[Editorial] 9 of the Creepiest Alternative Vampires in Horror

Vampires are one of the earliest examples of classic horror creatures. From Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) to the black and white silent film Nosferatu (1922), vampires have been terrifying horror fans for decades.

Vampires feed on blood, they don’t like the sunlight, and they’re not particularly fond of religious imagery or silver. There are a bunch of rules we’re familiar with that make it easy to recognise a vampire from 10 paces. However, sometimes all of those rules don’t apply, and we’re left with something which is almost a vampire but not quite as we know them!

So, let’s check out nine of the best alternative vampires to ever grace the world of horror!

9. All Cheerleaders Die (2013)

Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson’s high school horror, All Cheerleaders Die, follows what happens when a cheerleading squad is killed in a traffic accident. Fellow student, Leena, sees the accident and decides to bring the cheerleaders back using witchcraft and magic stones.

The cheerleaders are brought back to life, and everything seems normal until it turns out they have a taste for blood. This means they need to drain other humans to survive, which makes them stand out to their fellow high school students pretty quickly, but it is also handy for getting revenge on those who caused their accident.

8. Lifeforce (1985)

The only thing better than vampires is alien vampires, as Tobe Hooper’s cult classic Lifeforce proves. After finding an abandoned spaceship floating in space, a research team discovers three humans and a bunch of weird-looking bats inside. The team decides to take them back to Earth to investigate, but when the woman of the discovered group wakes up, she quickly drains the life force of anyone she comes into contact with.

Not only that, but once a human has been attacked by the vampire aliens, they come back to life and need to drain others themselves to stay alive. The vampires are also able to shapeshift, making them very difficult to track down and kill.

7. Rabid (1977)

After getting into a motorcycle accident, Rose is transported to a local hospital where a plastic surgeon decides to try out an experimental procedure on her. Rose awakens and the procedure seems to have worked, but she is overcome by a hunger that causes her to feed on others and drink their blood..

While Rose doesn’t always kill her victims, her biting  infects them, causing them to turn into zombie-type creatures. Because of this, Rose’s infection spreads so quickly that it causes an apocalypse-like event that threatens to wipe out humanity.

6.  What We Do in the Shadows TV Series (2019)

In a spinoff from the hilarious movie from 2014, What We Do in the Shadows follows a group of vampires living together in a gothic mansion. While three of the vampires are your standard bloodsucking fiends, there’s also Colin Robinson, an energy vampire. 

Colin doesn’t tend to kill his victims. Instead, he works in a boring office job and sucks the joy out of all of his coworkers by being the most boring and incredibly frustrating person alive. Colin can go out in the daylight, and appears mostly human, but chooses to live with his fellow vampires for a sense of community.

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5. NOS4A2 (2013)

NOS4A2 by horror author Joe Hill has been turned into a TV series, but as I’ve only read the brilliant book, I thought it would be best to use that as my example. The villain of the tale is Charlie Manx, an immortal vampire creature who drains the life force from children by driving them around in his magical car.

The longer the children spend in Manx’s car, the more he is able to feed off them, before dumping the twisted remains of their souls in a place called Christmasland. When Manx hasn’t fed for a while, he starts to look old, but a short ride in his car with a new victim quickly restores his youth.

4. Bliss (2019)

Dezzy is a struggling artist who is desperate to try anything she can to cure her artistic block. After heading to her drug dealer looking for a solution, he provides her with a new drug called bliss, which Dezzy instantly gets hooked on. 

However, it seems like something else is going on as well. In addition to waking up to find her painting almost finished, Dezzy appears to be developing a taste for blood. Bliss may seem like a standard vampire story, but it keeps you guessing right until the end as to whether Dezzy is actually becoming a vampire or if her drug addiction is simply taking over her life. 

3. Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island (1998)

It’s never too early to introduce your kids to horror, and Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island is the perfect mix of loveable characters and real-life scares. The Scooby Gang head to Moonscar Island to investigate a case of pirate zombies, but soon get more than they bargained for. 

They soon discover that the zombies are real, but they were created by a group of werecats, who drain the lifeforce from their victims to keep up their immortality and maintain their youth. In fact, the zombies aren’t bad at all and have been trying to warn the Scooby Gang so they can avoid the same fate.

2. Doctor Sleep (2019)

A sequel to The Shining (1980), Doctor Sleep heads back into the life of Danny Torrance as he deals with his psychic powers as an adult. Through his powers, he makes friends with Abra, a very powerful young girl who has been tracking a group of energy vampires called the True Knot. Abra has accidentally connected with the group’s leader, Rose the Hat, and teams up with Danny to try and stop Rose from killing any more children.

Rose and the True Knot use their powers to find children across America who also have psychic powers and then murder them in the most brutal way possible, so they can extract the maximum life force from them as they die. Without this life force, the members of the True Knot eventually start to age, before disappearing from existence altogether.

1. Sleepwalkers (1992)

In a plot quite similar to Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, Sleepwalkers follows a mother and son team of werecats who need to feed on the life force of virgins to survive. As they move from town to town, Charles heads out to seduce a local virgin, before returning to share the meal with his mother.

However, when they move to the small town of Travis, and Charles tries his best to win over high school student, Tanya, he gets more of a fight than he bargained for. There’s also the small matter that cats hate the werecats, and stake out their house hoping to get the chance to attack them. This leads to a hilarious showdown between the two types of cats, where one of the werecats bursts into flames after getting scratched by a domestic cat.

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