Vampire movies: a court ordered Dracula's unauthorised film destroyed

A vampire film is a movie about a folklore creature, a dead person who rises from the grave at night to feed on the living, usually by drinking their blood. The novelist Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897, and the Library of Congress credits him with creating the character in that book. It fixed the suave, seductive, deadly count as the image of the vampire.

The first famous screen version was made without permission. The 1922 German film Nosferatu adapted Dracula without securing the rights from Stoker's estate, renamed the count Orlok and moved the story to Germany. Stoker's widow, Florence, sued. The court sided with her, and in July 1925, after the producers lost their appeal, they were ordered to destroy the negative and every print. The order was never fully carried out: prints had already travelled abroad, and Nosferatu had its American premiere in New York in 1929.

What followed is the reason vampires are everywhere. Universal's 1931 Dracula, with Bela Lugosi in the title role, is credited with starting the studio's wave of monster movies. In 1958 the British studio Hammer made Dracula with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, which TCM describes as the international hit that led Hammer to commit to horror. Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend, about a plague that turns humanity into vampires, was filmed again with Will Smith in 2007, and critics have traced George Romero's Night of the Living Dead back to it. That is how the vampire led to the zombie, which the zombie movies guide follows.

Relay carries 200 films with a vampire or Dracula tag. The eight below are in release order, and each one shows a different version of the monster.

What makes a vampire film

• A creature that feeds on the living. Usually on blood, sometimes on something else. The hunger is the plot.
• A look that changes with the decade. The plague bringer of Nosferatu, Lugosi's aristocrat, Lee's seducer, Matheson's epidemic and, in the 2000s, the teen romance of Twilight.
• A stand-in for something else. In these films the vampire is a seductress, a doctor's brother, a regime or a cult. The monster is rarely only a monster.

8 vampire movies to watch

Genuine: The Tragedy of a Vampire (1920)

Robert Wiene directed The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the German silent film famous for its crooked painted sets. He made Genuine right afterwards, with the same writer, Carl Mayer, the same cinematographer and the same designer, Cesar Klein. The sets are stark, angular and visibly painted, and one reviewer describes giant shadows and a laboratory skeleton with a clock for a head.

The "vampire" in the title is a "vamp", a predatory seductress who ruins the men around her, a stock figure of silent film. Critics have noted that the vampire film as a genre barely existed in 1920, so the English subtitle misleads modern viewers. The story is a dream: a painter becomes obsessed with a portrait of Genuine, a priestess who is captured, sold at a slave market and kept by a rich man, and the men around her are driven to kill. German censors passed it with a ban on viewers under 18 five days before its Berlin premiere in September 1920. The version most people see runs about 43 minutes.

Horror

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Dead Men Walk (1943)

Producers Releasing Corporation, known as PRC, was a Poverty Row studio, the nickname for the small Hollywood companies that made films quickly and cheaply. Sam Newfield directed it and George Zucco plays both brothers: Dr. Lloyd Clayton, a small town doctor, and his twin Elwyn, an occultist who comes back from the grave as a vampire.

Critics have traced the borrowing from Dracula. The vampire and the man hunting him are twins, with the doctor in the role of Van Helsing, the vampire hunter of Stoker's novel. Dwight Frye, who played Renfield, Dracula's servant, in the 1931 Dracula, plays Elwyn's servant Zolarr. Frye died in November 1943, the year the film came out. According to TCM, it has been a staple of late-night television and public domain horror compilations for decades.

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Theatre of Death (1967)

Samuel Gallu's British horror, also released as Blood Fiend, stars Christopher Lee, the Hammer horror star, as Philippe Darvas, who runs a Paris theatre that stages gruesome horror shows. Julian Glover plays a retired doctor, Charles Marquis. Young victims are being stabbed in the neck.

There is no monster in the cape. Marquis only theorises that the killer believes themself to be a vampire, which makes the vampire an idea rather than a creature. The setting borrows from the real Théâtre du Grand Guignol, which ran in Paris from 1897 to 1962 and staged lurid plays of murder and torture. Its name now describes a deliberately over-the-top style of horror. The Monthly Film Bulletin called the material routine in January 1967 and said it loses momentum after its colourful opening, and critics place it among the many British horrors that tried to cash in on Hammer's success.

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Razor Blade Smile (1998)

Jake West wrote, directed and edited this British film as his first feature. Eileen Daly plays Lilith Silver, a contract killer who was turned into a vampire in a duel 150 years earlier. To save money West shot near home: in his parents' house, at a rock formation in Tunbridge Wells and in an underground goth bar in Hampstead. Filming began in 1996, two years before release.

David Warbeck, known for The Beyond, plays the Horror Movie Man in what was his final screen role, and he died shortly after production wrapped. The film won awards for director, actress, cinematography and special effects at the first B-Movie Film Festival in 1999. Love Horror compares it to the American vampire hits Blade and From Dusk Till Dawn and describes a blend of gothic horror, comic book styling and action. In 2026 Nucleus Films released a 3-disc 4K restoration scanned from the original 16mm film rolls, with over 9 hours of extras.

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Perfect Creature (2006)

It is set in an alternative colonial New Zealand of steam-powered cities and zeppelins, where benevolent vampires oversee humanity's spiritual life until one goes rogue. A human cop partners with a vampire cop to stop a war between the two races. Director Glenn Standring said he wanted vampires to be "no longer mankind's nemesis but its spiritual saviour", and described the film as a blend of Blade Runner and Seven. It was shot in 2004 in Dunedin and Oamaru on New Zealand's South Island.

The film was sold to distributors around its Cannes screening, including 20th Century Fox for the US. The Hollywood Reporter called the Fox deal the largest ever made of a New Zealand film, and NZ On Screen describes it as the first New Zealand film picked up for distribution by a major Hollywood studio. The producer Tim Sanders also produced Whale Rider, and the effects team included artists who had worked on The Lord of the Rings.

Action/Adventure

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Strigoi (2009)

Faye Jackson, a British director, says she spent about 10 years in Romania, the homeland of her husband and producer Rey Muraru, and that her research into local beliefs sparked the film. Her starting idea was what would happen if the Ceausescus, the Communist rulers of Romania, returned as vampires. The film opens with a short, irreverent retelling of the 1989 Romanian revolution, and it is set in the village of her husband's grandfather.

Jackson says Romanians regard Stoker's Dracula as a joke and think it cheesy. For her the stronger folklore is the strigoi, the undead of Romanian belief, linked by greed. She wrote the dialogue in English and cast Romanian actors who could speak it, and she says the film was made entirely on analogue film, listed by the British Council as 35mm. It had its world premiere at Toronto After Dark in 2009. The Austin Chronicle's Marc Savlov called it as unexpected and revivifying as Let the Right One In, from 2008, and said you would have to go back to Boris Karloff in Mario Bava's Black Sabbath for a comparison.

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Aaron's Blood (2017)

Tommy Stovall wrote, directed and edited it. He says the idea began when his son told him he wanted to play a vampire. Years later, looking for an original concept, he turned it into a father and son story, and his son Trevor plays Tate, the vampire son. Single father Aaron fights to save his hemophiliac son after becoming infected with vampire blood. Hemophilia is a condition in which blood does not clot normally.

Stovall describes the film as an allegory for parents watching their children grow up and drift away. It premiered on 27 May 2016 at the International Vampire Film & Arts Festival in Transylvania and reached US theaters on 2 June 2017. Reviews were mixed to poor: The Hollywood Reporter called it a sincere but uneven effort.

Drama

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Nest of Vampires (2021)

Chris Sanders wrote and directed it, calling it his first feature, through his own company Black Coppice Films. He funded part of it through several Crowdfunder campaigns, which are online appeals for small donations. An MI5 agent hunts the killers of his wife and the kidnappers of his daughter and finds a vampiric cult involved in human trafficking and Satanic worship.

Sanders named The Ghoul, a 1975 horror film directed by Freddy Francis and starring Peter Cushing, as his favourite, citing its fog, moorland and Edwardian mansion. The film went to digital release in March 2021, first for rent from 13 March through its own site. Film Threat gave it 4.5 out of 10, praising the atmosphere and lead actors and finding the story overloaded.

Horror

Where to go next

All eight films above are on Relay. For more of the same, try these guides.

• For the other undead genre that grew from I Am Legend, see Zombie Movies.
• For horror built on local legend, see Folk Horror Movies.