Ahead of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part One, Donal O’Donoghue picks the scariest five vampire flicks ever
Is it just me or are the vampires in Twilight about as scary as Count Duckula? It’s as if the cast of Beverly Hills 90210 sprouted fangs (ooh scary!) and plastered their mugs with white powder (oooh I’m petrified now!). Then again that’s not the deal is it? We’re talking hunks here and from the time of Bram Stoker, vampires were always the ultimate forbidden fruit. You don’t need to have a degree in pop psychology to make a link between bloodsucking and you know what. But c’mon vampires should be scary too. Otherwise they just suck. Or it could be just me? Either way, here are some alternatives - vampires that will make you reach for the garlic: or the remote control (but in a good way).
For all others The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn opens in Ireland on November 18.
1. 30 Days of Night (2007)
Probably the scariest vampires this side of Transylvania are the razor-toothed, plug ugly bloodsuckers from 30 Days of Night. Adapted from a graphic novel, 30 Days is set in the remote Alaskan town of Barrow, on the edge of the Arctic Circle. When the sun goes down here it doesn’t rise again for over two weeks: thus making it the perfect picnic stop-over for a gang of marauding vampires lead by the underrated Danny Huston.
In a movie that plumps for style over anything else, the effects are eye-popping (these vampires move and feast like ferociously fast animals and speak their own gobbledy-gook language) and the tension is ratcheted up from the opening sequence. It’s a long night’s journey into day and only the hunky sheriff (played by Josh Hartnett) can save the villagers from hell.
2. Let the Right One In (2008)
The smartest vampire movie of modern times is really a love story between a bullied young boy and a lonely young girl. It just so happens that the wee lass is a vampire with an insatiable taste for blood. This lust is accommodated by her hapless and increasingly helpless minder – one of the most disturbing scenes in the film is a body being drained in the woods.
Directed by Tomas Alfredson (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), this Swedish horror poetically blends reality and oddness. It is dark, forbidding but also touching. It takes the vampire story very seriously: so serious that you even begin to believe that they just might be out there. The US remake is on the way: see this first.
3. From Dusk till Dawn (1996)
Quentin Tarantino had a field day with this comic book carve up in which a pair of murderous brothers (a tattooed George Clooney and Tarantino himself, proving that he still can’t act his way out a paper-bag) grab themselves some hostages (a bible-toting Harvey Keitel, and his daughter, Juliette Lewis) and gatecrash the sleaziest tavern in Mexico.
But what seems like just your regular rougher-than-hell joint turns out to be a hellish haven for vampires with Salma Hayek top of the heap. And when those doors are bolted, the blood-letting begins in the weirdest horror hybrid of recent years.
4. Nosferatu (1922)
OK, I know what you thinking (saying, wondering or whatever): we’re sticking in a black and white vampire just to be arty. Well Nosferatu may not be the scariest vampire in this list but it’s oddly the most believable. Have you ever really watched this piece of work by F W Murnau? Max Schreck’s vampire is not just the original of the movie species – the film was based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula – but the best. Here truly is a creature of the night, odd and eerie and unforgettable: a rat-like beast on two legs.
Less than a decade later we got Browning’s Dracula (1931) with Bela Lugosi, a vampire as scary as a rubber bat in a joke shop, in fact there is a rubber bat in that film. The great Werner Herzog remade Nosferatu in 1979 with the late Klaus Kinski in the Schreck role: a noble, stylish effort but even that pales against the original.
5. Near Dark (1987)
Long before she scooped her Best Director Oscar (The Hurt Locker), Kathryn Bigelow was showing us her potential with this off-kilter tale of modern day vampires eating up Oklahoma in a blacked-out SUV. Part western, part biker movie, part horror, Bigelow’s story is utterly preposterous but also compelling as it chronicles the tale of a love-struck Romeo who falls for a pretty young thing with bad blood connections.
The cinematography is balletic – watch those bullet holes puncture the darkness in the dramatic shoot-outs – and Lance Henriksen is picture postcard perfect as the undead. True Blood owes a debt to this minor horror gem.
• The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part One opens in Ireland on November 18 (interviews with cast in forthcoming RTÉ Guide)
