This is the grandfather of all good spiritual movies, a movie that never should have been made. This film is a black and white silent picture that stars Max Schrek as the creepy Count Orlock. This film was an expressionist film that remains extremely populaaar today, but because of a weird way: half the people who still watch this film find Nosferatu extremely creepy and scary, while the other half find it campy and hilarious.
This is one of the earliest vampire films, and after it’s release, Bram Stoker’s widow sued the director, saying this was a blatant rip off of her late husband’s novel: Dracula. The court found in her favor, and every negative of this film was supposed to have been destroyed, but pirate copies kept cropping up all over the place. Once the copyright to Dracula wore off (copyrights last 70 years after the author’s death), the movie was re-released in DVD format and is now available on DVD. Whether this movie hits you as very creepy or hilarious, it’s worth seeing.
John Carpenter’s Vampires (1998)
John Carpenter’s Vampires is one of the better recent vampire movies that actually takes the effort to be a vampire movie, and not an action film disguised as a vampire movie. James Woods plays the role of the main protagonist, a vampire hunter who is obsessed with wiping the mall out with his team after he witnessed his parents murdered by the blood sucking undead when he as a child.
He discovers that a group of vampires are searching for a powerful doom for mankind. The Vatican then secretly enlists a team of vampire-hunters, led by Jack Crow, to hunt down and destroy all of them before they find a crucifix that would give them the power to walk in the day.
After destroying a nest of the evil monsters, Valek, the vampire master, comes after Jack and his team, leading to a fast paced action based movie that still focuses mostly on vampires against the human undead hunter. A great action paced film that is mostly action based, but definitely has its moments of out right terror.
Lost Boys (1987)
This is a favorite among many vampire movie fans, and will almost always pop up on a top ten list of vampire films. This Joel Schumacher film is also pop culture famous because it featured the two Coreys at the height of their teenage heart throb popularity in the late eighties.
Don’t let this scare you away, this is a good movie, and it is a very traditional story in a modern setting, mixing the two well without bastardizing either. A single mother and her two sons move to a small coastal California town. There are some mysterious deaths, as well as a pesky motorcycle gang. The younger brother makes friends with imaginative boys who claim to be vampire hunters. The older brother falls for a beautiful girl and then begins acting stranger and stranger while exhibiting all the classic signs of vampirism.
