By guest blogger Brandon Engel
Top 5 Vampire Valentine’s Day Flicks
Chocolate, wine, and…vampires? Think about it. Vampire lore has always been full of lust and sensuality, making the genre the perfect Valentine’s accompaniment.
After the flowers, red wine, and fancy dinner, print yourselves a vampire motivational poster for the TV room and sink your teeth into one of these flicks for a romantically spooky holiday:
5. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)
This is the film that preceded the popular TV show. The film features Kristy Swanson as its titular demon decimating high school senior. Buffy and her partner-in-slaying Oliver Pike (Luke Perry) eventually become romantically involved, sealing their love with a kiss. With classic, quotable lines perfect for inside jokes, like “I can’t believe I’m in a graveyard hunting for vampires with a strange man, on a school night,” you two will remember this Valentine’s for years to come.
4. Let the Right One In (2008)
This romantic horror film from Sweden received worldwide praise and was derived from a novel of the same title. Let the Right One In revolves around a bullied 12-year-old boy named Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) and his new neighbor Eli (Lina Leandersson) of the same age. Eli turns out to be a vampire in hiding. These two lonely pre-teens develop an unconventional friendship turned love, fighting off the demons of bullies and childhood.
3. Fright Night (1985)
This fun romp of a horror movie centers around Charlie Brewster (William Ragsdale), a young boy infatuated with vampire movies. He suspects his neighbor, Jerry, to be a vampire, and goes out of his way to bring the truth to light. No one believes him, including his girlfriend, but when she disappears Charlie knows exactly where to look. The film performed respectably upon its initial release, and it’s retained a cult following, thanks in some small part to regular screenings on horror-centric television networks carried by DirecTV, and also sites like Netflix that allow you to stream the film. The film begat by an ill-fated sequel in the eighties, and an ill-fated remake in 2011.
2. Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)
From the cinematography to the wonderful soundtrack provided by Popol Vuh, Nosferatu is a classic horror film derived from both Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula and F.W. Murnau’s silent horror film Nosferatu. It is considered one of the best films to come from the German “New School of Cinema.” The story follows realtor Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) as he visits Count Dracula (Klaus Kinski) in Transylvania to complete paperwork. Dracula drains
Harker, and decides that he also wants to suckle Harker’s lover, Lucy (Isabelle Adjani). The great race begins to reach her, the Count by Sea and Jonathan by land. The film did well critically and was later included in Ebert’s Greatest Movies Collection. In 2014, Nosferatu the Vampyre was re-released in select cities.
1. Dracula (1931)
Bela Lugosi stars as Dracula in this loose adaptation of both Bram Stoker’s novel and the play by Hamilton Deane. After a long journey to the castle of Count Dracula (Bram Stoker), Renfield (Dwight Frye) is drugged and brought back to London, where the Count begins feasting on local women. It is a race against the clock to prevent the women from becoming undead, testing the characters’ love and devotion to each other.
While Dracula was, and continues to be, immensely popular, it still became victim to a censored re-release in 1936 according to the Motion Picture Production Code. The censored version, entitled Dracula’s Daughter, cuts out some of the aspects that focus on supernatural belief, which could offend religious groups. If you pick this film for your special, blood-curling night, make sure you get the full effect of the 1931 original.
