After spending seven years in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with a highly regarded pair of Black Panther movies, Ryan Coogler has returned to the world of original productions with Sinners.
Hitting cinemas today (April 18th), it’s no less fantastical than his preceding films, offering an intriguing combination of vampire horror, gung-ho action, and blues-soaked period drama. After working with Coogler on Black Panther and Creed, Michael B. Jordan takes on the dual role of twin brothers Elijah and Elias Smoke, who return to their hometown to open up a juke joint.
Things take a sinister turn when mysterious stranger Remmick (Jack O’Connell) rocks up with a former acquaintance of the twins, bringing the forces of darkness into this already heady mix.
It’s a bracingly fresh alternative take on the classic vampire movie, though it’s far from the first film to attempt such a mash-up.
The following films have all successfully supplied their own unique spin to the familiar blood-sucking mythos, stirring in disparate genre elements from westerns, comic books, and even social realist drama.
We love Interview With the Vampire and Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula as much as the next film nerd, but both offer fairly traditional takes on vampire lore. These 10 films bite a little harder...
1. Blade
Blade is often remembered as the progenitor of the modern superhero movie, arriving two years before the original X-Men and four years before Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. What tends to get left out is that it’s also a solid addition to the lineage of vampire movies. Wesley Snipes plays the titular Dhampir, a half human, half vampire committed to hunting down his murderous kin. Blade the movie wisely follows its comic book muse, playing down the usual horror elements in favour of tightly choreographed (though still blood-soaked) super-powered action.
2. 30 Days of Night
It might be set in a modern day Alaskan town, but 30 Days of Night is perhaps the purest slice of vampire horror on this list, effectively restoring the fear factor that had been lost among the tropes. As the Arctic town of Barrow enters its customary month of sustained darkness, a gang of vampires rolls into town for a feeding frenzy. A small gang of survivors, led by Josh Hartnett’s Sheriff Eben Oleson, hole up in an abandoned house to wait out the storm. It’s a great concept, executed with brutal economy by director David Slade.
3. Byzantium
Neil Jordan all but defined the ’90s vampire movie with his starry Interview With the Vampire. His 2012 effort Byzantium is a much more low key vampire treatment, but with a more distinctive flavour. Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan play mother and daughter vampires on the run from a patriarchal vampire society who forbid their very existence. This is no glossy thriller, however, as the two set up a squalid brothel in a run down English seaside town. The tone is resolutely downbeat and mournful, but this is a vampire film that really sinks its teeth into you.
4. What We Do in the Shadows
Vampire films can be funny, despite what Dracula: Dead and Loving It might have suggested. Just consider What We Do in the Shadows, a hilarious mockumentary from New Zealand’s finest Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi. It follows a group of vampires living together in a Wellington suburb, as they struggle to reconcile their out-of-time nature with the complexities of modern life. The two creative leads are on fine acting form here, with Clement playing a hammy vampire tyrant and Waititi the charmingly effete Viago.
5. The Lost Boys
The vampire movie genre gets the full Brat Pack treatment in Joel Schumacher’s youthful 1987 classic. Jason Patric and sidekicks Corey Haim and Corey Feldman take on a dangerous group of teen-aged blood suckers, led by Kiefer Sutherland, using little more than their rebellious attitudes and water pistols filled with holy water. And if that isn’t the most eighties sentence you’ve read today, we’d be surprised. If you thought that Buffy the Vampire Slayer pioneered the whole teen vampire thing, The Lost Boys would like a word with you.
6. Cronos
Before he led his deeply unlikely assault on Hollywood, Guillermo del Toro made his directorial debut on home turf with 1992’s Cronos. It’s quite unlike any vampire film you’ve ever seen, as an elderly Mexican antique dealer stumbles upon an infernal contraption that appears to confer upon him a new lease of life. The cost of his newfound vitality soon reveals itself to be a painful thirst for blood, as well as the attention of a ruthless businessman and his thuggish nephew, played by Ron Perlman.
7. Thirst
Following his masterful Vengeance trilogy and just prior to making his English Language debut, South Korean director Park Chan-wook applied his own distinct spin to the vampire genre. The resulting film, Thirst, has the auteur’s fingerprints all over it, from its twisted central relationship to its botched plots and deeply flawed characters. What’s new is an element of the supernatural, as Song Kang-ho’s Catholic priest becomes unwittingly infected with a vampiric disease. Soon enough he’s stealing blood transfusions packs and commencing an affair with the wife of an old friend, to calamitous ends.
8. From Dusk Till Dawn
The premise of Sinners perhaps most closely resembles this 1996 action-horror extravaganza from director Robert Rodriguez. It too concerns a pair of criminal brothers (played by George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino) on the lam, who proceed to stumble upon a vampire hoard in a seedy bar on the Mexican border. Written by Tarantino himself, it’s an absolute riot of genre-splicing left turns, gruesome dismemberments, kinetic gunplay, and cool-as-a-cucumber dialogue. Salma Hayek turns up as a vampire stripper, while there are also roles for Harvey Keitel and a young Juliette Lewis.
9. Near Dark
Released the same year as The Lost Boys, Near Dark concerns another handsome young man getting in with a rough and ready crew of blood suckers after falling for a mysterious girl. That, aside from a contemporary US setting, is about where the similarities end. Director Kathryn Bigelow’s film has a much grittier, more grounded tone, with elements of the Western genre mixed in with all the supernatural chicanery. Near Dark is a gorgeous looking, strangely affecting film that deserves a revisit.
10. Let the Right One In
Who says Americans have to have all the vampiric fun? Not that ‘fun’ is the first word we’d associate with Let the Right One In, a deeply twisted love story set in a frozen Swedish suburb during the early ’80s. It’s here that we find Oskar, a bullied boy who befriends an otherworldly young girl. The resulting relationship is as heart-warming as it is disturbing as the body count starts to rack up. It’s so good, Hollywood decided to release an inferior remake just two years later.