Vampire movies have not had the best year in 2022. From the Marvel Sony movie Morbius, which got terrible reviews, to the Netflix original Day Shift, which critics said brought nothing new to the table, the wait for a great new vampire movie continues. However, in many cases, all it takes is trying something new to break out of the pack of this crowded horror genre.
Vampire tales have been around for a very long time, but it was Bram Stoker’s tale of Dracula that made them so popular in the modern era. This led to a movie adaptation of the novel, and then the tropes Stoker created mostly stuck. With that said, it is often when movies break these tropes that something special happens and the movies rise to something unique.
Vampires Are The Undead – Morbius (2022)
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Morbius received some of the worst reviews of any comic book movie in a long time. However, the movie did something with the vampire genre that helped it stand out somewhat, even if the rest of the movie didn’t follow its lead. Michael Morbius was not one of the undead.
The biggest trope in vampire movies is that the vampires were formerly humans who died and returned as bloodsucking fiends. Even in Blade, he became a half-vampire after his mother died giving birth. However, Morbius got his powers from vampire bats and subverted the old trope of dying first.
Vampires Are Seductive – 30 Days Of Night (2007)
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One of the biggest tropes in most vampire movies is how seductive they are. Sometimes, the human character falls in love with the vampire, or in the case of Dracula, the vampire seeks to reunite with his lost love.
There is absolutely nothing seductive about the vampires in 30 Days of Night. These vampires don’t want love and no one would want to live these grotesque creatures that rule in this Alaskan town. These are just monsters who relentlessly kill, almost more like fast-moving zombies than vampires.
Sunlight Kills Vampires – Dracula (1931)
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One of the biggest tropes in vampire movies is that they can not go into the sunlight. This actually played a big role in the Blade movies, as he was a Day Walker and that gave him an advantage over the other vampires. However, this trope did not come from Dracula. This came from Nosferatu.
Dracula actually subverted this trope right off the bat, but other future movies kept it as part of the vampire lore. In Dracula, the Prince of Darkness could walk in the daylight, and it didn’t kill him like it did other vampires in the franchise, although he could not use his powers in the sunlight.
Vampires Are Children Of The Night – Underworld (2003)
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In most vampire movies, the vampires are children of the night, coming out and hunting their prey in the dark of the cities. However, Underworld threw that completely out the window. While they still avoided the sunlight, they were not creatures preying on humans.
In the Underworld movie franchise, the vampires changed from the children of the night to armed and deadly warriors. They were soldiers and not monsters hunting their prey. With guns and scientists creating weapons to kill werewolves, this was a new era of vampires.
Vampires Are Bitten – Thirst (2009)
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The vampires in most movies and TV shows have one trope that has become almost a law for the genre. A vampire bites someone, and that person turns into a vampire. That was not what happened in the Korean vampire movie Thirst. This movie by Park Chan-wook completely subverted the vampire genre.
A priest volunteers at a hospital and offers his ministry to patients. However, he develops a fatal disease but is cured almost completely thanks to a blood transfusion. However, that blood transfusion turns him into a vampire. The movie then takes on the form of a conflict of faith and gets very dark before the conclusion.
Crosses Hurt Vampires – Blade (1998)
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Blade did a lot to dispel a lot of vampire tropes in movies, and it mocked many of them. During the first movie, people asked about certain ways to hurt or kill vampires, but Blade explained that most of what people have read in books and seen in movies was wrong.
One of these tropes that Blade subverted was the idea that crosses can hurt vampires. All the way back to Dracula, crosses were used to keep Dracula back, and he couldn’t do anything as long as it was there. In Blade, this was one of many things that had no effect on vampires, making them even harder to kill.
Vampires Are Repelled By Garlic – The Lost Boys (1987)
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One interesting weakness for vampires when it comes to the old-school tropes was that vampires repelled the monsters. In Dracula, garlic was placed all around the rooms to keep a vampire from entering. It was also something that could kill a vampire if they digested it.
The Lost Boys not only subverted this trope but did it in a very funny way. The Frog Brothers came over for dinner, hoping to expose the evil vampire that ruled the town, and they added lots of garlic to his dinner. The vampire began choking. Just when it looked like they were right, he just said it was too much. It turned out this was a vampire weakness that didn’t exist in this world.
Calling Them Vampires – Near Dark (1987)
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In most fiction, people know what vampires are based on legends. Even if they call them bloodsucking fiends, or by other slang titles, they still know them as vampires.
In Kathryn Bigelow’s classic vampire movie Near Dark, they do not use the word vampire one time. The Lost Boys, released the same year, loved to play with vampire lore, but Near Dark kept things serious and didn’t play into the lore of the vampire, instead just making these characters a family living on the edge of society.
Only Stakes Through the Hearts – From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)
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The biggest trope for beating a vampire involves driving a stake through their hearts. Watch any vampire movie or an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the fights usually rage on until the hero finally gets the wooden stake driven through the vampire’s chest.
In the Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez vampire movie, From Dusk Till Dawn, they didn’t care about the wooden stakes. When the Gecko brothers were trapped in the vampire bar, they used anything they could get their hands on to kill vampires, and the demons died just as easily from a gunshot as anything else.
Need Permission To Enter A Home – Twilight (2008)
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Twilight is not a movie that many fans of vampire movies care about much. Geared more toward the young adult crowd, this series was a supernatural romantic drama about a teenage girl who fell in love with a 100-year-old vampire. There was a lot that Twilight did to subvert the vampire genre, including the results of sunlight exposure.
However, one other area it subverted was done subtly. In vampire fiction, they can’t enter someone’s home without permission. This was shown in a horrifying manner in Salem’s Lot with the floating young vampire. However, Edward straight up told Bella that he had been sneaking into her room and watching her sleep, never once even announcing his presence.
