The 25 best vampire films of all time, ranked

Three siblings hover near poverty, steeped in loneliness, save for each other. The twist? One of them is a vampire, and the other two have made it their life’s work to protect him, whether they like it or not. Emotional, haunting, and expertly crafted in the tradition of films like Let The Right One In, My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To is a slow-burn vampire drama with an emotional force that will knock you backwards.

You might go into Bit thinking you’re about to watch an all-female Lost Boys, or some other more predictable ride. Then Brad Michael Elmore’s film—about a young woman (Nicole Maines) who joins a vampire coven—takes a turn and becomes a biting (pun very much intended), wickedly fun feminist horror journey. It’s a film that knows all the vampire rules, and therefore knows the absolute best times to play by them, and the best times to break them. That makes it not just entertaining, but refreshing.

Director Stephen Norrington’s Blade is certainly a vampire masterpiece in its own right, but when Guillermo del Toro took the reins for Blade II, he took things a step further and put his love for creature design to work. The result is a story in which Blade (Wesley Snipes, cool as ever) takes on what amounts to a new species of vampires. The film has all the thoughtful attention to detail we’ve come to expect from Del Toro, cinema’s greatest monster lover. It’s fun, it’s funny, and the autopsy scene alone will linger in your head for days.

There’s so much to love about From Dusk Till Dawn, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s cinematic dose of pure vampire mayhem. You’ve got George Clooney in villain mode, and loving every minute of it. You’ve got legends like Tom Savini and Fred “The Hammer” Williamson fighting (and sometimes becoming) vampires. You’ve got vicious violence, Salma Hayek dancing seductively, and of course, that wonderful opening sequence that features no vampires at all, but somehow still might be the best part of the movie.

Harry Kümel’s Daughters Of Darkness might not be the first lesbian vampire saga out there, but it’s arguably the most influential. Sumptuous, decadent, and gorgeously eerie, the film follows a married couple staying in a mostly empty resort, where they’re preyed on by a beautiful vampiric woman (Delphine Seyrig, resplendent and terrifying) with a dark legacy. It’s a formula you think you know, but if you’ve never seen Daughters Of Darkness, you’ve never seen it done quite like this. It’s a stunner, and its impact is felt in everything from The Hunger to The Love Witch.

Long before Renfield, Nicolas Cage was getting his bloodsucker on with Vampire’s Kiss, a wild ’80s black comedy about a yuppie literary agent who falls prey to a creature of the night while hopping clubs. Cage’s performance as a man who might be turning into a vampire or might just be going crazy remains legendary all these years later, and the fearless over-the-top irony of the whole film makes it seem ahead of its time.

When it comes to merging gritty and brutal genre elements with rich thematic weight, Abel Ferrara has always been our guy, and The Addiction is a prime example. Starring Lili Taylor as a philosophy student who’s slowly turning into a vampire, the film is both a bloodsucker flick that delivers the goods and a terrific showcase of Ferrara’s talent for mixing philosophical explorations with his horror.

The great Christopher Lee starred in seven Dracula films at Hammer Studios over the course of 15 years, and while the first, 1958’s Horror Of Dracula, is often considered the best, Taste The Blood Of Dracula is also a strong contender. The film tells the story of a group of aristocrats fighting for their lives when they encounter the dead vampire’s dried blood and end up unleashing Dracula on the world again. It’s Hammer getting really creative with sequels, it’s Lee in top form, and of course, it’s a truly great title to cap things off.

Though Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles is getting a new chance at screen life thanks to an acclaimed AMC series, for many fans, Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Interview With The Vampire, Rice’s first vampire novel, remains a favorite. Rice famously issued a public apology for resisting Tom Cruise’s casting after she saw his performance as the Vampire Lestat, and Jordan’s gorgeous photography is enough to make you want to become a creature of the night yourself.

F.W. Murnau’s legendary Nosferatu (which we’ll get to, don’t worry) casts a very long shadow in the vampire movie world, so long that in 2000, decades after the film was released, it got a very interesting spin-off movie. Directed by Begotten mastermind E. Elias Merhige, Shadow Of The Vampire is a fictionalized account of the making of Nosferatu, built on the premise that Murnau (John Malkovich) found an actual vampire (Willem Dafoe) to play the title creature. Malkovich and Dafoe are riveting, it looks gorgeous, and most importantly the film grows well beyond its gimmick to tell an addictive tale of obsession and terror.

Tom Holland’s (no, not that Tom Holland) Fright Night is one of those great ’80s horror movies that manages to work on two levels. On one, it’s a killer vampire flick set amid the trappings of suburbia, dominated by Chris Sarandon as the main villain. On the other, it’s a thoroughly metaphysical look at vampires through a pop culture lens, helped along by Roddy McDowall as a horror host turned hapless vampire hunter. Those two threads weave together perfectly, and the result is one of the most entertaining horror films of its era.

One of the most important horror films ever made by a Black director (or by any director, honestly), director Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess undulates seductively between harrowing tale of terror and trippy, mesmeric tone poem. The way Gunn shoots the vampirism scenes, the way the film uses sex, and the way the same music repeats in key moments, all create the sense that we’re witness to a dark spell being cast, to some magic being worked that we can’t quite see but can definitely feel. It’s a strange experience, but also a very rewarding one.

Like Fright Night before it, The Lost Boys offers a certain dose of metafictional fun with its vampire terrors, as a group of pop culture-savvy kids face off against a coven of bloodsuckers. Unlike Fright Night, which roots itself in suburban malaise, Joel Schumacher’s vampire classic is a coming-of-age tale that’s both timeless and very much of its time, the story of young people in a crumbling town that’s bleeding them dry, trying to find a way to see the sun again.

Lush, hypnotic, and driven by wonderful performances from Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton, Only Lovers Left Alive, Jim Jarmusch’s take on the vampire legend, is both a movie you can get happily lost in and a movie you can just put on in the background and vibe with. Like so many of Jarmusch’s films, its greatest success lies in the way it uses genre cinema trappings to deliver a rich character study, chronicling two eternal lives while tracing the thematic implications of who we choose to walk into oblivion with.

Tod Browning’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel, starring Bela Lugosi as the Count (reprising his role from the stage version), is not the greatest vampire movie ever made. It’s not even the greatest Dracula adaptation ever made. But in terms of sheer influence, this is arguably the most important vampire movie in the history of cinema. When we think of “Dracula” as a character, no matter how many other great interpretations there are, we instantly think of Lugosi’s slow, menacing approach to the vampire. That’s a testament to the strength of his performance, and to Browning’s focused, patient direction. It’s a movie with a ripple effect that still feels like a tidal wave almost a century later.

Made just one year after Dracula, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr couldn’t be less like Browning’s vampire classic if it tried. They’re both in black and white, and they’re both vampire stories, but while Browning’s tale is unapologetically geared toward luscious mass appeal, Dreyer’s is blissfully expressionistic and experimental. It’s a horror tone poem so textured and singular, you could put it on right now and imagine that some indie genius made it yesterday.

“What if vampires were just guys trying to get through the day?” might not sound like a particularly promising premise, but What We Do In The Shadows executes it in a delightfully original way. A seamless, joyous blend of the ordinary and the uncanny, Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s mockumentary is as memorable for its ordinary moments (parting the curtains and simply getting excited about nighttime) as it is for its riffs on classic horror tropes (the rivalry between vampires and werewolves).

The 1980s were a hotbed of great vampire cinema, but it never got better than Kathryn Bigelow’s bloodsucking Western road movie. A story steeped in the coming-of-age trope of searching for a place to belong, Near Dark is as rich with longing and warmth as it is with violence and dark humor. And even after decades of great vampire violence, Bigelow’s film still serves as proof that we haven’t run out of ways to use vampire powers for action movie fun. It’s a movie that casts a spell unlike any other, and considering how many vampire movies have tried to replicate its success since, that’s really saying something.

Vampire movies in the ’80s were often primal, fast-paced exercises in creature effects, but that’s not The Hunger’s vibe. Though it certainly packs its share of gruesome visuals into the runtime, and vampirism is definitely on display, Tony Scott’s story about the fallout of a vampire love triangle is more deliberately sensual than many of the other bloodsucker films of its era. Having a cast led by Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie, and Susan Sarandon certainly helped with that, but Scott’s gorgeous visuals are the real star here.

Werner Herzog’s updated take on F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu is about more than using the iconic imagery of that first film to make a new mark. The imagery is there, of course, but for his film, Herzog shed some of the more expressionistic trappings of Murnau’s story to tell a tale steeped in existential terror, not just a story of how a vampire preys on a family, but how it preys on a society. Putting Klaus Kinski in the title role of a vampire trapped by his own immortality was the master stroke.

Sheila Vand’s title Girl gliding on a skateboard on a deserted street, her cloak trailing behind her, is one of the most beautifully spooky images in all of vampire filmmaking, and it’s just one of the things that makes A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night so special. Anchored by Vand’s hypnotic performance, Ana Lily Amirpour’s feature debut is a vivid, singular dream, a film as inviting as it is haunting.

Thirst, Park Chan-wook’s take on a vampire movie is, like all of his films, a stunning, unpredictable blend of angst, violence, sex, and unforgettable visual depth. Following a priest (Song Kang-ho) whose descent into vampirism makes him question everything about life, faith, and desire, it’s got the sudden brutality of Oldboy, the taboo heat of Stoker, and the kinetic energy of The Handmaiden, plus vampires. What more could you want?

Perhaps the greatest meditation on the vampire as a metaphor for loneliness in cinema history, Tomas Alfredson’s Let The Right One In, about a young boy who befriends a vampiric neighbor is both jaw-droppingly beautiful and relentlessly unsettling. The swimming pool massacre remains one of the most gripping depictions of violence in vampire movie history, but what will stick with you even longer is the film’s focus on a bond between two outsiders, and how hard those outsiders will fight to sustain it.

There are several intensely frightening shots of Max Schreck’s Count Orlok scattered throughout F.W. Murnau’s classic unauthorized Dracula adaptation, that would rank as the scariest single moment in any other movie even now. Nosferatu remains great because of its century-long impact, to be sure, but if you’re thinking this movie is only vital because of its place in film history, think again. Through a combination of pacing, staging, and great makeup, Murnau and Schreck created something eternally terrifying, capable of stunning viewers for decades, with no sign of slowing down.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel—led by Gary Oldman as a gloriously lavish version of the title character—is three decades old now, and remains a luscious, sinfully decadent maelstrom of imagination. Daring to make a film that blended old filmmaking techniques with modern cinema sensibilities, Coppola and company threw absolutely everything at the wall, and miraculously it all stuck. The result is the best vampire movie of all time, a film as biting as it is seductive.