Byzantium (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.
Tag: Horror (Page 6)
1990sFrom 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.
1970sNosferatu 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.
1960sThe Fearless Vampire Killers (1967)
Roman Polanski's affectionate Hammer parody is more gorgeous gothic fairy tale than laugh-out-loud comedy. The Fearless Vampire Killers earns its 6.5 as a beautiful, uneven oddity, a horror comedy that is more interested in atmosphere than in jokes and lands…
1950sDracula (1958)
Hammer's 1958 Dracula made the vampire physical, sexual, and bloody. Christopher Lee plays Dracula, and the performance redefined the role.
1930sVampyr (1932)
Characters appear and vanish. Vampyr earns its 8 as the strangest, dreamiest, and most genuinely uncanny vampire film ever made, a 1932 work by the Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer that abandons plot and logic in favor of pure nightmare.
1960sBlack Sunday (1960)
Mario Bava's debut is one of the most visually ravishing horror films ever made and launched Italian gothic. Bava had been a cinematographer, and it shows in every frame.
1970sBlacula (1972)
William Marshall plays a tragic vampire prince with Shakespearean dignity in this landmark Black-led horror film. Is Blacula as silly as its title?
1970sThe Vampire Lovers (1970)
Ingrid Pitt raises Hammer's adaptation of Carmilla into a melancholy gothic. There is real sorrow in the performance.
1970sCount Yorga, Vampire (1970)
Count Yorga dropped an old-world vampire into 1970 Los Angeles and got there before the rest of the genre. The film also bears the marks of its origins.
1970sBlood for Dracula (1974)
Paul Morrissey reimagines Dracula as a dying aristocrat starving for virgin blood in a changed world. The film's central joke is also its central tragedy.
1960sThe Brides of Dracula (1960)
Hammer built a gorgeous sequel without Christopher Lee, and it may be better than the original. Christopher Lee, wary of being typecast, sat this one out, and Hammer built a sequel around a different vampire entirely, a charming young aristocrat…