For as long as their have been vampires in stories and popular culture, there have also been those who would see the undead destroyed. Vampire hunters have come in many shapes and sizes over the decades, from kick-ass men of action, to small, blonde women with superpowers, to demonic beings who may end up being just as dangerous as the very creatures they’re hunting. Then, of course, there is the greatest vampire hunter of them all. You can keep Blade and Buffy for yourself. If vampires did show up in my town, I’d want Professor Abraham Van Helsing, learned scholar, vampire expert and the arch enemy of Count Dracula himself, fighting in my corner first and foremost.

Bram Stoker’s second most famous creation (you can argue that, but you’d be wrong) may not have been the first vampire hunter the world had ever heard of, but he certainly set the template for every one which would come after. You’ll be hard pressed to find a vampire story these days which doesn’t have its very own Van Helsing figure. What else is Whistler to Blade than a modern version of Van Helsing, and in the universe of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon gave us an entire group of Van Helsings who worked with the Slayer in the Council of Watchers.

Surprisingly, given the number of times Dracula has appeared on screen, there haven’t been anywhere near as many actors to have portrayed the good professor, and of the ones who have, a great many of them have been awful. Christopher Plummer may be a very fine actor indeed, but his turn in Dracula 2001 was… Well, he was clearly just there for the money. Thankfully, there have also been a couple of great Van Helsings, including your favourite, Peter Cushing. Next year will also see Dario Argento bringing us Dracula 3D, featuring Rutger Hauer as Van Helsing. I like Rutger Hauer, and have a feeling that, even if the film is total crap, had I written this a year later, he would have found his way onto the list.

However, I didn’t, and so, since we have to begin somewhere…

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Um... I'm supposed to write some kind of preamble to these things, but how do I do that when it's just a continuation of what I wrote on Friday? Ooh! Let's pretend it's a TV show!

Previously on Behind the Masks - Dracula...

People voted Gary Oldman and Christopher Lee as the best Dracula of all time. They were wrong about Oldman, 'cos he wasn't very good, in point of fact. The top ten currently stands like this:-

10. Gary Oldman
9. John Carradine
8. John Forbes-Robertson
7. Peter Stormare
6. Rudolf Martin

But who made the top five? And will Spider-Man and Iceman rescue Firestar? Find out... Right now!

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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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Whatever you want to call him, there’s no doubting that Frankenstein’s Creature is one of the most iconic creations of all time, and yet it’s hard to say what the definitive image of the Creature should be. If you turn to Mary Shelley’s original novel, the Creature within is an eloquent, intelligent being, who genuinely cares for the people he considers his family, but is also full of rage and loneliness, and is capable of acts of great evil, such as the murder of Frankenstein’s young son and wife. He is described in the book as being eight feet tall, with translucent yellow skin, watery eyes, black hair and white teeth. However, when it comes to Frankenstein’s Creature on screen, there have been so many different, wildly varying versions, both in terms of the physicality of the Creature and the way in which he is portrayed as a character, that picking the five best is a tough challenge.

Yes, when you mention Frankenstein’s Creature, the image which pops into most people’s heads is that of Boris Karloff in the classic Universal Frankenstein films of the nineteen-thirties, a fact reflected in the public vote for this week, which Karloff walked (or lumbered) away with by a mile. But Karloff’s is only one interpretation of a character who has been portrayed in almost any way you care to think of. What follows here, moreso than last week’s column on Doctor Frankenstein himself, is, rather than anything claiming to be the definitive top five, merely a choice selection of five Creatures, each completely different from the last, from the funny, to the sympathetic, to the calculating, to the monstrous, to the downright bizarre.

If you read last weeks column, then many of these choices won’t come as any great surprise, but I think there may be one entry here which you won’t have seen coming.

Also, special mentions to some of the actors who were considered for the list, but didn’t quite make the cut. Dave Prowse’s turn from The Horror of Frankenstein was strongly considered for a good long while, though I surprised myself by never really giving Lon Chaney Jr or Bela Lugosi, who both played the Creature at one point or another for Universal, a shot at the top five, as their performances as the Creature, especially for two such highly regarded actors of the genre, were ultimately quite disappointing.

So, who is on the list? There’s an easy way to find out.

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