The 9 Best Vampire Movies of the 1980s, Ranked

Let's get something out of the way immediately.

This isn't really a traditional vampire movie.

But have you seen Amanda Donohoe's Lady Sylvia Marsh?

The enormous fangs. The supernatural seduction. The biting. The apparent immortality. The tendency to treat unsuspecting humans as potential meals.

We're allowing it.

Ken Russell's The Lair of the White Worm is what happens when British folk horror, Bram Stoker, vampire imagery, ancient snake worship and a particularly strange sense of humour are thrown into a blender.

Then Hugh Grant and Peter Capaldi are dropped into the middle of it.

The result is completely bonkers.

And that's exactly why it's here.

There are better vampire films from the decade, but very few that leave you wondering quite so frequently what on earth you're watching.

Amanda Donohoe commits completely to Lady Sylvia, creating one of the most memorable and gloriously excessive villains on this entire list.

It's weird.

It's provocative.

It's extremely British.

And it couldn't have come from any decade other than the 1980s.

Why it's #9: Barely a vampire film, undeniably brilliant fun and far too strange to leave out.

Read our full retrospective: The Lair of the White Worm (1988)

Imagine discovering you're a vampire.

Now imagine your biggest concerns aren't eternal damnation or an uncontrollable desire to murder people.

You're mostly worried about school and girls.

Welcome to My Best Friend Is a Vampire.

Robert Sean Leonard plays Jeremy Capello, an awkward teenager whose already complicated adolescent life gets considerably more difficult when he wakes up with a couple of suspicious marks on his neck.

Fortunately, René Auberjonois turns up as Modoc, essentially the world's most reassuring vampire guidance counsellor.

That's the charm of this movie.

Vampirism isn't treated as evil.

It's treated almost like another awkward stage of growing up.

Meanwhile David Warner's wonderfully enthusiastic vampire hunter manages to become convinced Jeremy's completely human best friend is the actual bloodsucker.

It isn't scary.

It isn't trying to be.

It's simply a warm, silly and enormously likeable supernatural teen comedy.

Why it's #8: One of the decade's forgotten VHS-era gems and probably the friendliest vampire movie on this list.

Read our full retrospective: My Best Friend Is a Vampire (1987)

And now things get considerably stranger.

Nicolas Cage plays New York literary agent Peter Loew, a man who becomes convinced he's turning into a vampire after an encounter with a mysterious woman.

Whether he actually is becoming one isn't really the point.

Watching Nicolas Cage believe he's becoming one absolutely is.

Vampire's Kiss contains a performance so spectacularly committed that describing it as "over the top" doesn't really do it justice.

The eyes.

The voice.

The movements.

The alphabet scene.

The cockroach.

The increasingly deranged belief that he has joined the undead.

It's Nicolas Cage operating on a frequency apparently unavailable to other human beings.

But beneath the madness is a surprisingly dark film about loneliness, misogyny and a man's complete psychological collapse.

It's uncomfortable.

It's hilarious.

Sometimes it's both simultaneously.

And more than three decades later, people are still sharing moments from Cage's performance without even realising which movie they came from.

Why it's #7: One of the most completely unhinged performances in 1980s cinema. Once you've seen it, forgetting it isn't really an option.

Read our full retrospective: Vampire's Kiss (1988)

Before Ace Ventura.

Before The Mask.

Before Dumb and Dumber.

There was Jim Carrey being pursued by a centuries-old vampire desperate for virgin blood.

Once Bitten is pure mid-80s teen comedy nonsense, and we mean that affectionately.

Lauren Hutton plays the Countess, an ageing vampire who needs the blood of a virgin to maintain her youth.

Unfortunately for Mark Kendall, played by a very young Jim Carrey, he happens to fit the job description.

What follows isn't remotely interested in traditional vampire horror.

This is supernatural sex comedy territory.

And Carrey already shows flashes of the physical comedy that would eventually turn him into one of the biggest movie stars of the 1990s.

Is it sophisticated?

Absolutely not.

Does it scream 1985 from practically every frame?

Absolutely.

That's considerably more important around here.

Why it's #6: Jim Carrey, Lauren Hutton and enough concentrated 1980s energy to power a small town.

Read our full retrospective: Once Bitten (1985)

"Wolfman's got nards!"

There was absolutely no chance The Monster Squad wasn't making this list.

Technically Dracula shares the movie with Frankenstein's Monster, the Wolfman, the Mummy and the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

But make no mistake.

Duncan Regehr's Dracula is running the show.

And he's fantastic.

Rather than parodying the classic Universal monsters, The Monster Squad treats them with genuine affection while dropping them into an 80s kids adventure.

The result feels like The Goonies collided with the golden age of monster movies.

It was hardly a huge success when originally released.

Then VHS happened.

A generation discovered it at home, and The Monster Squad gradually became the cult favourite it always deserved to be.

For plenty of 80s kids, this was their introduction to Dracula.

That's enough to earn it a place halfway up our list.

Why it's #5: One of the great 80s cult movies, with a Dracula who genuinely feels dangerous.

Read our full retrospective: The Monster Squad (1987)

Now we're getting serious.

Tony Scott's The Hunger doesn't look like anything else on this list.

Catherine Deneuve.

David Bowie.

Susan Sarandon.

Bauhaus performing "Bela Lugosi's Dead" in the opening minutes.

You know immediately you're somewhere different.

This is vampirism as beauty, desire, decadence and decay.

Deneuve's Miriam Blaylock has lived for centuries, taking lovers and promising them eternal life.

There's just one problem.

The promise isn't quite what it appears to be.

Bowie's rapidly ageing John gives the film some of its most haunting imagery, while Scott shoots the whole thing with the kind of visual confidence that would later define films such as Top Gun.

It's elegant.

It's erotic.

It's cold.

And it remains one of the most visually distinctive vampire films ever made.

Why it's #4: The coolest art-house vampire movie of the decade, and David Bowie was born to inhabit this world.

Read our full retrospective: The Hunger (1983)

If The Lost Boys made vampires cool, Near Dark made them dangerous.

Kathryn Bigelow's vampire western strips away much of the traditional mythology.

Forget castles.

Forget capes.

Forget aristocratic counts.

These vampires drift across America's back roads in stolen vehicles, hiding from daylight and leaving devastation behind them.

They're less like supernatural nobility and more like an outlaw gang that happens to drink blood.

And then there's Bill Paxton.

His Severen is funny, charismatic and absolutely terrifying.

The bar sequence alone would earn Near Dark a place somewhere on this list.

But what makes the film special is its atmosphere.

It's grimy.

Romantic.

Violent.

Melancholic.

And completely unlike the more polished vampire films surrounding it in the late 1980s.

It wasn't a major hit when released.

Time has been considerably kinder.

Today, Near Dark is rightly regarded as one of the decade's essential horror films.

Why it's #3: A brutal vampire western with atmosphere to spare and one of Bill Paxton's greatest performances.

Read our full retrospective: Near Dark (1987)

Imagine looking through your bedroom window and realising the charming new neighbour next door is a vampire.

Nobody believes you.

What do you do?

If you're Charley Brewster, you call Peter Vincent.

Tom Holland's Fright Night understands exactly why vampire movies are fun.

It respects the old mythology while dragging it enthusiastically into suburban 1985.

Chris Sarandon is superb as Jerry Dandrige, somehow managing to be charming, seductive and genuinely threatening without ever turning the character into a joke.

Roddy McDowall is even better as Peter Vincent, the washed-up television horror host who discovers the monsters he spent his career pretending to fight are suddenly very real.

The effects are fantastic.

The comedy works.

The horror works.

And unlike many horror comedies, neither side undermines the other.

Nearly every element of Fright Night still works today.

Which made putting it at number two extremely difficult.

Why it's #2: Funny, scary, charming and endlessly rewatchable. One of the most perfectly balanced horror comedies of the entire decade.

Read our full retrospective: Fright Night (1985)

Was it ever really going to be anything else?

There are vampire movies from the 1980s.

And then there's The Lost Boys.

Joel Schumacher's film didn't simply update vampires for a new generation.

It made them cool.

Kiefer Sutherland's David and his gang didn't live in castles or sleep beneath crumbling European estates.

They rode motorcycles.

They hung from railway bridges.

They prowled the Santa Cruz boardwalk.

They had enormous hair.

And they looked like joining them might actually be worth the whole drinking-blood-and-never-seeing-daylight problem.

Then you've got Jason Patric.

Corey Haim.

Corey Feldman.

Dianne Wiest.

Edward Herrmann.

Jami Gertz.

Barnard Hughes.

The Frog brothers.

Tim Cappello aggressively playing a saxophone.

And a soundtrack containing INXS, Echo & the Bunnymen and "Cry Little Sister".

You couldn't make this movie more 1987 if you tried.

But underneath all that style is a genuinely good vampire story.

Michael's transformation gives the film its danger.

Sam and the Frog brothers provide the comedy.

David gives it one of the decade's great charismatic villains.

And Santa Carla becomes a character in its own right — sun-drenched and inviting during the day, dangerous once darkness arrives.

Plenty of vampire movies are better known.

Some are scarier.

Some are more sophisticated.

But if somebody asked us to choose one vampire movie that represents the 1980s, there isn't really a debate.

It's The Lost Boys.

Why it's #1: Because no other vampire movie captured the attitude, music, fashion and rebellious energy of the 1980s quite like this one.

Read our full retrospective: The Lost Boys (1987)

That's the remarkable thing about looking back at these nine films together.

They're all about vampires.

Yet they're almost nothing alike.

The Hunger gave us beautiful, decadent immortals.

Near Dark turned them into nomadic killers.

Fright Night put one next door.

Once Bitten turned vampirism into a teenage sex comedy.

My Best Friend Is a Vampire made it a coming-of-age problem.

Vampire's Kiss wasn't even sure whether its vampire existed.

The Monster Squad resurrected Dracula.

Ken Russell gave us a snake-vampire-whatever-the-hell-Lady-Sylvia-is.

And The Lost Boys gave the vampire a leather jacket, a motorcycle and one of the greatest soundtracks of the decade.

That's why 80s vampire cinema remains so much fun to revisit.

There wasn't one version of the vampire.

There were dozens.

Filmmakers took a monster that had already existed on screen for generations and asked what else they could possibly do with it.

The answer, apparently, was just about anything.

And forty years later, we're still watching.

Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die.

Yeah.

The 80s really did have the best vampires.