DIRECTED BY: Chan-wook Park
FEATURING: Kang-ho Song, Ok-vin Kim, Hae-sook Kim
PLOT: A priest becomes a vampire after he receives a blood transfusion during an
experimental treatment to find a cure for a deadly virus; after his transformation he becomes erotically obsessed with a young woman who lives as a virtual slave to the family that adopted her.
WHY [...]
DIRECTED BY: Rod Hardy
FEATURING: Chantal Contouri, Shirley Cameron, Max Phipps, Henry Silva, Rod Mullinar
PLOT: A direct descendant of Elizabeth Bathory is kidnapped by vampires who want
to make her one of their own.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: While Thirst has an offbeat plot for a vampire movie, it doesn’t go that extra [...]
DIRECTED BY: Tobe Hooper
FEATURING: Mathilda May, Steve Railsback, Peter Firth
PLOT: A space shuttle investigating Halley’s comet discovers a spaceship containing
three suspended, nude human bodies; returned to Earth, the bodies come alive and begin vampirically sucking the life force out of humans.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Lifeforce is a grandly cheesy and frequently nonsensical mishmash [...]
AKA Bram Stoker’s Dracula
DIRECTED BY: Francis Ford Coppola
FEATURING: Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu Reeves, Tom Waits
PLOT: Vlad Dracula, a defender of Christendom against invading Muslims, curses God
and becomes undead when his beloved bride throws herself from the castle walls due to false reports of his death sent by Turkish spies; centuries later, he [...]
“You been exploding frogs again?”–Ruth Dove
DIRECTED BY: Philip Ridley
FEATURING: Jeremy Cooper, Viggo Mortensen, Lindsay Duncan
PLOT: Over-imaginative young Seth, growing up in post-World War II rural USA, comes to believe that his widowed neighbor is actually a vampire. After his father dies in unexpected fashion, the older brother he adores returns from his military tour of the Pacific. [...]
Guest review by Alfred Eaker
Tod Browning’s Dracula is often unfairly compared to Murnau’s unauthorized Nosferatu, and it is an unfair comparison because the two are very different films, which merely happen to share the same literary inspiration. (Neither are mere adaptations. The only film to fairly compare to Murnau’s would be Herzog’s remake with Kinski [...]
DIRECTED BY: Larry Fessenden
FEATURING: Larry Fessenden, Meredith Snaider
PLOT: Slacker and (barely) functional alcoholic Sam—still smarting from the
recent loss of his father and separation from his live-in girlfriend—finds his health growing worse and worse as he gets more and more involved with a mysterious beautiful woman he meets at a Greenwich Avenue Halloween party.
WHY IT [...]
