The vampire genre is nearly as old as cinema itself, with F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” scaring up audiences in 1922, followed by the countless iterations that came in its shadow. Every era and every filmmaking country has since taken up its own spins on the myth of the vampire, from Universal Studios’ “Dracula” series beginning with Tod Browning’s Bram Stoker adaptation in 1931, all the way up to Iranian-American director Ana Lily Amirpour’s indie feminist twist “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” in 2014.
While the genre has generated many a bloody classic — too many to count, in fact — IndieWire has rounded up staff favorites that also happen to represent an exhaustive cross-section of vampire homages, including Francis Ford Coppola’s controversial, romantic ode “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” in 1992, Park Chan-wook’s erotic South Korean take “Thirst,” Europe’s 1971 lesbian imagining “Daughters of Darkness,” the 2014 mockumentary “What We Do in the Shadows,” and more.
Right in time for Halloween, check out IndieWire’s picks for the top 12 vampire movies below. We promise they don’t suck.
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