This new tactic has become part of his stylistic habits as a writer and director, and Thirst was the first time where it felt like he was pushing his style into an entirely new realm of thought and perspective. What changed was the humor, which was far more buoyant, bordering on animated, in Lady Vengeance. Vengeance, Chan-wook unleashed Lady Vengeance, in which the violence continued to be pummeling yet critical and the turns of the plot remained unpredictable. After creating two of the best South Korean movies ever made in the aughts with Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Brian Formoįans of Park Chan-wook may have been blindsided by Thirst. Blood has never looked so enticing-nor has the vampire's desire to feast and bathe in it-than in this film. What Jordan excels at with Byzantium is elaborately displaying blood-from decapitations, waterfalls, and bandages-with a can't-look-away voyeurism POV. Jordan's film is eerie, feminist, and a bit meandering. Told from the viewpoint of a forever young vampire ( Saoirse Ronan)-who only preys on those already at death's door-she writes about her vampire mother ( Gemma Arterton) as half tragic, half inspiring, because she's a woman who's never been able to evolve beyond the world's oldest profession (selling her body), but who also chose to become a vampiric being when that was reserved solely for men. It’s one of the few films that show vampires not as upper-class blood drainers, but as members of a scrappy lower class. Handsome as Interview is, and important for showing the eternal sadness of vampirism, Byzantium bares more of its soul. Neil Jordan has double-dipped in the vampire genre, and although his Interview With the Vampire is his most well-known work, we’re giving his visually arresting but chillingly distant Byzantium the nod here.
All that’s great, but it’s near-textural feeling of Carpenter’s mind at work in every frame that makes Vampires unique in a sub-genre that so often feels plain. The film is shot well, strewn with good use of gore and impactful action sequences, and sports a solid cast that also includes Mark Boone Jr., Sheryl Lee, and Maximilian Schell. There’s not even a minute trace of sentimentality in the production on the whole really, and it’s that simplistic, skeptical perspective that gives Vampires its undeniable edge. There’s no attempt to make Crow into a role model. James Woods is Jack Crow, the leader of a gang of vampire slayers who are all but wiped out completely when they come up against Jan Valek ( The Karate Kid Part 3’s Thomas Ian Griffith), a powerful bloodsucker looking for a talisman that will allow him to walk freely in sunlight. The second best of John Carpenter’s interesting but largely dramatically lacking 1990s output, Vampires expresses a kind of hard-nosed brand of bad-assery that other directors have attempted to pull off but few have ever even brushed up against. It’s fun that way, no? As always, let us know if your favorite made the cut, if we hipped you to something new you wanna see, or if you’ll never read us again because we’re not fans of vampires who sparkle or run in packs of Coreys. We could list more than 25 films here, but we narrowed it down to a number low enough that you can tell us how much we suck for leaving off your favorite. Just like many of the vampires on this list have to adapt to the times, so do the films themselves. Each century of filmmaking has experienced more than one peak vampire moment, where the lore needed to be recycled into something fresh and new, before totally sucking. There have been some absolutely great vampire movies. It’s a lonely existence that also keeps the thrill of the hunt and the thrill of keeping a secret.īecause vampires exist in the folklore of almost every society on Earth, it’s only natural that it’d be a story expressed in nearly every language and thus, films around the world. They can’t even go into someone’s home without being invited. To maintain eternal life they must pierce the neck and suck the blood of a living human. The vampire is probably most appealing because the vampire isn’t hugely enviable, so it’s not a wish-fulfillment fantasy. Perhaps the most beloved lore that’s been spun out of eternal life has been the vampire. The concept of living to see every advancement of human society has splintered into literature and folklore in many different ways. Eternal life has been mortals' quest since, well, for eternity really.