Top 10 Best Vampire Movies of All Time

Oldboy director Park Chan Wook proves he can make anything when he directed Thirst (2009), a revenge thriller film based on Emile Zola’s novel Therese Raquin.

In the film, we follow a Catholic priest, Sang-Hyun, who suffering from a personal crisis about his faith and his forbidden love for a friend’s wife. His struggles are aggravated when he decides to be a test subject for a new vaccine which changed him into a vampire.

Successfully controlling himself at first, things begin going south when he starts an affair with his friend’s wife.

Leave all the horror movie tropes you’ve been used to seeing behind, they would be useless when watching A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014).

Here, we see the titular girl, who is a vampire, as she goes out in her nightly excursions around the deserted streets of a fictional Middle Eastern city. Observing and stalking possible prey, she meets a young man Arash who is slowly succumbing to the crime life.

Although director Werner Herzog considers the original Nosferatu film to be the greatest German film to ever be made, he decided to remake the film to be a more faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Here we see the iconic Count Dracula played by Klaus Kinski as he stalks a German village called Wismar where he would find the beautiful Lucy Harker, played by Isabelle Adjani, the wife of a man who is trapped in his castle.

Have you seen vampires as beautiful and cool as Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston in the Jim Jarmusch film Only Lovers Left Alive (2013).

In the film we see Hiddleston play the lonely vampire, Adam, who after centuries of inspiring scientists and musicians contemplates suicide after growing disenchanted with humanity. To comfort him, his beautiful wife, Eve, flies home to him. But their melancholic existence is soon disturbed by the arrival of Eve’s sister Ava, played by Mia Wasikowska.

We’re betting you’ll love this comedy gem.

What We Do in the Shadows (2014) is a sort of mockumentary following the immortal lives of four vampires roommates living in modern day New Zealand. Their old fashioned ways are challenged when their ‘friend’ accidentally turns into a vampire and begins showing them how to live in the modern world which brings them up against a group of werewolves living in their neighborhood.

The film was directed and written by Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement who also star as vampires in the film. A sequel called We’re Wolves has been announced.

What’s amazing about From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) is how it smoothly and effectively manages to change genres midway its running time.

Starting out as a crime film following a pair of bank robbers, played by Tarantino and George Clooney, running away to escape in Mexico things soon change when they end up on a strip joint which they would later discover is patronized by vampires.

Now revealed as a horror film, audiences are treated to amazing effects showing monstrous vampires and gloriously gory deaths.

Horror of Dracula (1958) features Christopher Lee’s iconic portrayal of the famous vampire. With his low voice and threatening presence, his performance is lauded for being the only one to even come close to being as better as Bela Lugosi’s.

The film was a British production and was filmed in Technicolor. The film proved to be a financial success spawning six more sequels over the years that follow giving Lee an opportunity to cement his reputation playing villain roles extremely well.

Speaking of Bela Lugosi’s iconic performance as Count Dracula, here is the original Dracula movie.

Directed by Tod Browning, the film derived heavily from the German Expressionism style that was popular in the 1920s from which another adaptation of the story, Nosferatu, emerged.

The film enjoyed both critical and financial success leading to the first great era of horror films in Hollywood with hits like Frankenstein, The Wolf Man and The Mummy.

Let the Right One In (2008) is a horror coming of age tale about Oskar, an eleven-year-old boy who is bullied at school. His life would be changed upon meeting one of his new neighbors, Eli, a mysterious young girl. He would, later on, learn about Eli’s dark secret: she is a vampire who needs to drink human blood to survive.

The film’s story is based on a novel by John Ajvide. Due to its success overseas, a US remake was made starring Chloe Grace Moretz and Kodi Smit-McPhee in 2010.

Of course, a list of the Best Vampire Movies is not complete without mention of this classic vampire film.

By modern standards, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu may seem repulsing and silly rather than terrifying. Surely, Count Orlok is nothing like the charismatic and handsome vampires that would follow him. Still, the vampire movies and horror movies we favor today owe much of their existence to this masterful work in early horror cinema.

Although the names and places were changed, Nosferatu is an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula at its core. Unfortunately, Stoker’s wife insisted that it was an illegal adaptation and demanded all copies of the movie to be destroyed. Good thing a copy survives until today and you can even watch it entirely online.