Since Halloween is approaching, I thought about a list of my favorite vampire movies. Not all of these movies are horror films as such, but, in my opinion, each of them has something that makes it special in the vampire genre. BTW, for me, one of the scariest vampire books will always be, to this day, Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. The first vampire story that really unsettled me when I was a child is Edgar Allan Poe’s Berenice. And the most beautiful vampire love story I have ever read is, without a shadow of a doubt, Tanith Lee’s Bite-Me-Not, or Fleur de Fur (It is one of the most poetic love stories between a vampire and a human, with an appropriately sad ending. Actually Tanith Lee wrote it well before the vampire romance genre really came to be, which makes her a kind of pioneer…). Lee’s story set the bar pretty high for me. Another vampire romance I adore is Robin McKinley’s Sunshine…While I did enjoy both True Blood and The Vampire Diaries, I am still looking for a vampire romance (book or movie or series) that I can really fall in love with…
But here’s my list:
- Byzantium (Neil Jordan)
It is a gorgeous film, which is a feminist reading of vampire stories. And there are actually no fangs in it… It was, in my opinion, grossly underrated. A mother and a daughter trying to survive in a forbidding world of men, who hunt them down for centuries just because they aspired to immortality…
My favorite scene: The one on the hidden island when Clara (the main character) turns into a vampire. There is a hypnotic use of shades of blood red…
- Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch)
This is not so much a vampire film, as a meditation on the death of history and of the end of an Old World where love and romance used to matter…I do feel sometimes very much like a creature of another age living in a world I can no longer make sense of… And Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston are, of course, magnificent here.
My favorite scene: Really everything that’s filmed in the urban Gothic ruins of Detroit…
- Interview with a Vampire (Neil Jordan)
Here’s the thing – I adore Neil Jordan, and this film of his, with its decadent setting and its half tragic/ half ironic mode, will always be one of my highlights. I do love Anne Rice’s book (although it is not one of my favourite books by her), but Jordan’s film can stand on its own and does not necessarily emerge as an adaptation.
My favorite scene: When Brad Pitt wakes up in the cemetery to see the statue of the angel with his vampire eyes for the first time. And of course, we’re talking of a young Brad Pitt looking at his most gorgeous (with a natural-looking hair color).
- Shadow of the Vampire (Elias Merhige):
This is a film which fictionalizes the making of Murnau’s famous Nosferatu. It is really a film about a film (Metatextual, yes)…Think about it, what if the actor playing Count Orlok in the film was actually a vampire? Subtle and ironic, this is more about the vampiric nature of cinema and about desire in general, than about anything else.
My favorite scene: Right at the very end when Count Orlok (played by Willem Dafoe) has killed each and every one of the actors on set, and the mad director (John Malkovich) keeps rolling the camera to capture everything and then to end the movie with the famous sunrise scene…
- Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola)
Although most of the Romanian bits in it are spoken in an atrocious accent (which makes them nearly unintelligible for Romanian speakers), it is still a nuanced film which transcends Eastern European stereotypes, and which manages to offer an intelligent reading of Stoker’s book. Gary Oldman’s Dracula is a fabulous performance (underrated to my mind), and Anthony Hopkins’ subversive Van Helsing adds further depth to the film.
My favorite scene: Decidedly, the scene in which Gary Oldman goes to see the moving pictures and then tries to seduce his lost love…There is a mixture of sad, horrifying, grotesque and beautiful there, and again there is that connection between vampirism and cinema that I have always liked.
Honorable Mentions
Oh, so many… There are many vampire films that could have made it on my list among which Guillermo del Toro’s outlandish Cronos or Robert Rodriguez’ s funny From Dusk Till Dawn or Tony Scott’s exquisite The Hunger…
