The Undying Appeal of Vampires in Pop Culture: Photo Timeline

Vlad Țepeș, also known as Vlad the Impaler, Prince of Wallachia, is often cited in vampire lore. “[Vlad Țepeș] is both a hero and a monster: a ruler fervently protecting his people while ruthlessly killing others. It was precisely this dual characterization that appealed to Bram Stoker in the writing of his famous novel Dracula,” writes medieval historian Alice Isabella Sullivan.

During Țepeș’ lifetime, stories stretched far and wide about his brutality, such as mass impalements and claims that he consumed his enemies’ blood. When Bram Stoker created the fictional Transylvanian Count Dracula in 1897, he drew upon those stories.

Countess Elizabeth Báthory of Hungary was accused of torturing and murdering young women between 1590 and 1610. Báthory’s case quickly passed from criminal proceedings into legend. Over time, the story evolved into the sensational claim that she bathed in her victims’ blood to preserve her beauty—a detail many historians argue reflects the misogyny miring her prosecution.

In periods of epidemic disease, superstition flourished. Outbreaks of illness led some communities to exhume suspected “vampires,” folklorist Paul Barber notes in Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality (1988). People staked or otherwise mutilated corpses in an attempt to halt the spread of sickness.

It became so common in Europe that Empress Maria Theresa of Austria sent her personal physician to investigate vampirism in 1755. He came to the conclusion that vampires weren’t real. The Empress then outlawed the desecration of graves under her rule, explains Olga Hoyt in Lust for Blood (1990), effectively ending the vampire panic in Europe…for a time.

In 1819, John William Polidori published The Vampyre, inspired by a Lord Byron poem. Byron came up with the idea during the same dark and stormy night that Mary Shelley conjured up the concept for Frankenstein.

Polidori’s novella follows a young man who encounters the mysterious and seemingly immortal Lord Ruthven. It was an immediate success upon publication. “John William Polidori unleashes the figure of the vampire, in all its aristocratic and privileged, rhetorically powerful and seductive, sexually potent...power,” says author Jan Capek. From there, the vampire became codified into what we commonly see now: an urbane, blood-drinking immortal.

Published in 1897, Stoker’s novel Dracula is a compendium of everything the barrister, writer and theater manager ever learned about vampire folklore.

Dracula has been viewed as the representation of different fears in the late Victorian era. The late 1800s saw an influx of discussion around contagious disease and medicine as a social and physical concern. Charlotte Stoker, Bram’s mother, had lived through a cholera outbreak in 1832 which she detailed to her son in 1875, likely inspiring his work.

Critics like David Glover argue Dracula also marked a turning point in representing changes to Britain as the 1900s arrived: “Economically by the Great Depression between 1873-96, and culturally by a pervasive sense that the high point of the Victorian era was now past.”

Early film studios were eager to adapt popular fiction. The small German studio Prana Films hired screenwriter Henrik Galeen to adapt Stoker’s novel for the big screen. The only problem? They didn’t have the rights to the book and Stoker’s widow, Florence, refused to sell them.

Instead, screenwriter Galeen created Nosferatu, altering the names of Stoker’s characters in an attempt to sidestep copyright. Count Dracula became Count Orlok, and the story took on a new dimension: Orlok arrives in Germany accompanied by swarms of rats, recasting the vampire as a harbinger of plague. Nosferatu also helped cement the popular trope that sunlight is a vampire’s greatest weakness.

Directed by F.W. Murnau and starring Max Schreck in the titular role, the movie was a success. But Florence Stoker sued the production company and demanded all the film prints be destroyed. Although the German courts ruled in her favor, copies of the movie survived.

Schreck’s performance endures as one of the most haunting depictions of the vampire, but some scholars interpret his design as antisemitic. Professor Tony Magistrale writes in Abject Terrors that Orlok plays into the idea at the time that Jewish people were carriers of disease as well as “invasion of the German homeland by an outside force.”

Nosferatu has inspired numerous reinterpretations, including Robert Eggers’ 2024 remake and Shadow of the Vampire (2000), a metafictional drama that playfully imagines Max Schreck as a real vampire on the movie’s set.

In 1930, Universal Studios acquired both the rights to Stoker’s novel and its successful stage adaptation.

Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi, who had been playing the role of Dracula onstage, lobbied for the film part and was cast in the lead. The film was shot over 36 days at Universal City in Los Angeles. “It is difficult to think of anybody who could quite match the performance in the vampire part of Bela Lugosi, even to the faint flavor of foreign speech that fits so neatly,” wrote a critic for Variety in 1931.

Dracula kickstarted a wave of Universal monster movies. It would also yield a Spanish-language version filmed at night on the same sets as Lugosi’s Dracula. Today, the character remains popular in movies with many sequels and adaptations.

Science fiction writer Richard Matheson released I Am Legend in 1954. The novel tells the story of a man who survives a pandemic and must navigate a world of flesh-eating vampires. Whether I Am Legend qualifies as a vampire story is debated. Although the monsters are pale, nocturnal bloodsuckers, they are also similar to zombies. (Director George Romero took inspiration from the novel for Night of the Living Dead in 1968.) The book, said to have been inspired by Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, situates the vampire in the world of the 1950s wherein one man, immune to disease, fights to survive.

I Am Legend was adapted into a movie in 1964 with Vincent Price in the starring role. The novel was adapted twice more: once with Charlton Heston as The Omega Man in 1970 and with Will Smith in 2007’s I Am Legend.

Vampires also found a home in daytime TV. "Dark Shadows," which aired from 1966 to 1971, introduced audiences to the brooding vampire Barnabas Collins, played by Jonathan Frid. Originally conceived as a Gothic soap opera, it blended melodrama, time travel and other supernatural elements. "Dark Shadows" helped pave the way for later character-driven vampire stories. Tim Burton adapted it into a feature film in 2012 starring Johnny Depp.

Because vampirism so often functions as a metaphor for outsiders and marginalized communities, it’s no surprise the Blaxploitation movement would embrace the genre. The 1972 film Blacula introduced what is widely considered the first Black vampire in film history, reframing Gothic horror through a Black cultural and historical lens.

Blacula’s success sparked a wave of Black-themed horror films in the early 1970s. Among them was director Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess (1973), a moody, avant-garde take on vampirism. The film stars Duane Jones as an anthropologist who becomes a vampire after being stabbed with a cursed dagger. Like Blacula, Ganja & Hess uses horror as allegory, positioning vampirism as a metaphor for struggles affecting Black communities, including addiction and cycles of dependency.

While grieving the loss of her daughter in 1973, Anne Rice turned to writing. She revisited a short story she’d started in the late-1960s and expanded it into Interview with the Vampire. The novel chronicles the life of vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac and his relationship with the arrogant Lestat. This was also the debut of a vampire child with the character of Claudia. Although it received mixed reviews upon publication, the novel quickly found a devoted audience. Rice expanded her richly imagined universe further with sequels including The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned.

Rice’s novels foregrounded intimacy and desire between male characters, pushing vampire fiction further into explicitly queer romantic territory. In the 1980s, films like The Lost Boys and Near Dark similarly flirted with homoerotic subtext involving blood-borne disease and male communities in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic. In 1994, a film adaptation of Interview was released with Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. The characters returned in 2020 when AMC released the Interview With the Vampire TV series.

Vampires remained a popular subgenre in the 1990s and 2000s, bolstered in part by the television phenomenon "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (1997–2003), which blended horror and teen drama.

In 2004, Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist published Let the Right One In, about a 12-year-old boy who becomes the companion of a centuries-old child vampire. The novel has spawned multiple adaptations, including a 2008 Swedish film and 2010 American remake.

The 2000s also saw a rise in romantic vampire-human relationships. In “Romancing the Vampire," Karen Backstein writes: “Across every medium, from books to films to television, today’s vampire…has transformed into an alluring combination of danger and sensitivity, a handsome romantic hero haunted by his lust for blood and his guilt for the humans he killed in the past.”

Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Mysteries book series (2001-2013), centered on Louisiana waitress Sookie Stackhouse and placed vampires amid murder, romance and small-town intrigue—later becoming the hit HBO series True Blood.

In 2003, Stephenie Meyer said the idea for her novel Twilight came to her in a dream. She spun that into the love story between vampire Edward Cullen and mortal Bella Swan. The book became a publishing phenomenon, spawning three sequels and a five-film blockbuster franchise. The era also saw the success of "The Vampire Diaries" (2009–2017), a teen-focused supernatural series that further cemented the vampire as a brooding romantic lead for a new generation.

Inspired by ’90s films like From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), The Faculty (1998) and Demon Knight (1995), director Ryan Coogler and star Michael B. Jordan crafted Sinners, about two brothers up against a gang of vampires. Unlike the Blaxploitation-era framework of Blacula, however, Sinners positions a white Irishman as its chief vampire, an outsider who attempts to insinuate himself into the community gathered at a local juke joint in 1930s Mississippi.

Coogler has pointed to the historical parallels underpinning that dynamic. “We being African Americans…forcibly removed from the continent of Africa…and the experience of the Irish people being forced to work land that has immeasurable abundance and wealth...the connections between the two cultures are really obvious to spot,” said Coogler, framing the film’s horror elements within a broader meditation on displacement, exploitation and cultural survival.