If '80s camp counts then you’ve got to include “Vamp” starring Grace Jones.
I still can’t forgive “Near Dark” for the ending. All the non-traditional vampire stuff was really great, but that ending. Argh!
-rainy
I thought the 'salem’s Lot movies were pretty good. I liked the recent made for TV version, but I’m guessing I’m part of the minority. Some scenes are sorta creepy!
Chris Sarandon was a great vamp in Fright Night but better was the chap in John Carpenters ‘Vampires’. Not the best movie but a good bad guy.
I’ll agree with that. The “twist” is nicely done, even though I saw it coming a little while before they actually revealed it.
From Dusk till Dawn
Salma Hayek :eek: 
Enough said.
OK, I’m a child of the 80’s. My favorite Vampire Movie remains “The Hunger”.
Sure, It’s a two hour perfume commercial, with blood, but it’s got Bowie, DeNeuve (sp?) and Sarandon, plus music by Bauhaus, my favorite Goth band.
It’s also one of the Rarities where the movie is better than the book. Whitley Striber couldn’t write his way out of a wet paper bag.
Agreed. I don’t think anything since has managed to live up to the standard set by Nosferatu.
Dude, it’s like you read my mind. I swear I’ve made almost exactly this same post in both vamp movie threads and “movies that are better than the book” threads!
I’ll second The Hunger, and add Cronenberg’s Rabid.
Near Dark is probably my favorite. Another I like that hasn’t been mentioned is Martin.
If we’re having a “freak Daniel’s shit out” contest, Martin wins, hands down. I’m not sure whether I liked it, but that was one amazingly horrifying movie.
Daniel
Lost Boys is, in my opinion, probably the best vampire movie ever. It just drips with this California '80s cool, with the pack of sexy punk vampires, Jami Gertz as the gypsyish Star, and Jason Patric channeling a young Jim Morrison. Genuinely moody atmosphere, a great twist ending (David was a victim too!), and comic relief that’s actually, you know, funny. I’m amused by just how much Buffy the TV Show ripped off this movie.
Kiefer Sutherland’s business-up-top, party-at-the-bottom mullet? Sexy sexy.
The award for most unintentionally hilarious moment in a vampire flick, however, goes to the concert scene in Queen of the Damned. Little twiggy Stuart Townsend takes the stage, weighing maybe 85 pounds sopping wet, this pale glittery stick figure. Then he opens his mouth and the powerful booming Jonathan Davis voice comes out. Fuckin’ A, man. That’s comedy.
I bet Davis is still counting the money from that movie, though.
“Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It’s fun to be a vampire.”
Lost Boys rocks.
Also, Near Dark. Funny that they both came out around the same time (as I recall, and I’m too lazy to actually look it up).
I’ve seen Fright Night too many times. Always a great movie. “You have to have faith”. “Brewster, you’re SO COOL!” Love it.
I was going to mention Cronos. Without spoiling anything, this is not a chock full of vampires film. It is not a film about fighting vampires. It is a film about what we live for and how much would you give up to live forever?
It’s isnt talky or preachy and it very much works as a horror/science fiction film. But it’s about exploring the heart, not driving a stake through it.
Re The Addiction
I sat through that once. Talking. More talking. Followed by more talking. Christopher Walken pops up to ask the eternal question “I defecate. Do you do that?” More talking. Character pulls own molar to prove some kind of point. “We are not evil because we sin. We sin because we are evil.” Still more talking. Then the movie ended. And I was very glad.
Nosferatu
I’ve never got around to seeing either version. But those images of Shreck remain IMHO some of the creepiest things ever put on film. I cannot think of any film which can even begin to unsettle me the way a few frames of Orlock stepping out of the doorway do.
Fright Night
I love that the old film clip shows him charging a vampire with the stake held backwards.
Martin was really good, in a good-story-low-budget kind of way, which is a shit load better than the big-budget-no-story shit we get out of hollywood. I liked the ‘realism’ of him taking the blood with syringes, then wiping down the train compartment in the opening scene. The old cousin and the radio call-in show were great too. I especially liked the depressed atmosphere of the industrial city in the late 70s, when the economy was changing and there werre no jobs.
The Hunger was excellent, especially for conveying the early-80s atmosphere.
I’m going to break with the pack and say that Coppola’s Dracula was great with the exception of Keanu Reeves. If they had cast someone else, someone capable of generating some kind of chemistry with Winona Ryder (I’d like to give it a try) or even, um, you know, acting? it would have been a perfect vampire movie.
Carl Dreyer’s 1932 Vampyr. I’m shocked that I’m the first to mention it…where are all the other precious art-house dweebs?
I’ve also always thought that Tod Browning’s 1935 Mark of the Vampire was pretty cool. S’posed to be a remake of his London After Midnight, and stars Bela Lugosi, Jean Hersholt, and the Lionels Barrymore and Atwill.
I thought the thread title was “Best Vampire movies”, not “Dullest Vampire movies”.
Not to knock Dreyer’s technical skills, artistic achievement, or ability to create tension and build suspense, because they’re all first rate. But well before the end of Vampyr I began to understand the true horror of being undead, trapped in a tedious eternity…
Unfortunately, there is no real vampire in this movie
Detop
Well, if it’s a remake of London After Midnight doesn’t that follow?
Eh. Some movies, you have to prepare yourself for. Some movies have no flying glass and babes in bikinis and car chases.
I like a lot of those sorts of movies.
Opium helps.
Ah. Thank you.