Top Ten Vampire Films
Editor’s Notes: Only Lovers Left Alive is now out in limited release. For our review of the film, visit here.
Vampires have been haunting our screens with their presence since cinema became a popular medium. Historically speaking, most global cultures have a version of the vampire legend and monster figure rooted deep within their folklore and this is something that literature has brought to the fore. Theorists such as Ken Gelder have categorised the vampire figure in cinema from its humble beginnings as a shadowy apparition to the modern day teen romantic. Vampires throughout their representations on the silver screen have transformed to fit the morals of the narratives and are mouldable characters that heavily influenced by the cultures their source material is taken from. The stereotypical vampire of Eastern European heritage earns its place through a fear of transmitting of plague and pestilence, converted to a fear of foreign cultures invading with the movement of trades across the seas. Bram Stoker’s classic novel Dracula is a prime example of this European imagery we initially conjure up when the word vampire is heard, but over the past decades the vampire has seen many forms in film.
