The Best of... Vampire Horror!

As Halloween draws ever closer, the next stop on our Best of... journey leads us to the most fearsome and revered movie monster of them all: The Vampire. They're evil, they need to feed, and they want our blood. That's about as terrifying as it gets.

Ever since Dracula and Nosferatu first terrified audiences nearly a century ago, the vampire has arguably been the most prominent of all  movie monsters. There have been too many incarnations of the bloodsucking menaces to count (Dracula himself has been brought to cinematic life at least 170 times himself, with more surely to come), and so picking only 30 of them to represent the sub-genre as a whole was no easy task.

The vampire movies that we tend to love the most are the exciting ones, the darker ones. The ones that put a welcomed twist on an overly-familiar story, or the ones that just play it straight and give us exactly what we expect from a vampire story. Depends on our mood. Luckily for us, there are more than enough vampire movies to fit any mood, at any given time.

We love vampire flicks. I mean, one of the coolest vampires of all-time is our mascot, so that pretty much goes without saying, but we really do love them. What other movie monster can be so suave and yet so terrifyingly deadly at the same time? *Hannibal Lecter doesn't count.

• We know that to many people, certain vampire classics of the 1920's, 30's, 60's and 70's take precedent over some of the later efforts included here, but as kids of the 80's, movies like Salem's Lot, Fright Night, and The Lost Boys were our vampire classics. In that way, this list will be more subjective than most, at least for us.
  
• We purposely left many of the Hammer Vampire films (and their 60's/70's ilk) off of this list, for the sake of variety. Had we not, many of the newer and more obscure movies included here would have been discarded, and that would have been bad; for us, variety counts nearly as much as quality itself does, especially when that variety is of high quality in its own right.
  
• This list, and especially the Top 6 and the Honorable Mentions, could easily be rearranged, more so than any other list we've done so far. So take those "rankings" with a grain of salt, as many of the movies here could easily be moved up and down in position.

If you're in the mood for a truly quality Vampire Flick, any of the movies in our Top Six will do you right. The Lost Boys and Salem's Lot are probably our all-time faves, but then they all bring their own unique and terrifying vision to the bloodsucker Sub-Genre.
Below are the rest of our 30 Best Vampire Flicks, and of course, a few Honorable Mentions thrown in for good measure. Keep in mind that no "Best of" list is ever perfect, but merely a solid starting point for anyone looking to watch some great flicks.  *Most of the links go to Amazon so that you can stream or grab yourself a copy of the movies; our review of the movie (when applicable); or in the case of some of the older & more obscure titles, IMDB, because they simply aren't available to stream or purchase.