The Sexiest Movie Vampires

This article contains some spoilers for the 1985 movie, Lifeforce

Vampires! They seduce, they enrapture, they hunger for us, and sometimes that’s not 100 percent horrifying, even if it might mean our imminent demise. We humans are a complex sort in that way.

Though vampires are typically depicted as being smart, powerful, sexy, and slick, there are definitely some onscreen bloodsuckers who are just incredibly gross. These are not them.

Santanico Pandemonium – From Dusk Till Dawn

From Dusk Till Dawn has a lot going on. Half crime spree movie and half vampire carnage spectacular, you’re either onboard for the film’s sudden switcheroo or you’re heading for the nearest exit, but one thing that many of us can agree on after making it through the other side is that Salma Hayek can put her damn foot in our mouth if she wants to. Hayek only has a small role in the movie as Santanico Pandemonium, Vampire Queen of the Titty Twister bar, but it’s a memorable one that includes a sexy snake dance and using Quentin Tarantino as a shoe. “I’m not gonna drain you completely,” she tells George Clooney’s fugitive bank robber, Seth. “You’re gonna turn for me. You’ll be my slave. You’ll live for me.” Weirdly, Seth doesn’t just simply say “yes, ma’am” and chain himself to the nearest radiator, which is perhaps the least believable thing in the movie.

A younger version of Santanico returned in a prequel called From Dusk till Dawn 3: The Hangman’s Daughter, but since only about 12 people in the world have seen that troubling backstory, we’re focusing on (and celebrating) her brief time as played by Hayek here. 

David Powers – The Lost Boys

Kiefer Sutherland has never turned the charm dial up as far as he did in Joel Schumacher’s 1987 teen horror classic, The Lost Boys. His sneering David utilizes all the weapons in his arsenal against the impressionable and new-to-town Michael Emerson (Jason Patric) in his efforts to add another vamp to his growing gang of bloodsucking Santa Carla cave-dwelling bastards.

Negging? Check. Peer pressure? Check? Swaggering around with Big Bike Energy, oblivious to the fact that he’s sporting one of the worst mullets in cinematic history? Triple check, locked and loaded. David’s seduction of Michael is so palpably hungry it drools off the screen. As a result, we’d almost certainly eat his lukewarm Chinese takeout, even if it really was maggots and worms. 

Selene – Underworld

At some stage in the early 2000s, a bunch of people sat down in a room and decided to dot the i’s and lower case j’s on the concept of putting Kate Beckinsale in a full black PVC-coated spandex catsuit for the first in what would be a string of vampire action movies. It’s fair to say those people were geniuses and deserved some kind of special award, because sweet baby Jesus and the orphans.

Beckinsale’s Selene (inspired by the Marvel Comics character created by Chris Claremont and Sal Buscema) may be an elite, cold-eyed vampire assassin who won’t often think twice about murdering you with a pair of guns in slow motion, but unlike many of her kind, she is open to spicing things up by admitting that werewolves are really hot, and that makes her a trailblazer of her era. Selene is truly vampire cinema’s reigning “don’t knock it until you’ve tried it” mommy. 

Lestat and Louis – Interview with the Vampire

Though Lestat and Louis weren’t quite as gay as they could have been in this film adaptation of Anne Rice’s popular tome Interview with the Vampire (a tragedy fixed by the recent AMC version of the novel) these two vamps, traveling through time and all the stages of a weird and beautifully terrifying relationship, were uniquely played by two of the hottest actors on the planet in Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise.

During one of the movie’s key scenes, Cruise’s Lestat drains Pitt’s Louis to the point of death and asks him to make a choice: “will you come, or no?” He does, but spends the next century mired in the most depressing post-nut clarity ever committed to celluloid. Still, he gets to go to Paris! Swings and roundabouts?

At the time, this was a really risky part for Cruise, who had largely shied away from villainous roles, and it’s still pretty wild to see him chew the scenery opposite the maudlin Pitt. They do make for a really attractive duo, veins and all, and that’s before you even add peak Antonio Banderas into the mix.

Akasha – Queen of the Damned

Queen of the Damned was a standalone sequel to Interview with the Vampire, replacing Cruise with a new actor as Lestat and casting singer Aaliyah as a villainous OG vampire called Akasha, who is suddenly awoken after a really, really long nap by Lestat’s successful rock music career at a time when Korn, Static-X, and Disturbed were all the rage.

Though the movie was received poorly by critics, it’s gone on to be a bit of a cult classic for fans of the genre, and that’s thanks in no small part to Aaliyah’s delicious performance as Akasha. Sadly, Aaliyah died in a plane crash about six months before the film was released, but it did manage to capture her in a bold new light before her passing.

Jerry Dandrige – Fright Night

Shady vampire next door Jerry Dandrige has been portrayed in live action twice. The first was in 1985 where he was played by Chris Sarandon, and the second was more recently in 2011 when Fright Night got a pretty decent remake and Colin Farrell stepped into the role. But we’re not here to waste your time by telling you that Colin Farrell is sexy, and as good a job as Farrell did as Dandrige by donning a white vest, flexing his muscles, and looking cool as hell, he just wasn’t battling the terrible ephemera of the ’80s like Sarandon, who had to deal with being dressed in rayon sweaters, white turtlenecks, and the kind of macs you’d typically associate with someone not allowed within 100 yards of a school playground – and he STILL managed to exude hotness at every turn. That’s real vampire showmanship! Sorry, Colin.

Adam and Eve – Only Lovers Left Alive

Two impossibly attractive vampires (Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston) are in the midst of an existential crisis in Only Lovers Left Alive. There’s way more indie navel gazing going on here than the other characters on this list would care to contemplate, but the pair are still incredibly beautiful as they wilt over each other after centuries of marriage and boredom.

Adam and Eve (yes) are reliant on pure blood from the olden days to survive, and are imbued with some fear that if they feast on regular 21st century folk, they’ll die from contamination. The whole thing is really languid, and we end up with a fascinatingly modern Adam and Eve who aren’t even trying to be sexy – it’s straight up intoxicating, natural charisma. And that’s sexy.

All of Them – Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Gary Oldman’s iconic OG vamp isn’t always the sexiest one in Bram Stoker’s Dracula; he’s mainly just terrifying, but his brides (the beautiful Monica Bellucci among them) and the newly devoured Lucy Westenra (Sadie Frost) deliver in spades. Director Francis Ford Coppola uses old school movie magic, practical effects, and buckets of blood to unnerve and shock us in his adaptation of Stoker’s classic tale, but the raunchiness of the film’s female vampires still manages to raise quite a few extra eyebrows.

Lucy’s journey is particularly erotic (and problematic). She is first seduced and bitten by Dracula in werewolf form [this better not awaken anything in me dot gif] before lying around in bed for a good chunk of the movie acting either deathly ill or unbearably horny, writhing and moaning while a trio of handsome suitors look on.

It’s clear that dear, sweet Lucy needs to be put out of her misery, but back in Transylvania we have Keanu Reeves, whose performance (and accent) as protagonist Jonathan Harker is so irredeemable that when he’s almost eaten by Drac’s trio of hungry ladies, we’re tempted to give them our full support. Girls gotta eat!

Count Dracula – Hotel Transylvania 

Now, hold up. We have our reasons for including the Count here, and if you hear us out, it’ll make some kinda sense. Drac (voiced by Adam Sandler) might not be the first one that springs to mind when it comes to sexy movie vampires. Yes, he is animated, and therefore a questionable choice from the outset, and yes, maybe if you’re younger you might be more keen on the immediate attractiveness offered by an Edward Cullen or a Selene, but priorities change, bro!

Drac is a family-oriented, protective, and caring widow who runs his own successful business. He is arguably the ultimate Daddy Vamp, and we’d feel much safer in the confines of his hotel than any of the lairs frequented by the other bloodsuckers on this list. Some of us just yearn for security, and that’s okay. 

Space Girl – Lifeforce

Mathilda May’s character in Cannon’s 1985 flop-turned-cult classic Lifeforce doesn’t even have a name, but when you’re a beautiful, naked space lady leading a vampire plague intent on sucking the life out of Earth to fuel your comet barnacle spaceship, do you really need to put a label on things?? Absolutely not!

May’s extremely believable full frontal thrall over every person she encounters in the flick will have you saying, “This makes me want to impale myself with an ancient weapon of leaded iron, which will release a burst of energy that blows open the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, allowing me to ascend to a weird spaceship full of desiccated bat creatures and return to the comet with her.” Probably.

Edward Cullen – Twilight

The Twilight series’ lead vampire Edward Cullen (played by a dashing, pale, and angular Robert Pattinson) is for the most part a terrible big screen vampire. He’s out during the day. He glitters. He makes barfy faces to indicate he’s attracted to his crush. He’s just plain weird! And that’s before we get to the part where he’s old as dirt but romancing a teen. So why the devil should he make the list of the sexiest movie vampires? Well, despite all that, he’s still friggin Robert Pattinson, and we’re only human. Not the first time those words have been uttered in defense of these movies, and certainly not the last.