did a Mario Bava post earlier in the year, and you can understand what I say about Black Sabbath there. I too feel sorta tempted to admit a picture which no longer exists, London After Midnight, because stills of Lon Chaney clearly argue that he came up with the scariest-looking vampire (and movie monster) ever, something even nastier than the original Nosferatu. But as I said, the film was lost, and all we have are those butt-kicking photos.And now that that's all out of the way, on to the list.1. Nosferatu, 1922.Starting with a charge here.the great F.W. Murnau gives us his unauthorized take on the Dracula story, and comes up with something that's not merely superior to every other vampire film ever made, but besides its source material.simply put it's a truly great picture by a real master, not merely a genre classic. Even Werner Herzog's remake, which makes the name after on, doesn't match it, and Herzog is no slouch. Yeah, the 1922 version is pretty crude technically-it looks like it was made ten days earlier, and the nocturnal scenes feature some of the brightest daylight this position of Plan 9 from Outer Space. But it actually makes no dispute at all.in fact, this is one of those instances where the shitty movie quality just renders the film more nightmarish and otherworldly. Yep, reality doesn't seem like that. But Max Shreck's hypodermic teeth and vulture claws seem quite of a man with overexposure, overcranking, and nights where the sun's blazing like something out of Krazy Kat. Much of the film's power derives from Shreck's performance and makeup, but so what.Schreck is the worst thing you can see in any surviving horror movie, pace once again to Lon Chaney's bloodsucker. But the visuals in Nosferatu are very scary across the board.the technology might be archaic and the budget insufficient, but Murnau sure as sin came up with some extremely choice imagery. I dare the constitution was his idea (if I'm mistaken, let me know), the use of really stark shadows is brilliant, the matter where Max comes up out of the coffin like a switchblade is perhaps the one most iconic bit of concern in the whole of horror cinema, and the low-angle work with Shreck teetering the floor of the transport is right up there too. I also enjoy the material with the processions of coffins and the rats, which seem like something decent out of Breughel.you actually get this tremendous sense of the vampire'svile lethality, how he's around the equivalent of a medieval plague. The sole station where the film really falls down is the climax, even though it depicts, for the start time, the impression that vampires are actually destroyed by sunlight.having the girlallowing him to drain her and thus keeping her at her bedside just seems languid and undramatic. But Nosferatu would've topped this name on the base of the first 20 minutes alone.Interesting side-note.the film almost wound up as non-existant as London After Midnight. Murnau hadn't secured the rights from the Stoker estate; there had been a lame effort to hide the fact-shifting the locations, changing Dracula's name to Graf Orlock and so on. But Stoker's widow wasn't fooled, and she went afterwards the movie hammer and tongs, getting a court put to demolish all the prints, most of which were indeed, duly done away with. Holy shit. But some copies survived, thank God, and the world's a best place. I see that around 90 percent of all the movies ever made have been lost, holy shit again.2. Dracula, 1931Hate to be a Dracula adaptation with another Dracula adaptation, but there's actually no assistance for it; after Nosferatu the twenties just weren't very rich in vampire movies. Even London After Midnight turned out to be about fake vampires, I believe; certainly, when its director, Tod Browning, remade it in the 1930s as Set of the Vampire, that had a preposterous Scooby-Doo ending which negated a lot of the remarkable vampire doings earlier on. Among other things, there was a bit where someone sees Carroll Borland's Luna flapping around outside a window on giant white mothlike wings.even though it took Browning and Co. two weeks to take this rather short sequence, because the effects kept breaking down, in the film her lepidopteran escapade flight turns out to have been an elaborate ploy to shoot the bad guys. Just goes to indicate that Aristotle was correct when he said you're best off with outright impossibilities than unlikely possibilities.Luckily though, Browning gave us a thoroughly supernatural vampire classic in 1931; Dracula was an adaption of a stage adaptation that had already made Bela Lugosi famous, and Browning quite wisely brought Bela out to Universal to reprise his office on celluloid. The Hungarian was a really weird commodity, but that worked very often to his advantage; his Dracula couldn't be more different from Max Shreck's-where Graf Orlock is a purely ghoulish figure, Bela's Drac is a bizarre Euro smoothie. Of course, neither conception is really much like like Stoker's Count, who was a backwoods Turk-butchering barbarian with hair on his palms, pretty savage.At any rate, rather like the novel, and about other adaptations of Dracula, Browning's version is at its best in the opening scenes, which feature wonderful matte-paintings and cavernous extremely atmospheric sets. Dwight Frye is quite appropriately twitchy and wide-eyed as English real-estate agent Renfield, who's been conflated with Jonathan Harker. There's a swift succession of fabulous bits,including Dracula going through a giant spider-web on the steps and not disturbing it, and the scene where he declares he doesn't drink.blood. We get around fine glimpses spider-infested vaults beneath the castle, and Bela, with his hovering pale masklike face, is actually pretty stone creepy. It's all quite cinematic, and nearly on a par with the form of Browning's contemporary and competitor James Whale; but when the narrative shifts to England, everything gets very stiff and stagebound. Moreover, characters start telling us some things that we'd rather see, and the climax, an offstage grunt as Bela gets staked, is even feebler than the end of Nosferatu. It didn't have to be like that, neither.this was pre-code, dammit, and Browning would prove that he could put some really psycho shit on screen with his masterpiece Freaks, although he did get in some inconvenience for it. Fact is, there's a semi-remake of Dracula that has some genuine onscreen gruesomeness and it got out with it, namely Karl Freund's The Mummy, which is probably, along with Island of Lost Souls, the scariest of the thirties horror flicks. But beyond a doubt, Browning chickened out at the end of Dracula.Still, the screen time Lugosi gets in the latter parts is still choice, even if he isn't trotted out sufficiently; Edward Van Sloane is ok as Van Helsing, and Dwight Frye as a now-vampirized spider-connoisseur Renfield is only a hoot. But it only has to be said: the film owes it classic status primarily to Lugosi's performance and the first 20 minutes. And if you need to see Browning's best work, it's Freaks.3.Black Sunday, 1960Long gap after Dracula, I'm afraid. There's some good thirties and forties bloodsucking that I've rewatched recently, but I didn't come in bed with any of it.maybe it's my fault. Dracula's Daughter is superior to lots of Dracula, and the lesbian hijinks are pretty startling, but the film doesn't always advance to the heights; Son of Dracula is substantial but really often a b-movie; oddly enough, a lot of the most memorable vampire carryings-on in the General canon are in the vastly underrated Abbott and Costello meets Frankenstein, which is really funny, frequently quite scary, but not entirely a vampire film. As for the Hammer films, I think, for the about part, that they're just not that great. The vaunted production values are not really impressive (check out any of the Roger Corman Poe movies to see some real love for your buck), and the Hammer Dracula films are characterized by a decided lack of Dracula. The force was hot stuff back in the fifties, but it's pretty tame now, and primarily you're left with honest British character actors making do in a crowd of really tiny sets. To see something that blows Hammer's product absolutely away, check out Black Sunday if you haven't already.True, it's fifty years old, but it's still pretty rabid. It runs out of gas at around the two-thirds mark, but until then it's been really very scary indeed-I'd go so far as to say it's the scariest movie made up until that point. The violence hasn't mellowed.the film would get an r-rating today, just for the opening sequence where the cloak of the Demon is pounded onto Barbara Steele's face with a big middle-ages Moldavian mallet. The photography is extremely impressive.you'd get to go backwards to Bride of Frankenstein to get a horror movie that looked this good. I think someone could indicate that it's not actually a vampire movie, that it's really a satanist incestuous witch movie.but the Satanist incestuous witches are living-dead throat-opening bloodsuckers who dread the sweep and lift up impaled on stakes. The guys at Hammer were just screwing around, and I actually do like all the cleavage they put on the screen, but Mario Bava's masterpiece is the actual deal.4.Nosferatu the Vampyre, 1979Yet another adaptation of Dracula, dammit.sorry about this. Maybe I should only do a Dracula top ten and have done with it. There certainly are a lot of versions out there, and that way I could admit the Louis Jourdan version. I could get both Nosferatus, and the Tod Browning version, and the Spanish-language adaptation of the Tod Browning version, and Revulsion of Dracula, and the Spanish Christopher lee version, and the Jack Palance TV movie, and.I'll break it some thought.No matter what, I actually couldn't out give the Herzog remake of Nosferatu. It's not as sound as Murnau's movie, but it has a lot of excellences of its own. Klaus Kinski was a great actor, and he brings a whole lot to the use of Graf Orlock.among other things, he communicates terrible sadness and pain.he actually looks like he's suffering, although he's extremely terrifying too, in an intensely vermin-like ratty way.he really looks as though he's spent a really long sentence in deep damp darkness. The constitution is essentially a flip on the original, but the ghastly color is a plus, and the teeth, which seem really specialized for drawing blood, are really an improvement.The titles tell you right off that you're in for something remarkable. They're superimposed over a tableau of real-life mummies, from that wacky museum down in Gaunajuato, Mexico. They're profoundly distorted and pathetic, each in a very different way.you get this horrible realization that you're looking at your own future, although you see that you're also release to shrivel up in your idiosyncratic way. Most horror movies wouldn't go anywhere about this, and whenever i had to concoct disinguishing characteristics for my zombies in The Dead, I ever thinking around the title sequence from this movie.The movie might not appeal to an audience brought up on Hollywood close-ups and promiscuous editing, but I wish long takes and long shots, and this film has a lot of them.or rather, doesn't. Herzog's early trend was childlike in the extreme.he'd settle on a stroke that he considered optimal, and he'd stick with it.like a master. Some might consider this boring; frankly, I've had plenty of Michael Bay and his ilk, and the finish time I went on a Herzog kick,I found his confidence an incredible relief. Nosferatu's pace is so slow, but only about every scene packs a cumulative punch. The scary rotting locations are really well chosen; decrepit oldEurope has never looked danker or shittier. There's some material with shadows that's as chill as anything in the original; when I first saw the movie, one particular vampiric entrance had the audience applauding. The Breughelish rat-plague scenes are yet more telling than in Murnau's film.the accession of a lot of burghers having one last banquet amid all the thickening horror, with rodents crawling around under the long tables, is especially memorable. I could've done without the downer ending,although it's an Amusing twist to depict Van Helsing as a rationalist know-nothing who accidentally unleashes the plague on the ease of Europe after Count Orlock is destroyed. All in all, it's a remake that does indeed make a cd to its inspiration, and then some. 5.Lifeforce, 1985Boy, I bet there are leaving to be some howls about this choice, but what the Hell, this is my own personal top ten list. And I really wish the imperially stackedMathilda May, who's onscreen and starkers far longer than any Hammer babe in any Hammer flick.But the movie's got some other things loss for it as well. It's based on Colin Wilson's novel The Space Vampires, which really did a farily creditable job on trying to update the whole vampire mythos with science fiction; I choose the classical approach,screw the whole Twilight thing, yucch), but I managed to get into Wilson's take on the material. For one thing, it brought a whole cluster of reach to the subject matter, and that expression of the word is preserved nicely in Lifeforce. The film has a comet entering the solar system.there seems to be a spaceship embedded in its core, and the European Space Agency sends a squad out to investigate. The astronauts get into the alien craft, which turns out to be good of dried up batlike apparently dead aliens.there are likewise several human bodies, which the astronauts appropriate. On the way home, however, shades of the ill-fated voyage of the Demeter, the crowd starts getting knocked off, and when the ship lands, there's just one guy alive, and he doesn't know what's happened.The picture gets pretty balls-out crazy after that, the world's nuttiest Quatermass film, sort of like Prince of Shadow with a much bigger budget and better special effects. And Mathilda May.but I digress. Turns out Mathilda is a space vampire who's been to earth countless times, and now she's back, walking around completely naked and leaving dried-out husks who wake up, raise hell for a while, and burst up if they don't constant infusions of human life-force, which gets sucked out of them by giant glowing collection-balls and brought back to the grave where Mathilda sets up shop. The film is frequently incoherent, but it moves right on with huge does of nakedness and very wierd gross-outs. Frank Finlay, who played Van Helsing in the BBC Dracula, is on pass as a space-age VH who gets vampirized.just afterwards the protagonist shoots him, Frank grins sweatily, says "Here I go!" and split into flame as all the life-force he's collected gets sucked out of him. Ultimately, London gets completely overrun with lifeforce-zombies, and it's the nearest thing to The Dead that's always been put on screen.the scenes of mass hysteria, destruction, brain-blowing out, and giant lighting collection balls rolling through the subways is really pretty impressive, exactly the kind of revelation that was needed at the end of Quatermass and the Pit, which is, admittedly,a much better movie. But Lifeforce is a fast, sexy, spectacular gas, and I actually enjoy it. Sue me.