Year Of The Vampire: 20 More 20th-Century Films To Quench Your Thirst For Blood

(Welcome to Year of the Vampire, a series examining the greatest, strangest, and sometimes overlooked vampire movies of all time in honor of "Nosferatu," which turns 100 this year.)

Vampires may be fundamentally incapable of self-reflection (seeing as how they don't show up in mirrors and all), but that doesn't mean we can't reflect on them. And so we have, all throughout 2022. The Year of the Vampire is almost over now, and these last 11 months have been an educational, blood-spattered ride through one of film history's oldest genres.

With the first 50 articles in this series, we spotlit individual vampire movies, beginning with F.W. Murnau's original "Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror" and ending with Werner Herzog's 1979 remake "Nosferatu the Vampyre." However, if you've been following along at all, you might know we've jumped around in time since January and analyzed over two dozen 20th-century vampire films.

This list adds to that with 20 more titles, from our catacomb to yours, thereby closing out the 20th-century portion of our official Year of the Vampire coverage. (We'll have another list of additional 21st-century films out next month.)

Before we dive into further recommendations, here's the full alphabetical list of 20th-century vampire movies we've put under the microscope so far.

Before dubbing and subtitles became the go-to practice for marketing Hollywood films to foreign countries, studios like Universal would shoot multiple versions of the same movie on the same sets with different actors. That's what happened with "Drácula," which had Carlos Villarías and a Spanish-speaking cast filming at night on the set where Bela Lugosi and an English-speaking cast had shot scenes during the day. They were the true vampires. Director George Melford consulted the footage Tod Browning was coming up with for the Lugosi version and relied on an interpreter to help translate for him as he had Villarías play "Conde Drácula."

The result was a film that some say is superior to the better-known English version, with more room to breathe, in terms of both low-cut negligees and a 29-minute longer runtime. It's in the National Film Registry now, but the Spanish edition of "Drácula" was forgotten for several decades, and it's still not streaming anywhere, though you can find it as a bonus feature on the DVD of Browning's "Dracula" and in the "Dracula: Complete Legacy Collection" Blu-ray set.

The 1940s were a fallow period for vampire films, as the real-life horrors of war eclipsed the make-believe horrors of movie monsters. Audiences knew Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster and the Mummy, but in "Isle of the Dead" — which hit theaters just five days after World War II ended — he played a Balkan War general under the grips of superstition about the vorvolaka, a kind of Greek vampire that "drains people of their strength and vitality until they die."

Quarantined on an island where a breakout of septicemic plague has occurred, the general and other characters face the same fears about shaking hands and gathering in groups that people living through the pandemic now have faced. At one point, we see them scrubbing up in an actual hand-washing montage. Karloff spouts the apocalyptic quote, "The horseman on the pale horse is Pestilence. He follows the wars."

Citing its premature burial scene as one that "never fails to scare" him, Martin Scorsese named "Isle of the Dead" his second favorite horror movie of all time. It may have helped inspire his own island-set psychological thriller, "Shutter Island."

A reindeer, you say? In a vampire movie? In this economy? But that's the beauty of it: "The White Reindeer" had already thought of the idea 70 years ago. We've seen Dracula transform into all manner of creatures, from wolves to bats to rats, so what's to stop a Finnish woman from sprouting vampire fangs and morphing into a reindeer? Absolutely nothing.

Keep in mind, Dracula often serves as a bloodsucking bigamist with three wives in his crypt. Newlywed Pirita (Mirjami Kuosmanen) would be happy just to have her one husband home with her, and she's willing to sacrifice a living thing to do it. Once upon a time, the Cannes Film Festival had an award called "Best Fairy Tale Film," and "The White Reindeer" won it in 1953, though it's sometimes classified now as an early work of folk horror. It was shown in the documentary "Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror," and we also featured it this year as one of the international titles in our own folk horror world tour.

The English version of "Black Sunday" opens with talk of "those monstrous beings thirsty for human blood, to whom tradition has given the name of vampires." However, much like "The White Reindeer," the film throws both vampire and witch ingredients into the same cauldron, so that you're just as likely to see Asa Vajda (Barbara Steele) being burned at the stake as repelled by a cross.

In the opening minutes, Asa also has an iron-maiden-like Mask of Satan hammered into her face (the film's Italian title translates as "Mask of the Demon"), but 200 years later, she's ready to rise from her coffin and take her revenge. Giallo filmmaker Mario Bava, who later helmed "Planet of the Vampires," made his official directorial debut with this black-and-white shocker, which makes a strong impression with its camerawork as it takes the viewer down into a cobwebbed tomb and gives a full 360-degree tour of it.

"Why should a dead man be interested in entertaining guests?" asks the original trailer for "Dracula: Prince of Darkness." Answer: because reports of his death by sunlight in Hammer's "Horror of Dracula" were greatly exaggerated. In "Dracula: Prince of Darkness," Christopher Lee returned to the title role for the first time, though he doesn't speak a single word of dialogue before they put him back on ice.

Forget Jonathan Harker; in this movie, it's a whole adult family of four that a rude, knife-wielding coachman abandons in the Carpathian Mountains. There's already a table waiting for them at Dracula's castle, and the only one capable of reading the tea leaves and reacting with appropriate fright is vampire-to-be Helen Kent, played by "Village of the Damned" star Barbara Shelley.

Considering that "Dracula: Prince of Darkness" came out over 50 years ago, it's somewhat shocking to see the Count's manservant hang a bloke upside down and bleed him out like drip coffee over a powdered vampire. "Let the Right One In" pulled a similar trick, while Gary Oldman adopted Lee's chest-slicing fingernail move. Who knew a vampire could be drowned in running water?

"Dracula Has Risen from the Grave" shows further overlap between Hammer Horror and early British folk horror, not only with Christopher Lee, who would play Lord Summerisle in "The Wicker Man," but in the presence of Barry Andrews, who would show up again soon in "Blood on Satan's Claw." His character's open atheism in this film adds a new wrinkle to the mythos, leaving him beholden to blind luck in lieu of religious weapons against vampirism like prayer.

Dracula still jumps straight out the window at the sight of a cross, but wooden stakes offer no guarantees, and those with faith are as vulnerable as those without it, as we see with the priest he puts in his thrall. Women back away from Drac yet eventually submit to his will, offering up their bosoms and necks to him in vampire POV shots. Buxom bar wenches and nasty, snake-like bites also characterize Lee's third outing as the red-eyed Count, which picks up right where "Dracula: Prince of Darkness" left off.

Midway through the vampire movie century, another Richard Matheson teleplay based on a then-unpublished Jeff Rice novel about a bloodsucker on the loose in Las Vegas became the most-watched TV movie ever. Intrepid reporter Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) initially thinks the city has a serial killer on its hands. The opening credits of "The Night Stalker" play out from the POV of a victim being autopsied, but it turns out this victim and others have been drained of blood.

This is the perfect story for an "amateur bloodhound" and night editor like Kolchak. If it bleeds, it leads, and if it bites at night, it's probably a vampire (one who might go on the rampage and raid the hospital fridge for blood, throwing subtlety out the window with a hapless orderly). "The Night Stalker" and its follow-up series "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" inspired "The X-Files," which is why creator Chris Carter cast McGavin as the father of the X-Files, Arthur Dales. Fifty years later, this movie still rings true in its depiction of a police bureaucracy that would rather suppress the news than see it reported truthfully.

The seven titular vampires have poor complexions, and apart from Hsi Ching (David Chiang), the seven brothers who fight them don't have very distinguishable personalities besides the weapons they're assigned. But the final entry in Hammer Horror's Dracula series, "The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires," is a Shaw Brothers co-production that earns points for attempting cross-cultural relations with Hong Kong—where it was made entirely on location.

This was Peter Cushing's last hurrah as Van Helsing. Three years later, Cushing would play Grand Moff Tarkin in the original "Star Wars" movie. The way Van Helsing's son enjoys another Eurocentric interracial romance while Ching and Vanessa Buren (Julie Ege) are punished for theirs betrays an undeniable double standard in "The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires" (which is nothing if not a product of its time). Hong Kong ultimately fared better with its own vampire/kung fu mashup, "Mr. Vampire."

The New York indie film scene in the mid-1990s was a veritable vampire catacomb, yielding "Nadja," "The Addiction," and the next entry on this list in rapid succession. Written and directed by Michael Almereyda, "Nadja" is the black-and-white bridge between "Dracula's Daughter" and "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night." The title character, played by Elina Löwensohn ("Schindler's List"), actually is Dracula's daughter, and she's got a sweet tooth for the blood of shark embryos. Jared Harris plays her vampire brother and Peter Fonda plays a long-haired, bicycle-riding Dr. Van Helsing. Where else are you going to see that?

"Nadja" costars Suzy Amis, Martin Donovan, and Galaxy Craze, but you won't always see their faces clearly because the movie makes heavy use of pixelated scenes, shot on a toy camcorder, whenever Löwensohn's character uses her vampire powers. Sitting through that kind of arthouse affectation might test the patience of some viewers, but if you're in the mood for something like early David Lynch, he executive produced "Nadja" and makes a cameo in it as a morgue receptionist.

B-movie fans might dig it, but it's hard to root for the vampire hunters in "John Carpenter's Vampires." Jack Crow (James Woods) wields a crossbow and an attitude as he leads his squad into a nest while his Baldwin-brother lieutenant winches bloodsucking "goons" into the sunlight. The Catholic Church sponsors them, but you wouldn't know it from the way they act: whoring it up in a motel like it's the Titty Twister, bribing a lawman, jacking Frank Darabont's civilian car at gunpoint, smacking around Sheryl Lee's character and even tying her naked to a bed (did they not see "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me?" Give the woman a break), beating up and torturing a well-meaning priest, and just generally being aggressive, misogynistic, and homophobic.

After hearing their laundry list of crimes against humanity, you'd think they were the vampires, but no, that's the inverse-exorcised goth Valek ("Cobra Kai" baddie Thomas Ian Griffith). The blues-guitar sounds in this vampire Western belong to Carpenter's Texas Toad Lickers.