Cronos (1993)
Guillermo del Toro reroutes the vampire myth through a clockwork device in his startling 1993 debut. The fascination with antique machinery.
Genre: Vampire
The oldest monster that still works. Vampire fiction is about hunger, power, and the terrible economics of living forever, and these stories take the fangs seriously.
HorrorNosferatu (1922)
Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu invented vampire cinema and still frightens a century later. The estate sued anyway and won, and a court ordered every copy destroyed.
DramaOnly Lovers Left Alive (2013)
Not the thrill of immortality, not the hunt, not the gothic romance. What it offers instead is two ancient lovers, the crumbling cities they haunt, and the slow pleasure of their company.
ComedyWhat We Do in the Shadows (2014)
What We Do in the Shadows earns its 8.5 by finding a joke the vampire genre had somehow left lying on the ground for a century. What if immortal creatures of the night still had to argue about whose turn…
HorrorThe Hunger (1983)
The film looks extraordinary. The Hunger earns its 6.5 the way a fashion shoot earns a magazine cover.
HorrorMartin (1977)
Martin earns its 8 by asking a question that quietly dismantles the entire vampire genre. What if there is no such thing as a vampire, only a disturbed young man who believes he is one?
HorrorShadow of the Vampire (2000)
What if the actor in Nosferatu was a real vampire? The conceit is irresistible.
DramaNosferatu the Vampyre (1979)
Werner Herzog remakes Murnau as a tragedy, and Klaus Kinski's Dracula is the genre's saddest monster. The vampire here is not merely frightening.
ActionFrom Dusk Till Dawn (1996)
The tonal whiplash is the entire experience. From Dusk Till Dawn earns its 7 by being two completely different movies stapled together, and by the strange fact that the staple holds.
DramaByzantium (2012)
Neil Jordan returns to vampires with a feminist story of a mother and daughter surviving two centuries. The film's mythology is explicitly gendered.
HorrorStake Land (2010)
Jim Mickle's Stake Land uses vampires as backdrop for a melancholy survival drama. Sometimes the vampires are not the point.
DramaLet Me In (2010)
Matt Reeves remakes Let the Right One In with care and conviction. Let Me In earns its 8 by being the rarest of things, an American remake of a beloved foreign film that justifies its own existence.