Vampires were there at the very beginning of Gothic literature. It was a vampire that turned horror into big business for Hollywood almost a century ago, and while their popularity comes and goes in waves, vampires will forever be a staple of the genre onscreen. For this list, Vulture presents you with a sampler platter of vampire movies, with flavors from every decade over the past 50 years. There is queer coding, blood sucking, shadow stalking, and even rave dancing, because the undead have always been the most fun of horror’s classic monsters. There are a few Dracula entries, because how could we not? But there are also plenty that have nothing to do with the Prince of Darkness, if you’re looking for stories that feel a little fresher than Bram Stoker’s Transylvanian titan. Whether it’s the lesbian vamps of the ’70s or Marvel’s iconic daywalker, these are some terrors you’re definitely going to want to invite inside.
Dracula’s Daughter (1936)
As the saying goes: Let’s go, lesbians! Dracula’s Daughter is about a lady vampire who seduces and feeds off other ladies and who is depressed and desperate to be cured of her unyielding desire for wom— sorry. Of her unyielding desire for blood. Yes, blood! That’s what she desires most. Not the forbidden touch of another woman but blood! A classic of both horror generally and queer horror specifically, the metaphor of this 1936 picture has been feeding the gays for nearly a century. If Carmilla were here she would do right by you, girl, but we’ll have to wait till the 1970s for that.
Blood and Roses (1960)
Dracula is by far the most famous vampire in film and letters, but Carmilla is really the one who started it all. The titular character of Sheridan Le Fanu’s gothic novella was introduced to the world in 1872, putting her in circulation 25 years before Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Much like Dracula pursued Mina Harker, so, too, did Carmilla set her sights on female victims — which might be why she didn’t catch on quite like her male counterpart, since lesbian-vampire stories from a female author might lack the cultural caché that men writing about undead men draining women has. This movie from director Roger Vadim presaged the coming wave of 1970s lesbian-vampire pictures. It’s an erotic horror film based on the Carmilla novella, and when this film’s Carmilla character is driven to jealousy by her best friend getting married, she is compelled to enter the tomb of a female vampire who ends up possessing her. Following the encounter, Carmilla returns to the estate where the wedding is taking place and begins to terrorize the grounds. See titles like The Vampire Lovers, Daughters of Darkness, or Vampyros Lesbos for more sapphic vampire trysts.
Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966)
For the Hammer horror portion of this list, we present you with Dracula: Prince of Darkness, in which a group of English travelers is warned by locals in the Carpathian Mountains not to travel near the domain of a count named Dracula. The tourists naturally ignore this advice, and serve themselves right up to the dark prince. This was the British production company’s third movie in its Dracula series of films, and the second to feature Christopher Lee, one of the most identifiable faces in vampire horror from one of the shops that contributed most heavily to vampire lore in pop culture.
Blacula (1972)
Dracula gets enough attention when it comes to talking about vampire movies. Make room in your life for some Blacula. This movie arrived as blaxploitation was becoming big business in Hollywood, and it features William Marshall as an African prince who is transformed into a creature of the night by the infamous Count himself. After getting sealed in a coffin for a few centuries, Blacula emerges once again — but this time in Los Angeles instead of Transylvania — and he becomes fixated on the pursuit of a young woman who bears a resemblance to the wife he had in his living years. This William Crain–directed picture is a seminal entry in the Black horror canon.
Ganja & Hess (1973)
Bill Gunn directed this experimental vampire story that debuted at Cannes in 1973, which co-stars Night of the Living Dead leading man Duane Jones. Ganja & Hess centers on an anthropologist who turns vampire after being stabbed with a cursed dagger, but Gunn was not interested in appeasing the capitalist appetite for another blaxploitation piece in the early ’70s. Instead, his hallucinatory drama explores themes like Black assimilation, imperial white oppression, eroticism, and the uneasy relationship between religion and power. This is Advanced Placement–level vampire cinema.
Blood for Dracula (1974)
Blood for Dracula was alternately titled Andy Warhol’s Dracula, and it stars the actor more likely to actually be Dracula in disguise than maybe anyone else in the world: Udo Kier. Kier’s version of Dracula must feed specifically on virgins to survive, but he is having trouble coming up with virgins in the 1970s, so he makes his way to Italy under the logic that a very Catholic country might have more unsullied women. What he finds instead, though, based on this quote from Google’s summary, is “incestuous lesbians with vile blood and Marxist manservant Mario.” Udo Kier Dracula and incestuous Italian lesbians amounts to one of the gayest vampire movies of all time, which is really something to say about the gayest of all the great monster archetypes.
Alucarda (1977)
This Mexican horror film (shot in English) is a loose adaptation of the novella Carmilla — literature’s favorite Ur-lesbian vampire — that throws in a little nunsploitation for extra flavor. Alucarda follows an orphaned girl brought to a convent where she meets the wilder titular character, also an orphan. Together their teen-girl passions begin to awaken dark forces, as teen passions usually do in horror movies. There’s religious zealotry, satanic rituals, stunning visuals, and demonic possession, so this Catholic-orphan undead party really does have it all.
The Hunger (1983)
The Hunger was the movie that filmmaker Tony Scott used to introduce himself to the world, and for that introduction, he said “bisexual New Wave vampirism!” We enter the film watching Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie be the sexiest duo imaginable in a New York night club with strobe lights setting off their bone structure as Bauhaus plays “Bela Lugosi Is Dead.” This alone is a marketing campaign for the joys of being an adult goth. Shortly thereafter we meet gerontologist Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon), who Bowie’s John seeks out to try to stop the rapid aging that’s about to kill him. Through John, Sarah meets vamp queen Miriam (Deneuve) and a dangerous flirtation begins. The Hunger is the peak of chic, cosmopolitan vampirism that gives us queer eroticism with an utterly stunning cast. Ideal vamp cinema.
Fright Night (1985 & 2011)
Because the 2011 Fright Night is a remake of the 1985 original — not a reimagining or a remix — we are counting it as one recommendation for two movies. Both Fright Nights are super-entertaining with note-perfect performances by two different actors in the hunk-next-door role of vampire Jerry Dandrige. You can pick your poison of Colin Farrell or Chris Sarandon, depending on your mood, and if you’re still clinging to some argument of originalism, know that Imogen Poots, Toni Collette, David Tennant, and the dearly departed Anton Yelchin fit like a glove into I, Tonya director Craig Gillespie’s classic horror-comedy remake.
VAMP (1986)
There’s only one movie on this list in which you can watch Grace Jones, wearing body paint applied by Keith Haring himself, as a stripper vampire who is the queen demon of a gentlemen’s club where lonely men are picked off from the herd and fed to her in a backstage sex lair. And that movie is VAMP. Case closed.
Vampire’s Kiss (1988)
There will probably never be a better movie about a case of psychosomatic vampirism than Vampire’s Kiss. This is the Nicolas Cage movie that birthed the persona of Rage Cage people still chiefly identify him with today — a panic attack of an actor who can hit screaming emotional peaks few others are capable of, with a physical freneticism to match. Cage’s go-for-broke performance comes in the service of playing a New York City literary agent who is consumed with the possibility he has been turned into an undead bloodsucker. The whole affair is a comedic descent into madness that’s vaulted into a higher plane of relevance as you realize you’re watching one of the most singularly gifted actors of a generation define his star presence.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
This is a Dracula movie as a museum piece. Francis Ford Coppola goes kinky gothic delicious for this classic tale of the Prince of Darkness/Jonathan Harker/Mina love triangle featuring Gary Oldman, Keanu Reeves, and Winona Ryder as its leads. It’s big stars with a big director doing big acting against big sets — with incredible costumes to match. We even get the bonus of Monica Bellucci as one of Dracula’s Brides. Cinema!
Cronos (1992)
The Guillermo del Toro vampire movie with the highest name recognition is probably Blade II, but almost a decade before that — when he was still working primarily in Spanish — there was his first feature, Cronos. This movie tells the story of an antiques dealer who comes into possession of a centuries-old artifact that latches on to its bearer, then grants him eternal life. But with that life comes the eternal dark thirst, too. Fixated on his newly restored youth and vitality, the man must decide whether his new lease on life is worth the price, which may include his own granddaughter, that he must pay to keep it.
Nadja (1994)
We didn’t want to make a vampire-movie list that was just variations on Dracula up and down the page, but a ’90s art-house take that centers on the Count’s offspring, who are located in New York City, is too fun not to include. This David Lynch–produced black-and-white indie stars Peter Fonda as Van Helsing, Elina Löwensohn as Nadja, and Jared Harris as her brother, Edgar, and it pits the famous vampire hunter and his children against the progeny of Dracula. It has lines like “receiving a psychic fax” in it and the trailer features Portishead. Vampire cinema for your Gen-X loved ones.
From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)
For some additional texture to this list, Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn will bring the dudes-rock action-horror vibes to your vampire viewing. The Gecko brothers (Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney) are on the run following a bank robbery turned deadly, and they decide to take hostages as insurance in the form of a preacher (Harvey Keitel) and his kids. Once the Geckos get everyone across the Mexican border, they stop into a strip bar but soon realize they have ambled into a vampire nest they’ll have to kill their way out of.
Blade (1998)
Blade is many great things. It’s a great vampire movie. It’s maybe the greatest comic-book adaptation? (If you’re a horror fan, at least.) And it’s just a great movie, full stop. Wesley Snipes is the pinnacle of undead cool as the titular daywalker, with Stephen Dorff as his perfect sneering foil. Blade was doing “a shadow world beneath our own” years before John Wick. It was also doing combat rave fashions before The Matrix blew that up in 1999. Udo Kier gets his fangs ripped out with pliers and Kris Kristofferson is a grizzled vigilante vampire hunter. This movie has it all, including the line, “Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice-skate up hill.” Bliss!
30 Days of Night (2007)
This movie is just damn good. It moves fast and looks slick. The forever-winter setting makes the vampire attack on this tiny Alaskan town feel relentless and inescapable, and the vamps aren’t sexy. They’re just soulless, black-eyed monsters, but somehow Danny Huston still makes a performance out of his Head Bloodsucker character. 30 Days is a lean-and-mean treasure from the 2000s high-gloss horror mines.
Let the Right One In (2008)
This understated Swedish vampire story carries numerous distinctions. It’s a great film. It’s a fresh take on one of the most well-worn monsters in horror history. It’s queer, and it is perhaps the keystone film that laid the groundwork for the art-house-genre boom of the 2010s, which launched in earnest with pictures like The Witch and The Babadook. Let the Right One In is a coming-of-age drama about a lonely little boy who befriends a strange tween newcomer to his apartment complex. Eli has secrets but Oskar doesn’t care and weird love wins the day — sort of!
Thirst (2009)
This Park Chan-wook movie from 2009 tells the story of a Catholic priest who agrees to participate in an experimental vaccine program to help stop a deadly virus. As a cure, the experiment fails, but it does have the effect of giving the priest a voracious appetite for blood and sex. Thirst won the Jury Prize at Cannes and was nominated for the Palme d’Or, which is some great prestige for this heretical South Korean horror drama.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
Ana Lily Amirpour’s Persian-language vampire Western became the darling of the horror scene when it debuted at Sundance in 2014. At the same time, It Follows and Goodnight Mommy and The Babadook were also circulating around film festivals, making A Girl Walks Home part of the class that catalyzed the great art-house horror boom of the late 2010s. Amirpour’s film follows a lonely vampire girl stalking the night in a fictional town called Bad City, and its haunting black-and-white sets a perfect tone for the movie’s eeriness as well as its melancholy. A Girl Walks is a gateway drug for the non-vampire fan in your life.
Bloodsucking Bastards (2015)
Bloodsucking Bastards begins as an Office Space–style workplace comedy, then becomes a horror comedy about people having to kill their way out of their company to escape a multiplying horde of vampires. As a total compliment to the movie, consider that Bastards co-stars Fran Kranz and as such feels like a Fran Kranz indie horror experience. It’s wry. It’s grounded in daily anxieties, and fortunately it also stars the under-discussed talent Emma Fitzpatrick as well as a pre–Game of Thrones Pedro Pascal playing a dickhead boss. Watch when you’re feeling like work sucks.
Carmilla (2019)
While the girl-on-girl wave of vampire movies in the 1970s might be the most visible era of Carmilla-inspired works, this adaptation from 2019 is one of the best you’ll find. It’s less gauzy leering at lady vamps touching other ladies (which is also great!) and more of a literary adaptation. A lot of movies in this subset of vampire stories are entertaining or lurid or both, but this one from director Emily Harris is actually a good movie, too.
Vampires vs. the Bronx (2020)
Not many picks on this list could be classified as family viewing, but Vampires vs. the Bronx will work for at least some families out there carving pumpkins and watching movies together. It’s exactly what it sounds like: A handful of neighborhood kids must band together when they realize their neighborhood is being sieged by gentrifiers. We mean vampires. Vampires are the ones sweeping in and sucking the lifeblood out of residents.
Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)
Last Voyage of the Demeter is a “don’t make ’em like they used to!” vampire throwback that was sadly slept on when it came out in 2023. Director André Øvredal capably delivered his adaptation of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, but Demeter feels like a return to the punch of efforts such as Trollhunter and Autopsy of Jane Doe. The movie takes place on a merchant ship bound for London and becomes a survival horror story as the crew starts getting laid to waste by a most surprising passenger hidden within the boxes below deck. Øvredal really knows how to show (and hide) his creatures to great effect, and Demeter’s vampire is a terror that feels like a modernly fast and frightening monster dropped into an old Hammer-style tale of horror on the high seas. A round of applause to actor Javier Botet for his embodiment of the chilling beast within.
Slay (2024)
What if From Dusk Till Dawn centered on a group of drag queens who ended up at the wrong shitkicker bar and had to team up with hillbillies to fend off a siege of the undead? Then it would be Slay! This movie has just the right amount of after-school-special acceptance messaging thrown in with its R-rated violence and comedy. It might even make you shed a genuine tear when one of its gruff main characters gets a makeover special and finds his true self. Vampires are extremely over the top and so is drag, so it’s a beautiful marriage of characters doing the most.
