Vampires are so hot right now. Well, they have been in recent years thanks to Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight et al. I’ve read the former with little joy - I didn’t enjoy Lives of the Mayfair Witches books nor the Interview with a Vampire movie. The Twilight saga has been such a sensation that it was very hard not to see one of the movies but again - no joy for me there.

Apart from these two later-day hitches, I have been a solid fan of the vampire. They are at the sexy, beautiful end of the monster spectrum. The traditional story of Dracula has been retold in film many times and is always a good yarn.

Interestingly, the vampires never win the war. Oh they can come out on top for the battles, but these unnatural blood suckers are usually turning to ash by the end of the movie. Unlike zombies, they’re a bit selective as to whose blood they drink, and who they decide gets to “live” on as a vampire.

For those of you who aren’t aware of some of the rules of vampirism:

vampires are immortal
they thirst for human blood, though they can survive on animal blood, they don’t like it
they can bite your and drink your blood until you die, or
let you drink their blood, and then you turn into a vampire yourself
vampires burn in sunlight (which is why they have Familiars to pick up their dry cleaning)
can be killed with a wooden stake through the heart
beget similar to a pyramid scheme (kill the original vampire and all vampires he infected, and were infected in turn, will die)
like in a pyramid scheme, those who got in early have the most accumulated wealth
can transmogrify (into a bat, usually)
have some levels of telepathy and/or kenetic abilities

If you’d like to sample some good vampire cinema, I present the following list:

If you prefer bad vampire cinema, almost anything else will do.

Or, add to my list - let me know which vampire movies you’d recommend.

The natural progression for me from comics and books, was the movies. Just as soon as I was old enough to get myself to and from the cinema I was buying tickets for the horror films.

And what a time to come of age and be a fan of horror - the eighties!

I saw Friday the Thirteeth, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Gremlins et al all at the cinema as they were released. If there is a movie equivalent to book first editions, that’s how I saw these movies - with hoards of like-minded twenty-somethings in a dark theatre scaring ourselves senseless.

And truly, is there a better way to see a scary movie?

Recently, on Facebook, the gorgeous Nick Butcher posted the Rotten Tomatoes list of the top horror movies and claimed he’d seen 21 of them. I clocked in at 32 - with a lot on that list I’d love to have seen.

And some I remember I never want to see.

Like Saw and Hostel (though I have seen that one) its ilk. I enjoy that extreme gore, torture-porn type of movie that was popular in the early 2000s. I prefer more finese like we see in the fabulous Silence of the Lambs, and The Sixth Sense, and Let the Right One In. Those kind of movies where the scare gets into your bones because the horror is only a thin veil away.

And that’s why I’m still scared of the dark.

Don't fear death

Listen to them - children of the night - what music they make

Friday night fright nights

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