The Vampire Movie Century: Sink Your Teeth into These 100 Films from 1922 to 2022

Dec 20

As a girl named Renfield, I have a personal stake (vampire pun fully intended) in anything and everything Dracula-related. The name has been in my family for a long time, and rather than run from its associations with a strait-jacketed, bird-and-bug-eating Bram Stoker character, I’ve learned to embrace them. You might even say I’ve cultivated a morbid interest in the subject of vampires.

In Hollywood, even as I write this, they’re readying a Renfield movie starring Nicholas Hoult as the title character and none other than Nicolas Cage as Dracula. Cage already has one vampire deep cut in his filmography; he previously donned store-bought fangs for the 1988 comedy Vampire’s Kiss.

Before anyone goes and proclaims 2022 the Year of Renfield, however, I should point out that there’s something else special about this year, vis-à-vis vampires. No, I’m not talking about the 30th anniversary of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, or the 25th anniversary of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series. Those two titles are comparatively young.

This year, I’ve been following along closely with a /Film series of articles analyzing 100 vampire movies from 1922 to 2022. 1922, of course, is the year that the oldest Dracula movie still in existence, F.W. Murnau’s creepy silent adaptation, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, bowed in Germany (in the Berlin Zoological Garden, of all places).

To commemorate the historic 100th anniversary of Nosferatu, I’m collecting every “Year of the Vampire” movie that /Film has covered into a running list, to be updated regularly. I’ve heard through the grapevine that the site will be doing a round-up of the whole series at the end of the year, but in the meantime, this is your reference guide, with outbound links, to the Vampire Movie Century.

/Film’s Year of the Vampire

Joshua Meyer, the writer who kicked off /Film’s Year of the Vampire series in January (and who was kind enough to follow me back on Twitter), tweeted that it began as a pitch that “evolved into something that will platform the perspectives of many different writers.” Crucially, those writers (names included below) are human beings, not bloodsuckers, which makes it easier for recovering fanggirls like yours truly to swallow their insights.

Seriously, I’ve watched way too many Buffy reruns, and that Vulture interview with Joss Whedon on MLK Day only served to reopen old wounds. Not for nothing, but I’ve also read every one of these articles once or twice—and seen every one of these movies so far. As the list gathers new additions, I’ll make it a point to watch any films I haven’t seen.

Meyer has been threading together link tweets with quotes and some notes of his own, but if you just want to scan the list of vampire movies and make a quick jump to one that interests you, you can do that here. I’ll keep the list refreshed as new entries post, bringing us closer and closer to the full one hundred films.

The first 50 (in alphabetical order):

1. 30 Days of Night (2007) - Valerie Ettenhofer

2. The Addiction (1995) - Joshua Meyer

3. Blade (1998) - Joshua Meyer

4. Bliss (2019) - Lex Briscuso

5. Blood Red Sky (2021) - Sarah Milner

6. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) - Sandy Schaefer

7. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) - Jamie Gerber

8. Byzantium (2012) - Caroline Madden

9. Cronos (1993) - Joshua Meyer

10. Daughters of Darkness (1971) - BJ Colangelo

11. Daybreakers (2009) - Ryan Scott