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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I am the Watcher. Of various films and TV programmes. I’ve watched loads of ‘em. And do you know what you need to make a film or a TV programme? Actors. You need people to play the many characters who will be appearing in said moving picture show, otherwise all you’ve got is a script scrolling across the screen or images of places where not much is happening.

The thing is, there are a number of actors who become so very linked to one of the parts they’ve played, that when you see them in something else, certainly to begin with, you can only see them in that part. A good actor can overcome this, and by the end of whatever it is you’re watching, they’ve become this new character, all trace of that other part you know them for gone and forgotten, at least temporarily.

But, sometimes, your brain starts to ask the question. “What if…” you ask yourself, “What if they were that other character I know them so well for? How would that change what I’m watching now? Would it make it better? Worse?” And then you’ve rewritten the entire film in your head. We’ve all done it. I know I have. So, here, for you, I present five of my own personal what ifs.

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Easily my favourite episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was 'Once More with Feeling' the now legendary musical episode, everytime a tv show goes the musical route now we call it 'doing a Whedon'. Well Batman: The Brave and Bold has done a Whedon and gone all out with a musical episode titled The Mayhem of the Music Meister starring none other than Dr Horrible himself Neil Patrick Harris. There are quite a few numbers jammed into the full episode but this one was the most fitting for Something Silly, check out the Arkham chorus line. Bloody brilliant.