Vampires are shit now. No two ways about it, thanks to crap like Twilight and The Vampire Diaries, instead of the evil, sadistic, scary, blood-sucking fiends they should be, vampires are instead seen as whining emos, or sham-pires, who sparkle in the sunlight and want to love you, but can’t, so they’ll just complain about it for a while. The monster has been defanged.

Quite frankly, if Dracula, the most famous, and the greatest vampire who ever (un)lived met any of these modern pussy vampires, he’d cut their heads off for being an insult to monsters everywhere, doing each and every one of us a favour in the process.

I patiently await the day, and it has to come, when vampires are scary, evil bastards again. In the mean time, we have plenty of proper vampire stories from the past we can dive into which give us a superior breed of vampire, and many of the best of them feature Dracula.

Dracula isn’t just the best vampire ever, but he’s also one of the greatest, and most well known, figures of popular culture. He’s appeared everywhere, on screen, in print, on stage, on the radio and on, and on. There’s an almost endless list of other characters who have encountered Dracula, including King Arthur, Batman, the X-Men, Scooby Doo, Spider-Man, Buffy, Billy the Kid and, perhaps most bizarrely, Emmanuelle.

There have been so many incarnations of Dracula on the screen that it was all but impossible to whittle them down to five only. So you’re getting ten in what I refer to as a two-part Halloween Behind the Masks special! Aren’t you lucky? Aren’t I amazingly self-indulgent while Gav’s away? As with the last two weeks, on Frankenstein and his Creature, this isn’t so much a top ten, as a selection of ten Draculas worth checking out. The top three though, that’s definitely the three best Draculas ever, and in the right order. You’ll be seeing them on Monday, and anyone who disagrees with their ranking is a wrong person.

You lot voted for a number of different Draculas as your favourites, with the eventual result being a tie between Gary Oldman and Christopher Lee. As for those of you who voted for Gerard Butler (if you weren’t a woman voting for reasons of, as it was described to me, filth) and the hilarious individuals who went with Leslie Nielsen, you need to watch more Dracula films.

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Long before Seth Grahame-Smith started mashing the likes of Jane Austen and Abraham Lincoln with vampires and zombies, Empire magazine’s resident horror honcho Kim Newman created his Anno Dracula universe in 1992. In the recently rereleased first novel of the series, appropriately entitled “Anno Dracula”, Newman begins with a wonderfully simple idea. What if, instead of being vanquished by Abraham Van Helsing and his improvised gang of vampire hunters, Vlad Tepes had triumphed and carried out his stated goal of conquering Great Britain?

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