I love New Year’s Day. Especially early in the morning: everything is quiet, most people are still asleep, and those few that are awake are probably hungover… Not me, though! Fresh as a daisy, yes, sir! Ready for a whole new year of reviewing and writing bollocks. Hello 2026!
So, vampires! Are they cool, or aren’t they? Yeah, they are! And although some are much cooler than others, as we’ll see, vampires, like zombies and werewolves, are here to stay. And why wouldn’t they? Looking all slick and sharply dressed, they’re fast, strong, and immortal! Well, sort of: you could still die from garlic, holy water, and a wooden stake driven through your no longer beating heart (although one need not be a vampire to die from that, per se.) Oh, and a nice summer day will also turn you into a charred brisket, after which you either turn to ash or catch fire and explode. So, there are some drawbacks. Apart from the whole having-to-drink-human-blood-to-stay-alive malarkey, of course. Unless you like that sort of thing. Sucky, sucky!
Bram Stoker (1874 – 1912) didn’t invent vampires, no. He invented Dracula. Bloodsucking revenants, however, had haunted folklore for centuries – known as strigoi, upír, and a host of other names – stalking the dark and storm-lashed countryside long before Stoker came around. What his 1897 novel did accomplish, of course, was introducing vampires to the mainstream public. And then, as with their more hairy, growling, and brain-munching counterparts, cinema came along.
Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922)
The very first. A German silent film by F. W. Murnau, starring Max Schreck as Count Orlok – Dracula in all but name, since Murnau didn’t have the rights to use it. That didn’t stop him from using the rest of Stoker’s novel as source material, though: the film tells how Orlok, after being visited in Transylvania by a real estate agent, relocates to a small German town, bringing plague, rats, and death with him. Fixated on the agent’s wife, he follows her across Europe, only to be undone when she knowingly sacrifices herself, keeping him distracted until the sun rises.
Very weird and probably not known to many, this is what started it. Find it here.
Dracula (1931)
This, however, is probably the one that most people would consider the daddy of the genre. Starring the legendary Bela Lugosi, it firmly cemented the classic image of the vampire: a creepy old man from a dark and faraway land, dressed in black, and with pointy teeth to sink into some unsuspecting virgin. Sleeping in a coffin by day and commanding rats, bats, and wolves by night, Lugosi’s Dracula made vampires cool for the first time.
The Lost Boys (1987)
But leave it to Kiefer Sutherland and his gang of rabble to make them even cooler! (What? Yeah, they probably made a whole bunch of vampire movies between 1931 and 1987. What’s your point?) These are the eighties, so vampires are rock stars now: wearing leather jackets, riding motorcycles, and turning snacks into maggots – it’s all part of the game! As is the sucking dry of your fellow man, of course. Two brothers move to a coastal town with their recently divorced mother and quickly come to realize that all is not quite right. Already excellently reviewed, twice, in fact, by my esteemed colleagues on this site, so I can save myself the trouble. Next!
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
This is one in the Big Names, Big Budget category: directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, and Gary Oldman as the evil prince. Like the original ’31 classic, it follows Stoker’s novel closely. Costing some $40 million to make, which was a lot for a horror movie at the time, but it shows: sets, costumes, it all looks great.
Personally, though, I have fond memories of this movie for a different reason: I saw it in a theater with a red-headed girl called Lynn, who was in the process of deciding whether she wanted to be my girlfriend or not… (What? No, it didn’t work out; unlike the Count and Miss Harker, she and I came to know each other on first base only…)
Interview with the Vampire (1994)
Are all vampires gay? According to Anne Rice (1941 – 2021), they are. And look who’s playing the lead role! Released right smack in the middle of that whole nineties Goth rage, it tells the story of Tom Cruise as Lestat and how he met Louis (Brad Pitt), his lifelong partner, friend, mate, and lover. Yeah, sure, they temporarily involve a puppet girl (Kirsten Dunst) in their charades to come across as more normal to the outside world (ha!), but she gets burned alive halfway through the movie, leaving brooding Pitt and beautiful Cruise to pine for each other forever. No, Tom Cruise is not gay! Tom Cruise is… special.
Blade (1998)
Now, then. Here he is. Ripped, ice cold, meditating in front of beautiful flowers… Blade! Not technically a vampire, yes, I know, but instead some in-between half-breed, Blade has the best of both worlds: all the vampires’ strengths, none of their weaknesses… Along with a long black overcoat, black sunglasses, a samurai sword, and the raddest of all rad rides, the legend that is the ’68 Dodge Charger – also black, yes – this movie was solely responsible for rejuvenating Wesley Snipes’s somewhat dozed-off career. Opposing Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorff), who wants to release some ancient vampire blood god so he can take over the world, but all that is much less important than looking impossibly slick while you turn hordes of bloodsucking vermin to ash. The Coolest.
30 Days of Night (2007)
Now, if I were a vampire, where would I want to live? Somewhere north of the Arctic Circle, of course! As little daylight as possible, weather to match the temperature of my blood… In this one the vampires are of the ugly and mean variety: snapping the neck of one of their minions comes just as easily as slaughtering the women and children of the town of Barrow, Alaska. Which is covered in total darkness for thirty days of the year, yes. A gang of vampires, led by Marlow (Danny Huston), descends on the village, and it’s up to the sheriff (Josh Hartnett) to stop them. But there is no escape. No hope. Only hunger and pain. So, let’s eat!
Let the Right One In (2008)
To finish this list, something very different, and rather special as well. A vampire movie not from the tarpits of Hollywood, but from the stark bleakness of Sweden. It tells the story of Oskar, a young boy living with his mother in the dark and frozen suburb of Blackeberg, somewhere in the early eighties. He is bullied in school and has no friends, until one day a girl called Eli moves into the apartment next door. A girl in appearance only, she is in fact an ancient and, as we’ll learn, quite ruthless little being… They become friends, and she teaches Oskar to stand up for himself. In the end, she also dismembers some of Oskar’s bullies.
This movie is great for many reasons: instead of all the Hollywood flashiness, it is very… quiet. Calm. Sweet, even, at times. But it’s also strangely realistic. It shows, for example, what it would take for such a creature to survive in the ‘real world’; she has a support network of ‘normal’ people who provide her with human blood, and the way this is shown is not gory or exciting, but almost clinical. I loved it. One of the best vampire movies I ever saw.
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Well, that’s it: my overview of a small part of the vampire cinematic universe. (And yes, someone again dared utter the words “Twilight Saga“, so after I shot him in the face, I threw him down an elevator shaft.) I hoped you liked it. If not, you can suck it.
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