Growing pains with fangs.
The teenage years feel like a horror movie already. The alienation, the hormones, the constant sense that something inside you is changing into something else. Vampire movies understand this better than most genres. They take that beastly transition and make it literal.
The best teen vampire movies don’t just deliver scares. They channel the awkwardness of high school, the pressure of fitting in, and the terror of first love. The Lost Boys gets it right. A town with the nation’s highest murder rate. A carnival that never sleeps. A gang of cycle-riding vampires who never seem to age past eighteen. Even Kevin would admit that’s cool. Probably while rolling his eyes.
Think of it this way. Kevin the Teenager from Kevin and Perry Go Large stomps around complaining that life is unfair and nobody understands him. Give that kid fangs and a coffin. Same energy. Same whining about wanting to stay out later. The Undertones wrote “Teenage Kicks” for a reason. Those kicks are hard to find when you also have to hide from sunlight and explain why you keep missing breakfast.
Fright Night takes the Eighties kid-on-a-quest formula and adds genuine tension. No parents. Just a washed-up actor and a lot of wooden stakes. Evil Ed, the pitiful loser turned bloodthirsty minion, steals every scene. He is basically Kevin after one bad day.
Then the darker entries. The Transfiguration. Milo believes he is a vampire. What he really is is a lonely child romanticising the lone predator. My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To traps three siblings in daily drudgery. The word “vampire” never appears. It doesn’t need to.
Even the 1992 Buffy deserves a spot. Kristy Swanson flirts with Luke Perry while staking bloodsuckers. Rutger Hauer as prom king. Paul Reubens as a vampire. Dated. Hilarious. And way more fun than being grounded by your parents.
If you want teenage vampire movies that respect both the horror and the coming-of-age metaphor, start here. These five films understand that growing up can be its own kind of bloodlust. So unfair. Brilliant, though.
Those teenage years can be beastly! A lot of vampire movies channel the alienation, hormones, angst and general misbehaviour into a cautionary tale about teeth. Here are some of our favourites.
5. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)
Back in ’92, Rutger Hauer and Paul Reubens played vampires (thank you!) bent on draining a California town. But one superficial mean girl at the local high school happens to be the Chosen One, the Slayer, or so says Donald Sutherland, and it generally seems like a fine idea to listen to him. Kristy Swanson then flirts with Luke Perry while training to stake some bloodsuckers.
Swanson is joined by Ben Affleck and Hilary Swank as vacuous teens in a highly dated but no less fun horror comedy. Reubens was a huge inspiration for our own short film Drunkula. Plus, anytime you crown Rutger Hauer prom king, you can count us in.
4. The Lost Boys (1987)
Out and proud Hollywood director Joel Schumacher spins a yarn of Santa Carla, a town with a perpetual coastal carnival and the nation’s highest murder rate. A roving band of cycle-riding vampires haunts the carnival and accounts for the carnage, until Diane Weist moves her family to town. While hottie Michael (Jason Patric) is being seduced into the demon brethren, younger brother Sam (Corey Haim) teams up with local goofballs the Frog brothers (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander) to stake all bloodsuckers.
Michael’s a recent high school grad, and the coven of vampires seems to also be allegedly the same roundabout age. Certainly Sam and the Frog Brothers would be high school age, although none of them turn. (Spoiler!)
What’s most fun about this movie is how gloriously gay it is, from the “will he or won’t he” chemistry between Michael and David to Sam’s Rob Lowe poster to the grinding sax man, Schumacher’s film finds sexuality in the vampire tale that swings.
For a different take on The Lost Boys, check out Kit Power’s
The Lost Boys: Kill Your Brother
3. Fright Night (1985)
Fright Night takes that Eighties, Goonies-style adventure (kids on an adult-free quest of life and death) and uses the conceit to create something tense and scary, and a bit giddy as well. The feature debut as both writer and director for Tom Holland, the film has some sly fun with the vampire legend.
Roddy McDowall got much deserved love at the time for his turn as a washed-up actor from horror’s nostalgic past, and Chris Sarandon put his rich baritone to campy, sinister use.
Still, everyone’s favorite character was Evil Ed, the manic, pitiful loser turned bloodsucking minion. Credit Stephen Geoffreys for an electric and, at least in one scene, heartbreaking performance.
2. My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To (2020)
Making an unnervingly assured feature film debut, writer/director Jonathan Cuartas commingles The Transfiguration’s image of lonely, awkward adolescence with Relic’s horror of familial obligation to create a heartbreaking new vampire tale.
Many things are left unsaid (including the word “vampire’), and My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To confines itself to the daily drudgery of three siblings. Dwight (Patrick Fugit) longs to break these family chains, but sister Jessie (Ingrid Sophie Schram) holds him tight with shame, love, and obligation to little brother, the afflicted Thomas (Owen Campbell).
What could easily have become its own figurative image of the masculine longing for freedom mines far deeper concerns. Cuartas weaves loneliness into that freedom, tainting the concept of independence with a terrifying, even dangerous isolation that leaves you with no one to talk to and no way to get away from yourself.
1. The Transfiguration (2016)
Milo likes vampire movies.
So, it would seem, does writer/director Michael O’Shea, whose confident feature debut shows us the relationship between the folklore and the life of a forlorn high school outcast.
Eric Ruffin plays Milo, a friendless teen who believes he is a vampire. What he is really is a lonely child who finds solace in the romantic idea of this cursed, lone predator. But he’s committed to his misguided belief.
O’Shea’s film borrows ideas from George Romero’s Martin, Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In, and openly gushes over Murnau’s Nosferatu. Inside and out, the film draws on the best in vampire cinema to help Milo deal with a world in which he is a freak no matter what he decides to do.
Jim "The Don" Mcleod has been reading horror for over 35 years, and reviewing horror for over 16 years. When he is not spending his time promoting the horror genre, he is either annoying his family or mucking about with his two dogs Casper and Molly.
