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.

Hammer is remembered today for its horror films, which is to be expected since the genre produced their most iconic films and characters, but is did start out making dramas and comedies, and also period-action films. Horror movies didn’t even register as half their output. As a matter of fact, only 1/8th of Hammer films were horror, and one of their most famous and appreciated films was the comedy On The Buses. So why is Hammer so synonymous with the horror film, and more importantly, such gothic horror characters like Frankenstein, Dracula and Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde?

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 …

Companion review for Top 10 1980s Horror Films & Top 10 Modern Vampire Films
A classic that frequented the sort of top 100 polls that read: ‘The Best Films To Rent You’ve Never Heard Of’, Near Dark wilted soullessly in the caverns of cinema’s black hole, yet this gem from 1987 wasn’t the usual bottom shelf turd that was destined to the recesses of 50 pence bargain bins, it was just the simple fact that no-one, bar a small group of die-hard, would-be bloodsuckers, had ever heard of it.
The film originally …