Top 10 Vampire Movies
By Cinema Sugar
Since we’ve already scared up our Top 10 Horror Movies, we thought it’d be fun to dive deeper into one of horror’s oldest, creepiest, and most enduring figures: vampires! Here are the blood-sucking, time-defying vamps of classic and modern cinema that have haunted us the most.
10. What We Do In The Shadows
Irreverent mockumentaries that skewer horror tropes are a rarity, and fewer still possess as much satirical bite and ferocious wit as Shadows does, with Taika Waititi firing on all cylinders in this hilarious behind-the-scenes look at the lives of four vampires who curse out werewolves (not swearwolves) and chow down on basghetti.
9. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
In this moody black-and-white western, instead of an archetypal Dracula preying on vulnerable women we get a complex portrait of a punk rock skateboarding girl standing up to bad men—and making a stylish statement.
8. Vampyr
There’s a dreamlike aesthetic adorning the entirety of Vampyr, rendering its world somewhat askew, with darkness spilling over from some other dimension as we, the audience, are sunk into this unknown zone, attempting to make sense of it, entering only when invited in and urged to stay.
7. Only Lovers Left Alive
When you’re approximately 500 to 3000 years old and preying on humans is a young Vamp’s game, in sets the existential dilemmas of love, time, and acquiring music gear for your underground noise rock project. Bull horns to Jim Jarmusch, my favorite vampire.
6. Near Dark
Director Kathryn Bigelow’s hemoglobin-drenched neo-Western turning a predatory gang of grimy, outcast vampires clad in leather and spurs into outlaws of a forgotten era who sustain themselves on a nearsighted, reckless existence in the middle of the desert, Near Dark is worth the watch just to see Bill Paxton cackle his way through his buoyantly chaotic performance as Severen.
5. Daybreakers
With crossbow kills, exploding vamps, and a Sam Neill bloodbath to ruin your childhood, this vampire sci-fi noir has visuals that will imprint on your brain like stirring blood coffee—not to mention an astonishing cast. Just don’t take this one too seriously and you will have an absolute ball.
4. From Dusk Till Dawn
How young is too young to see a movie about two murdering thieves who cross the border and hide out in a strip club that happens to be run by vampires where a bloodbath ensues? Definitely not speaking from experience. (The answer is 12.)
3. Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Francis Ford Coppola cooked up a gothic feast for the senses when adapting the story of literature’s most famous bloodsucker, creating an eerie and operatic ambience to backlight his exploration of the Transylvanian man behind the monster.
2. Let the Right One In
Lacking warmth and color from the outset, Sweden was an appropriately cold choice of setting for this romantic vampire character drama that stitches horror imagery and violence together with impactful human themes in a display of innovative genre artistry.
1. Nosferatu
Count Orlok is frightening, the absence of sound is very loud, the ambience is grim, and the German expressionism is at its pinnacle in Nosferatu, a symphony of shadows created by F.W. Murnau that is still eclipsing any limitations placed on its inception over 100 years ago.
Contributors: Natalie Bauer, Natalie Pohorski, Elliott Cuff, and Kevin Prchal.