Long before the Twilight saga Jim Carrey was turning into a bloodsucker while simultaneously looking for love. The year was 1985. The film was Once Bitten.

Writer-director Tom Holland’s post-modern vampire film celebrates the traditional conventions of the genre with its tongue firmly pressed against its cheek. The self-referential humour brilliantly updates the vampire film while perfectly playing to the popular sensibilities of both comedy and horror, a genre that had flourished in the decade of the film’s release.

The vampire: that harbinger of everlasting life and eternal damnation. From the cloaked gothic majesty of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” to the down and dirty night-crawlers of Kathryn Bigelow’s “Near Dark”, vampire’s have formed the basis for more literary and cinematic horror than any other fictional creature.
Early cinematic incarnations of the blood-sucking sun-haters were based on Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. Infamously, Friedrich Murnau made “Nosferatu” in Germany without acquiring the rights to film the novel. After a lawsuit, all copies of the film were ordered to be destroyed. The film …

I vaguely remember my introduction to the horror film. My cousin was visiting, the curtains had been drawn on a sunny afternoon, and John Landis’ An American Werewolf In London had been placed in the VCR. I was seven years old. As I lay in bed for days after all I could see were those green hills shrouded in the black cloak of night, and the warning: ‘Stay on the road. Keep clear of the moors,’ delivered in that Yorkshire twang. Brian Glover’s short, controlled outburst – probably his unusual form of goodbye – ‘Beware the moon, lads.’