The 22 Best Vampire Movies Ever Made, from ‘The Lost Boys’ to ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’
Ghosts are ubiquitous and zombies have had their moments of dominance, but of all the classic horror monsters, vampires have the strongest claim for the greatest film legacy. The vampire genre is nearly as old as cinema itself, with F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” scaring up audiences in 1922, followed by the countless iterations that came in its shadow. Every era and every filmmaking country has since taken up its own spins on the myth of the vampire, from Universal Studios’ “Dracula” series beginning with Tod Browning’s Bram Stoker adaptation in 1931, all the way up to Iranian-American director Ana Lily Amirpour’s indie feminist twist “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” in 2014.
2024 has not exactly been a banner time for brilliant takes on the horror genre’s most iconic creatures of the night, with the most notable bloodsucking project to come out this calendar year being the fun but ultra-silly “Abigail.” That’s likely to change this December though, when Robert Eggers’ reimagining of the original “Nosferatu,” featuring Bill Skarsgard as the devious Count Orlok. Focus Features will distribute the film — also starring Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, and Willem Dafoe — this Christmas. While we wait anxiously for Eggers’ interpretation of the original vampire story, why not sink your teeth into the great entries in the vampire canon that have spawned since?
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While the genre has generated many a bloody classic — too many to count, in fact — IndieWire has rounded up staff favorites that also happen to represent an exhaustive cross-section of vampire homages, including Francis Ford Coppola’s controversial, romantic ode “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” in 1992, Park Chan-wook’s erotic South Korean take “Thirst,” Europe’s 1971 lesbian imagining “Daughters of Darkness,” the 2014 mockumentary “What We Do in the Shadows,” and more.
In honor of the 2024 Halloween season, we refreshed and updated our list of the greatest vampire movies of all time. The picks range from comedic, irreverent takes and Hollywood blockbusters to gory fright fests and introspective arthouse features. Read on to see IndieWire’s picks of the top 22 vampire movies below. We promise they don’t suck.
With editorial contributions by Chris O’Fault, Ryan Lattanzio, Jude Dry, Tambay Obenson, Christian Blauvelt, Eric Kohn, and Zack Sharf. [Editor’s note: this list was originally published in October 2019 and has been updated multiple times since.]
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