The Decade of the Vampire: How the ‘80s Changed Bloodsuckers Forever

Vampires are among the oldest and most enduring cinematic bogeymen, but between Murnau’s seminal Nosferatu in 1922 and Werner Herzog’s remake in 1979, there was very little in the way of innovation. That may have had something to do with the first official version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1931 – the movie was a smash hit and Bela Lugosi’s iconic turn as the regal Count set the tone for the majority of screen vampires for the next five decades.

Sure, there were some variations along the way. Terrence Fisher’s 1958 version of Dracula with Christopher Lee popularised fangs and there were some interesting slants during the Blaxploitation era (Ganja & Hess, Blacula), but otherwise vampires were generally still the same dude with a cape and a widow’s peak knocking around in Gothic castles.

Then everything changed in the 1980s. It was a decade when vampires were suddenly everywhere, and they didn’t always look like Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee anymore. A lot of times, they looked just like you and me – on the surface, at least. And what was more, they might even live on your street.

Salem’s Lot (1979)

Stephen King had a huge part to play in bringing horror stories from windswept moors and gothic mansions into the regular lives of ordinary folk, and Tobe Hooper’s two-part TV adaptation of Salem’s Lot, first airing in November 1979, opened the door for a new generation of vampire movies.

Trimming the fat from a King novel is often a challenge for screenwriters (just take Christine, 200 pages of story stretched to an interminable 500 pages) so Warner Bros. decided that a mini-series was the way to go. Paul Monash condensed much of the character detail and folksy bits of business into a workable script and Hooper was hired to direct on the strength of his landmark calling card, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Salem’s Lot suffers many of the downsides associated with TV movies of the time, creaking along during the daytime exposition scenes. David Soul of Starsky & Hutch fame is wooden as Ben Mears, a novelist who returns to his hometown intending to write a book about a supposedly haunted house. He’s acted off the screen by James Mason as Richard Straker, the debonair English businessman who now inhabits said house. Naturally, Straker is the familiar of powerful ancient bloodsucker Kurt Barlow (Reggie Nalder), who soon starts sinking his teeth into the locals and kick-starts a vampire invasion.

Hooper is in his element with the film’s scary scenes, some of which have passed into vampire lore. Whether we’re in spooky fog-shrouded woodland or inside the crumbling interior of Barlow’s lair, the director cranks up the tension and delivers a series of effective jump scares. Unlike the chatty and sophisticated head vampire of the book, Hooper also turned Barlow into a desiccated feral monster in a clear nod to Nosferatu.

The one scene that terrified me as a kid was the image of vampiric Ralphie Glick floating outside his brother’s bedroom window scratching on the glass – a nightmarish moment that Joel Schumacher would homage in The Lost Boys.

The Monster Club (1981)

Early in a decade of vampire modernity there was one last hurrah for the old-school, if “hurrah” is the right word for this threadbare and painfully strained horror anthology. It was the final film from journeyman director Roy Ward Baker, who had a spell with Hammer in the ‘60s and ‘70s (Quatermass and the Pit, Scars of Dracula), and producer Milton Subotsky (Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, Tales From the Crypt). 

Together, they assembled a cast of veteran actors including John Carradine, who had played Dracula on several occasions; Donald Pleasance, who was enjoying a resurgence with John Carpenter; and Vincent Price, one of horror’s most iconic faces at the tail-end of his career.

Unfortunately, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee both passed, which leaves The Monster Club feeling rather sparse and flat. It’s heart is in the right place but it is woefully half-baked, with the actors looking very long in the tooth and any scares diluted by the goofy humour. Author Ronald Chetwynd-Hynd, whose spooky stories provided the source material, was not very impressed. Carradine’s fictional version of him in the movie is bitten by Price’s vampire, which provides the framing device for a trio of tired tales.

The Hunger (1983)

New decade, new vampires, and no film sums up the modern approach more than Tony Scott’s The Hunger, a sleek erotic re-imagining of vampire lore that tapped into the Goth and New Wave subculture of early ‘80s New York. Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie were well-cast as Miriam and John Baylock, two beautiful and hedonistic vampire lovers stalking their prey in neon-lit clubs. Even the now-traditional fangs were out – instead, the bloodsuckers use ornate little knives to drain their victims.

The Hunger was Tony Scott’s debut feature. Like his brother Ridley, Scott had cut his teeth on commercials, although his aesthetic was far glossier and would develop into full-blown popcorn fare like Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop II. His approach to his calling card was nevertheless startling, bordering on arthouse.

This made it an unusual proposition for a mainstream Hollywood movie and the film spooked many critics, some of whom regarded it with hostility. It is a fascinating film, however, taking a novel approach to the immortality of vampires – we learn that Miriam is ancient and has retained her beauty for millenia, but she has grossly mis-sold the idea of living forever to a string of lovers. The portion of the story dealing with David Bowie’s sudden rapid deterioration is poignant and absorbing, but Scott drops the ball with the lesbian affair between Deneuve and Susan Sarandon, which turns the movie into a softcore wet t-shirt contest.

Another interesting wrinkle in the film’s legacy is that, although not intended as such and only tangentially related, The Hunger became a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic that blew up in New York in the early ‘80s. This makes it a great double-bill with Slava Tsukerman’s peculiar avant-garde alien horror Liquid Sky, released the previous year.

Fright Night (1985)

Wes Craven’s Scream was rightly celebrated as a horror with one major innovation: unlike their oblivious predecessors, it featured a group of knife-fodder teens who had actually seen slasher movies before. This wasn’t a totally original concept, however, and one earlier example is Tom Holland’s Fright Night. Here, Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale) suspects that his suave neighbour may be a vampire and turns to an expert for help – namely Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall), a hammy old late-night horror host from TV.

For many, Holland’s film is the definitive horror comedy of the ‘80s, and the director gets the blend just right. The dynamic between our young hero Charley and his pal Evil Ed (Stephen Geoffreys) generates laughs, as does McDowall’s loveable performance as the clearly-terrified but ultimately valiant horror host. It was a role originally written for Vincent Price, who passed because his health was deteriorating and he was tired of horror typecasting.

McDowell does a great job in his place and would return for the 1988 sequel alongside Ragsdale. Meanwhile, Chris Sarandon is  magnetic as the brooding vampire next door and the special effects are still pretty frightening even by today’s standards. The poster art by Peter Mueller is wonderful too!

Lifeforce (1985)

Off the back of the success of Poltergeist, Tobe Hooper was given a three-picture deal with Cannon Films, a now-defunct studio probably best known for a string of somewhat trashy action flicks during the ‘80s. And what did Hooper do with that deal? Invaders from Mars, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part II, and Lifeforce. Say what you want about the quality of those movies, at least he went with his heart.

For the latter, Hooper was handed a substantial $25 million budget to adapt Colin Wilson’s novel The Space Vampires for the screen. He decided he wanted to go back to his horror roots and make what he considered a 70 mm version of a Hammer film - in this case, Lifeforce became a flashy remake of Quatermass and the Pit, just with bigger effects and nudie vampires from outer space sucking people’s psychic energy instead of blood.

The movie had pedigree, co-written by Dan O’Bannon with special effects by Oscar-winning John Dykstra (Star Wars: A New Hope, Spider-Man 2) and a score from Henry Mancini. The resulting film, however, is a baffling mess – grandiose, corny, and utterly gratuitous, best-known for how much time we spend ogling the naked form of Mathilda May as the lead female vampire.

Vamp (1986)

Characters were always hanging out in strip joints in ‘80s Hollywood movies, so it makes complete sense that one would become a vampire’s lair in Richard Wenk’s overlooked horror-comedy Vamp. After all, what better way to lure your victims when the sun goes down than seduce punters with an erotic dance before sinking your teeth into them?

The set-up is also familiar for fans of teen comedies of the decade: Two college dweebs Keith (Chris Makepeace) and AJ (Robert Rusler) try to impress their way into a frat house by throwing a party with booze and a stripper, so head out to recruit a dancer from a club in the city. Perhaps needless to say, the one they pick after a bizarre stage performance is Katrina (Grace Jones), an ancient vampire. 

The rest of the movie plays out pretty much as you’d expect with Keith trying to handle his newly-undead best friend (shades of An American Werewolf in London) and fending off hordes of bloodsuckers. Grace Jones was one of the most outlandish celebrities of the ‘80s, a pop star, model, fashion icon, and movie star who barely looked human at all, and her wordless performance as Katrina really stands out. 

The film also looks a treat with nifty special effects and some gorgeous soft neon lighting which tells you exactly which decade you’re in, making it a decent alternative to the more well-known vampire comedy duo of Fright Night and The Lost Boys. It will escape absolutely no-one that the idea of a strip club providing a front for a coven of vampires bears a striking similarity to From Dusk Till Dawn – as a video store geek, Tarantino would have definitely been aware of it and may have taken inspiration for his screenplay.

The Lost Boys (1987)

While pencilled in as a project for Richard Donner, The Lost Boys was originally intended to feature much younger kids. But what could have turned into the ultimate Goonie-fication of the vampire genre turned into something far more rock ‘n’ roll when Joel Schumacher took over, casting some of the sexiest young stars in Hollywood at the time.

The great thing about The Lost Boys is that it is basically a teen rebel movie where our delinquent antagonists just happen to be vampires. And in the seedy seaside town of Santa Carla, David (Kiefer Sutherland) and his gang have found the ideal place to hunt – the terrific opening credit sequence establishes a boardwalk filled with knuckleheads, beach bums, stoners, hippies, punks, slobs, and assorted other freaks. In other words, if vampires can’t blend in here, then where else?

Some may derive some snarky pleasure from the more dated ‘80s elements - Corey Haim’s outrageous shirts, the sexy sax man, etc. But The Lost Boys still hits a sweet spot between comedy and scares and moves along at an exuberant pace. It also follows on from Fright Night with its meta elements: The Frog Brothers, played delightfully by Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander, are two tough kids running a comic book store who know exactly what is going on in Santa Carla and treat vampire comics as a survival guide. As it turns out, our young protagonists’ eccentric Grandpa also knows the score, resulting in one of the most perfect final kiss-off lines in horror cinema.

The Monster Squad (1987)

If you want some idea of what The Lost Boys might have looked like with a younger cast, look no further than Fred Dekker’s The Monster Squad. Here we have a true ‘80s kids-on-bikes adventure where our tween heroes face off against an updated roster of classic Universal Monsters – Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, Gill-Man, all assembled by Count Dracula in a plot to conquer the world.

It’s a breezy and fun movie that, in truth, lives better in nostalgia than reality. Dekker previously showed his comedy-horror credentials with Night of the Creeps and House, but he should have done better with an all-star line-up of monsters that everyone knows and adores. That goes double with Shane Black, hot off the back of Lethal Weapon, on screenwriting duty. Despite the obvious talent behind it, The Monster Squad flopped hard at the box office before becoming a solid cult classic on VHS.

Near Dark (1987)

A decade before John Carpenter’s career flatlined with Vampires, Kathryn Bigelow showed how great bloodsuckers in a western setting could really be with Near Dark. 

Adrian Pasdar plays Caleb, a small town cowpoke who falls in with a scruffy band of nomadic vampires after he is bitten by an attractive young female member of the crew. For the vamp gang, Bigelow plundered a trio of actors who had already made a big impression in her then-husband James Cameron’s movies: Lance Henriksen as the charismatic leader, Bill Paxton as a typical loose cannon, and Jenette Goldstein as mysterious Diamondback.

Lean, mean, and atmospherically nocturnal, Near Dark is one of the most accomplished and original entries in the ‘80s vampire canon. Unfortunately, audiences didn’t think so at the time and it failed to make back its $5 million budget at the box office before the usual home video rediscovery by switched-on horror fans.

Vampire’s Kiss (1988)

“Greed is Good” extols avaricious corporate raider Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) in Wall Street and, in a decade of rampant capitalism, it made total sense that a loathsome yuppie would become a literal bloodsucker. Which brings us to Vampire’s Kiss, the tale of Peter Loew (Nicolas Cage), an obnoxious literary agent who becomes convinced he is turning into a vampire after picking up a woman in a club.

Critics and viewers were nonplussed and the film received poor notices and flopped at the box office despite only costing a relatively modest $2 million. Perhaps it was a little ahead of its time, presaging Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and giving audiences their first true taste of Nicolas Cage’s unique brand of mega-acting. He’d shown flashes of it in his previous films but this time he let it all hang out in an outrageous performance that has become a staple of those “Nic Cage Losing His Shit” mash-up videos on YouTube. Whether he’s leaping on tables, ranting the alphabet, or munching live cockroaches, he definitely goes all-in.

But snarky amusement aside, it is worth noting that he’s in virtually every scene and Loew’s mental deterioration is in keeping for a horror-comedy about a man who thinks he is becoming a creature of the night. One has to wonder what the original casting choice would have made of it – Dennis Quaid was given the part before he jumped ship for Innerspace.

The Lair of the White Worm (1988)

After tearing it up in the ‘60s and ‘70s to stake his claim as Britain’s most outrageous and iconoclastic filmmakers, Ken Russell had a relatively low-key ‘80s. Towards the end of the decade, he returned to classic literature again to adapt a lesser-known novella by Bram Stoker: The Lair of the White Worm.

Based on the English legend of the Lambton Worm, a dragon-like creature vanquished by a brave night, Stoker’s story was decidedly not a vampire tale. Strictly speaking, Russell’s version isn’t either. But his screenplay, knocked out to fulfil a three-picture deal with Vestron Pictures, definitely gives the main antagonist more vampire-like powers.

This would be Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donahue), the dominatrix high priestess who worships a subterranean worm God. While she has many on-the-nose snake-like qualities such as emerging from a basket, Russell also imbues her with traits commonly associated with vampires: she can hypnotise people, hates Christian imagery, sprouts deadly fangs, and can turn her victims into snake/vampire creatures too. As such, White Worm has been claimed by vampire fans.

Hugh Grant gets an early role as Lord James D’Ampton, a descendant of a knight who once cut the mythical worm in half. It’s not a great movie, but it is notable for tipping the vampire genre back toward the gothic while adhering to the ‘80s trend of horror-comedy. Of course, being a Ken Russell joint, it is also a film laced with grotesque humour, kinky sex, scandalous imagery, and psychedelic freak-outs. Not his finest, but Russell working at 50% is always more interesting than most regular directors at the top of their game.

So there you have it, our rundown of the ‘80s vampire boom. What are your favourites, and would you add any other titles to the list? Let us know!

Our banner image is from an amazing alternative movie poster for The Lost Boys by the incredibly talented freelance artist, Frederick Cooper.