and Stella Oleson is straight out of The Abyss. The Stranger, who arrives in Barrow before the vampires and tells them of their impending doom, is superfluous. Some have seen him as analogue to Renfield or Straker in ‘Salem’s Lot. Indeed, there are a lot of parallels to King’s novel, not least the destruction of a small American town. Beyond the opening half an hour, The Stranger has no pay-off or a satisfying narrative arc. You expect to see him return as a vampire, but he never does.
With its location, the film invites obvious comparisons to The Thing. It’s an unfair comparison, because The Thing is a masterpiece of horror, practical effects and 80s paranoia. Although The Thing takes place in Antarctica during the dead of winter, and yet the sun still rises every day. Even the best films have flaws.
The main objection to the premise to 30 Days of Night is that during the winter months the sun doesn’t rise in Alaska for more than 60 days. No-one would make it out of Barrow alive if that were the case. 30 days is a convenient ticking clock on which to hang the narrative.
It’s a far from a perfect film. The middle sags a little, but it looks gorgeous for a film that takes place almost entirely at night (although much of it was shot in New Zealand during the day). Some of the opening images as the sun sets are like HD renderings of landscapes by Turner or Constable.
The sequel, on the other hand, is the absolute pits. None of the ‘surviving’ characters are played by the same actors and the film lacks any of the cinematography of the original. It was also seemingly made on a tenth of the budget.
This is not a comic book adaptation, but a bog standard horror film with a pretty egregious ending. When you introduce a voiceover late in the day to conclude everything, you know you’ve hit rock bottom. I'm glad I still have the rest of The Vampire Lestat to watch, because to end this project on such a low note, especially when the first film is excellent, would leave a bad taste in the mouth. I'm saying it sucks. Come up with your own terrible vampire puns and have fun with the joke.
Conclusion
Well, I think you’ll agree that is more than enough vampires to be going on with. The list is far from exhaustive. There are plenty of other vampire films and TV shows I could have included. I enjoyed the Buffy the Vampire TV series, but by the time BBC2 were showing it in the early 2000s I was already too old to be watching a bunch of high school kids fight monsters. I’m certainly too old to be rewatching it in 2026. I watched Angel sporadically when it was shown on Channel 4, which was more adult and pretty good from what I remember. It's no Ultraviolet.
There are things like John Carpenter’s Vampires from 1998 that I rented on video and didn’t think was that good. Looking back, it’s not a million miles away from Near Dark in tone and plot, but Near Dark is better. After this, I might do a deep dive into John Carpenter’s movies, because I have seen almost none of them. The only Halloween film I’ve seen is the third one and that doesn’t even have Michael Myers (or John Carpenter) in it. I have seen The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China and that’s about it. Criminal, I know.
There is also The Last Vampyre, the last feature length episode of the Jeremy Brett incarnation of Sherlock Holmes, which ran for a decade on ITV from 1984. I love the series. Jeremy Brett will always be the perfect encapsulation of Holmes. However, by the time The Last Vampyre aired in 1993, Brett’s well documented health issues were making filming difficult (he would die only two year later). The whole thing became an enormous strain on his mind and body.
The result was certainly not worth the pain and effort. It’s just not a good episode. It falls into the classic trap of serialised drama where the main character behaves in a way they would never have acted in earlier episodes (see McNulty in the final season of The Wire, for instance). The ‘vampire’ (spoilers) isn’t a vampire and the whole thing has a rational explanation. Yet to string it out to an hour and three quarters, we have to have Holmes doubt his senses and behave irrationally until enough screen time has passed to allow him to return to his senses. It’s an infuriating two hours.
These later TV films in the ITV Holmes were all odd choices, sometimes stitching together two or three short stories. The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire, the story on which the episode is based, runs to less than twenty pages. There is more padding than an NFL team. It’s safe to say it is the nadir of the series. A sad end to a largely magnificent series. Definitely a comfort show in spite of its later flaws.
The less said about Twilight the better. I am more likely to read Harry Potter than I am to read the Twilight books or watch the movies.
I was going to rewatch the 2004 Van Helsing movie starring Hugh Jackman, because I saw it at the cinema and I wanted to see if it truly is one of the worst films I have ever seen in any genre. However, it was removed from Netflix before I could get to it. Which is probably for the best.
I also saw the first Underworld movie when it came out and was equally unimpressed. There is something about Kate Beckinsale and vampires (she was also in Van Helsing). I loved her as Hero in Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing. I don’t think I’ve seen her in anything else in the last 20 years. Certainly not the Underworld sequels. One was more than enough. Vampires versus werewolves? What We Do in the Shadows does it so much better.
I suppose a major omission from this list is Shadow of the Vampire, a fictionalised retelling of the filming of the original Nosferatu movie. Is Max Schreck as Count Orlock actually a vampire? I saw it on video when it was first released and loved the concept. I need to go back and rewatch it.
I have seen maybe half the first episode of True Blood. I might watch it at some point.
If you want a couple of good Dracula related music albums, I recommend the soundtrack Philip Glass recorded in 1999 for the 1931 movie and which is far too good to be associated with that hot mess of a film. There is also the 2005 album (Dracula) by Italian progressive rockers, Premiata Forneria Marconi. It’s all I Italian, but excellent even if you don’t understand the lyrics (I don't and I still enjoy it).
And now that really is enough. If you’ve got any recommendations, drop them in the comments, but I think I am all vamped out for the time being. There are plenty of other genres, plenty of other horror subgenres, to explore. I still haven’t seen all of Kubrick’s films, despite owning the DVD boxset. Plus all that Korean cinema.
So take out your fangs. Remove the cape from around your neck. Wash the Brylcreem out of your hair (The bats have left the bell tower. The victims have been bled.). Time to step into the daylight.
