Kino Lorber

"Sinners" would not exist without "Ganja & Hess." Bill Gunn's experimental romance was one of the first to put Blackness in conversation with vampirism, specifically through the lens of sexuality, spirituality, and privilege. The film stars Duane Jones ("Night of the Living Dead") as an anthropologist whose assistant stabs him with a dagger once belonging to an ancient group of blood drinkers. Naturally, he develops a similar addiction. When the assistant kills himself, his widow, Ganja (the bewitching Marlene Clark), quickly falls for Hess and, eventually, becomes bloodthirsty.

The film's small amount of plot is fairly quickly conveyed, leaving the rest of the film to hypnotically and meditatively explore Hess' retreat into isolation from affluent society and, eventually, his pull back toward Christianity. The way "Ganja & Hess" presents vampirism as metaphors for addiction and societal hedonism, not to mention how it presents Christianity as an antidote, laid the groundwork for "Sinners" to burst those themes wide open in a similar vein. Furthermore, Gunn's film was one of the first unconventional vampire films in that it was unafraid to do away with many stereotypical tropes, from how vampirism is spread through biting to killing vampires with a stake to the heart to even aversion to sunlight. Gunn knew that "Ganja & Hess" was about much more than bloodlust; it was an exploration of the Black experience through evocative symbolism.

Lionsgate

It was an ordinary farm life for Caleb Colton (Adrian Pasdar), a farm boy living in small-town Oklahoma ... that is until he meets the beautiful and mysterious Mae (Jenny Wright). Next thing he knows, Mae bites him — turns out she's a vampire — and dooms him to a life as part of her drifting crew of gnarly vamps, led by leader Jesse (Lance Henriksen) and the violently swaggering Severen (Bill Paxton in one of his most killer performances). When Caleb's father and sister attempt to rescue him, all hell breaks loose in a cat-and-mouse chase.

In the already thoroughly underappreciated pre-"The Hurt Locker" filmography of director Kathryn Bigelow (if you haven't seen "The Loveless" or "Strange Days," add them to your list), "Near Dark" stands out as one of her most overlooked genre fusions. Bigelow takes the body horror of vampire flicks and blends it with the down and dirty violence of the modern American West to make a singular kidnapping thriller with the kind of rip-roaring fight scenes you could only get from blending the two genres. You also have a cavalcade of exceptional performances with the standout, of course, being the late-great Bill Paxton as a my-way-my-rules bad boy with no regard for the law or the living. It's a hell of a ride and a gloriously singular film in a way other '80s vampire films simply couldn't replicate.

Paramount

No list of unconventional vampire movies is complete without "What We Do In The Shadows," the quintessential vampire comedy and, by all accounts, one of the funniest modern comedies of all time. Based on a 2005 short film of the same name written and directed by frequent collaborators Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement, the 2014 feature film follows the comedic misadventures of four centuries-old vampires living in modern day New Zealand: the meek Viago (Waititi), repressed tyrant Vladislav (Clement), bad boy Deacon (Jonathan Brugh) and the elderly yet ravenous Petyr (Ban Fransham). When a fifth vampire, Nick (Cori Gonzales-Macuer) inadvertently joins their ranks, it begins to test all of their friendships to the breaking point.

Many vampire tropes are alive and well in "What We Do In The Shadows," which was so successful it inspired a standalone television sequel that ran for six seasons on FX. In fact, there's a wealth of semi-authentic historical insight within the characters' backstories. However, the film's mockumentary style and deadpan absurdism makes it as unconventional a vampire film as you can get, giving us a "day in the larger-than-life" look at a well-worn archetype. Vampire comedies are nothing new, but Waititi and Clement's knack for comic reinvention cemented their take as one of the best.

Magnolia Pictures

One of the few international vampire films to find success in the states, "Let The Right One In" is a Swedish vampire film that centers on the profound friendship between 12-year-olds Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), a young boy who is relentlessly bullied at school, and Eli (Lina Leandersson), a young girl who moves into his building. After a series of murders take place, Oskar learns Eli is a vampire, yet their friendship transcends this mortal coil. As Eli encourages Oskar to stand up to his bullies, Oskar helps Eli survive amidst the town's growing suspicions of danger.

Director Tomas Alfredson had no familiarity with the long legacy of vampire films before signing on to direct the film and, frankly, it's clear from the jump (complimentary). Aside from sensitivity to sunlight, this film is largely devoid of the tropes seen in most vampire films and even more devoid of a traditional vampiric sensibility. There's little reverence for the fantastical or the supernatural here, instead focused on telling a bloody tale about young love that's fostered amidst humanity's cruelty. Somber at best and harrowing at worst, it's like a Stephen King horror fable, just replace the northeastern suburban nostalgia with wintry, harsh, working class Sweden.

Disney Channel

Kids deserve a vampire movie of their own, don't they? After all, they need something family-friendly to watch during spooky season! Though the lineup is limited, one often overlooked inclusion is the surprisingly charming Disney Channel Original Movie "Mom's Got a Date with a Vampire." Starring mid-'90s icons Caroline Rhea ("Sabrina the Teenage Witch") and Charles Shaughnessy ("The Nanny"), the film does what it says on the tin: three children are so desperate to get out of being grounded that they set their mother up on a date with a local single guy who they later discover is a vampire.

Look, is this film high art? Not even close. Its visual effects are dated, its dialogue is cheesy, and its surprisingly stilted editing and bizarre amount of ADR makes certain scenes feel like they belong anywhere but a Disney flick. That said, it's a solid stepping stone for any child who wants to engage in the horror genre, not to mention a solid introduction to the vampire and a number of its cultural trademarks. Plus, its performances are all solid. Rhea and Shaughnessy's natural charm do a lot of the heavy-lifting, but Robert Carradine ("Lizzie McGuire") is also fun as a suburban riff on Van Helsing while all Matt O'Leary, Laura Vandervoort, and Myles Jeffrey are chock full of personality as the film's leading trio of siblings.

The Criterion Collection

If you thought "Sinners" barely used the word "vampire," you'll be shocked watching "Cronos," which never utters the word once across its entire 92 minute runtime. It's one of the many things that separates Guillermo Del Toro's directorial debut from traditional vampiric lore. Set in (what was at the time of release) a subtly near-future Mexico, "Cronos" follows an antiques salesman who, upon succumbing to a strange device found in one of his statues, begins to de-age. However, he also discovers a growing thirst for blood. All the while, a rich manufacturing magnate seeks to find the device and use it for his own personal gain.

in "Cronos," one becomes a vampire not by being bitten by another vampire but rather by being stabbed by the aforementioned "Cronos device," a scarab-shaped gold piece that houses an insect who, by being infused with your blood, grants the user eternal life. The device, invented by a 16th-century alchemist, blurs the line to the point that vampirism becomes less of an urban legend and more as a symbol of man-made greed. Though it incorporates tropes like burning sunlight and stakes through the heart, GDT's vision of vampirism is a pandora's box of eternal life, a cautionary tale about accepting the life you're given. In a way, this too is reminiscent of "Sinners," who use eternal life as a symbol for black subjugation and cultural assimilation.

Warner Bros. Television

What's better than Batman? How about Batman and a bat...man (not to be confused with Man Bat)? In hindsight, it was inevitable that, someday, the two most iconic bat-based icons would be pitted against one another. They were first combined in a '90s trilogy of Elseworlds comics by Doug Moench and Kelley Jones, but, for our money, their ultimate collision came in 2005 when Cartoon Network presented "The Batman vs. Dracula," a special episode of its then-current iteration of the Caped Crusader in which, you guessed it, Batman battles the Count Dracula as he attempts to spread a plague of vampirism across Gotham City.

The mid-2000s run of "The Batman" remains a thoroughly underrated edition of DC's most popular superhero, in part because it wasn't afraid to shake up the Batman mythos and do it with style. On paper, "The Batman vs. Dracula" sounds a bit like the Adam West series would've tried. In practice, it's an atmospheric actioner that has the odds supernaturally stacked against Bruce Wayne like never before. Sitting thrice as long as the typical episode length, the film is given the room to explore a grander, more cinematic story for this iteration of Batman, blending gritty action with gothic fantasy in a way the series never could. Plus, it gives us Vampire Joker, which goes harder than you could ever imagine.

Sony Pictures Classics

Any fan of Jim Jarmusch could've told you that his take on the vampire movie was going to be a bit quirky, but not even they could have predicted a film that so melancholically yet playfully eschews the folklore's trappings. "Only Lovers Left Alive" places vampires in present day Detroit, specifically Adam (Tom Hiddleston), a reclusive but well-known musician, and Eve (Tilda Swinton), his long-distance lover. Adam laments over the doldrums of his endless immortality amidst an uncultured humanity, who he deems so unevolved he won't even drink their "contaminated" blood, and contemplates suicide – naturally, it's with a wooden bullet. The only things keeping him going are his everlasting love for both Eve and analog art, from the music of Franz Schubert to the films of Buster Keaton.

Some semblance of plot eventually kicks in, but that's not really the point. This is a hipster hangout movie but with vampires and, shockingly enough, it works wonders. The film's brooding atmosphere and grungy score immediately create a haunting portrait of eternal love, while the writing's cheeky humor and abundance of culturally ephemeral references build a new kind of alternate history for vampires that takes the piss out of the entire genre in the best way. When vampires, of all things, can make sobering observations about humanity's descent into uncultured swine, you know our race is in deep trouble.

Focus Features

While "Twilight" fans were focused on the debate between Team Edward and Team Jacob, true cinephiles were thoroughly on team Sang-hyun. Stephanie Meyer's tragic romance looks like a coughing baby next to Park Chan-wook's bombastic "Thirst," a gruesomely violent and unflinchingly erotic take on the genre that made for one of the best vampire movies of the 2000s. Frequent collaborator Song Kang-ho ("Parasite") stars as a priest who, after a botched medical experiment, is infused with vampiric blood. He soon begins fighting a lustful desire not only for blood but also for his childhood friend's wife, Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin), and they begin a scandalous affair that has un-deadly consequences.

If you took "Dracula" and combined it with "Body Heat" and "First Reformed," you would get something resembling "Thirst," but even that doesn't quite cut it. Master Park's vampire film defies description; it's spine-tingling yet gleeful in its gory violence, sensual yet cold in its eroticism, and moving yet unpredictable in its exploration of the internal tug of war between faith and lust. To say the film is shocking is an understatement, for each explosive moment tops the last, but this is nothing new for fans of Park's work. What folks might be surprised by is how well Park's shocking and unnerving filmmaking maps onto the eternal longing at the center of vampire folklore. It's almost as if the two were made for each other.

Toho

An animated vampire movie is already unconventional, but how about a vampire anime? If you look hard enough, there are plenty that have escaped mainstream success, but few that are as engrossing as "Vampire Hunter D," which recently celebrated its 40th anniversary. Directed by Toyoo Ashida ("Fist of the North Star") and based on the manga by Hideyuki Kikuchi, the film sees a young girl bitten by an ancient vampire lord and forced to hire an elusive vampire hunter named D (Kaneto Shiozawa) to kill her attacker, that way she can keep from becoming a vampire herself.

One of the few films on our list to center on a vampire hunter rather than the vamps themselves, "Vampire Hunter D" was one the first vampire anime to feel like it came directly from the genre's roots. The film is deeply gothic in tone and aesthetic, from a melodramatic story to costume designs infused with period elegance, but also is clearly influenced by horror new and old, from its ghastly creature designs to its implementation of vampire lore. That said, it also infuses elements of Westerns, science fiction, and even samurai films to make for a unique story world that helped pave the way for pulpy, adult-oriented anime OVAs throughout the late '80s and into the '90s. It also inspired a sequel, subtitled "Bloodlust," which, believe it or not, is an even wilder vampire movie.

Kino Lorber

It would be easy for "the first Iranian vampire Western" to play things fairly straight, but that's not what director Ana Lily Amirpour did. Instead, she made "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night" a beautiful and genre-bending nightmare. It's a spaghetti Western by way of feminist, slice-of-life horror that is so far beyond a typical vampire movie that the vampire isn't even named. She isn't even the main character of the story. The primary protagonist is Arash (Arash Marandi), a man caring for his heroin-addicted father who is forced to spend his well-earned money paying off his dad's debts.

He encounters the titular girl (Sheila Vand) one night wandering around the city while lost and high on ecstasy after a costume party. He is dressed as Dracula, while she is in a traditional and unassuming chador. Turns out this is the girl's real cowl, for she is a real vampire. As Arash maneuvers a dog-eat-dog world while falling in love with the mysterious girl, she is enacting her own vigilante justice against the many ruthless men who take advantage of the meek and compassionate, like Arash. In this sense, the vampirism of Amirpour's film is less of a primary theme and more of an ancillary motif that elevates the film's central themes: what we do when pushed to the point of desperation and why we should never underestimate society's outcasts.

New World Pictures

For some, it can be tough to categorize "Rabid" as a vampire film. David Cronenberg's box office hit doesn't formally acknowledge vampires and disregards most of its tropes. Hell, the only real vampire trope in the film is sucking blood and passing it on, and even that is done in a rather ... unusual way. In classic Cronenberg fashion, this film's vampiric cravings happen through magnificently gross body horror, specifically an engorged red stinger that extends in and out of your armpit. However, for those who recognize the breadth of bloodsucking, "Rabid" ultimately fits comfortably in the vampire canon. Rose (Marilyn Chambers) acquires her mutation after a plastic surgeon experiments on her following a motorcycle accident and begins to crave blood. As she attacks unsuspecting victims, she turns them into zombie-like bloodsuckers and spreads her pseudo-vampirism like a plague across Quebec.

If you thought Hailee Steinfeld and Michael B. Jordan made vampire sex hot and heavy, you might not be ready for what Cronenberg has in store for you. Chambers, a famous pornographic actor at the time of the film's release, has many sensual scenes seducing her victims. However, this sexuality is but one part of Cronenberg's equation. "Rabid" is at once a vampire movie, a zombie movie, a contagion movie, and an exploitation movie, a concoction of many motifs and ideas that culminate in a countercultural Canadian landmark.