The 16 worst vampire films of all time, ranked

There are a lot of good ideas in . Thrusting the infamous Count into the 2000s provides plenty of opportunities for new scares, like him not showing up on camera as well as in mirrors. Plus, revealing he is an aged Judas Iscariot surprisingly makes some sense. But from the title to the effects to the editing, the movie has aged horribly. Vampire actors Gerard Butler and Omar Epps never feel intimidating, and the jump scares soon get tiring, too.

has all the excellent John Carpenter-isms you’ve come to expect. The soundtrack (which includes rockin’ slide guitars befitting of its neo-Western setting) and practical effects are reliably brilliant. However, as he plays a leather-clad vampire hunter in New Mexico, James Woods proves a deeply unlikeable protagonist. Such additions to vampire lore as the monsters being able to get gunned down also rob them of their scariness. Carpenter’s had worse days at the office than this, but it won’t leave much impact either.

We’ve put low on this list because it is a legitimately fun watch—just for all the wrong reasons. The story, which was the first original screenplay Stephen King ever wrote, is incomprehensible, meshing the silliest bits of the vampire and werewolf myths with a distressing amount of incest. The acting’s unbelievable, the CGI’s trash and the dialogue is horrid, yet the nonsense flies so thick and fast that it makes this movie hilarious. Grab your friends and relish the schadenfreude.

Given that it’s a horror-comedy directed by Wes Craven two years before he made Scream, you’d expect to be a deftly handled send-up of nosferatu cliches. Instead, star Eddie Murphy—playing a Caribbean vampire who’s come to America, if you will—jerks between surreal impressions of preachers and criminals, while also trying to be a chilling villain on top. Needless to say it doesn’t work: the comedy proves annoying, which only undermines the “scary” scenes. At least the practical effects are good.

Both for better and worse, plays out like a feature-length music video. The movie’s heavy rock soundtrack, largely centered around Korn singer Jonathan Davis, still has a cult fanbase of metalheads, as does the lavish goth aesthetic. On the other hand, the performances and writing are often ludicrous, trying far too hard to seem poetic or badass.

Like its contemporary, Queen Of The Damned, looks nice, flaunting a gorgeously dark gothic style and some rich costume designs. That said, this vampires-versus-werewolves showdown is excessively dense with exposition which over-explains and overcomplicates what could have just been an enjoyable bout of monster-on-monster violence. All the excessive mythologizing lets the movie evolve into a massive saga, off which director Len Wiseman and star Kate Beckinsale doubtlessly made bank, but none of the sequels or prequels are particularly good, either.

In his first lead role, a 23-year-old Jim Carrey played a teenage virgin-turned-vampire in . As a result, he continually looks out of place in an ’80s comedy that has no idea whom it’s for. While sex is a key theme and there’s adult language, there are “comedic” scenes that boil down to nothing more than lame, Three Stooges-wannabe chases and Carrey hissing at children. At least The Mask, Dumb And Dumber and Ace Ventura were still to come, eh?

This young-adult fantasy put the nail in the coffin (get it?) of the vampire’s mainstream post-Twilight credibility. Centered around a teenage “half vampire” played by Chris Massoglia, is constantly awkward, due to the lead’s lack of chemistry with his romantic interest (Jessica Carlson) and fellow “freak” Evra Von (Patrick Fugit). Plus there’s the frantic camerawork and editing. The film evokes flashbacks to all of your cringiest tween social interactions, and not in a nostalgic way.

1998’s Blade helped the superhero genre turn a corner into darker, more adult storytelling and legitimized Marvel as a movie studio. Wesley Snipes played a compellingly mysterious badass in one of his signature roles, but the problem is that a stony visage gets dull fast. By , the series was spinning its wheels, despite the presence of the ever-charismatic Ryan Reynolds and the seemingly ante-upping inclusion of Count Dracula. All of this is mere window dressing, though, and the movie’s just boring.

Although will always have its staunch defenders, the movie and subsequent franchise reduced the bloodsucking hellspawn to an angsty teenager who sparkled in the sunshine. That crime is enough to make it a bad vampire movie, but the stiff performances and dumb writing simply make it a bad movie regardless of genre, period. As the series progressed, it just got worse and worse, striking a nadir with the long-ridiculed “It was all a dream!” twist that closed the finale.

Famously one of the biggest dropped balls in modern horror, could have been a cornily fun monster mash that showed Hugh Jackman beating the crap out of Dracula, werewolves, and Jekyll and Hyde for 90 minutes. Instead, this Stephen Sommers-directed flick robs itself of its own promise. Jackman does his best, but not even his charisma can sustain us through the scrambled plot, that bloated two-hour runtime, and an over-the-top stab at the Count by Richard Roxburgh. Shame.

Even though the first 30 Days Of Night was far from perfect, it was at least buoyed by a novel premise: vampires attack a town so far north that it can go up to a month at a time without seeing the sun. ditches both that element and the original graphic novel, leaving us with a generic story about hunting a vampire queen, not to mention uninspired directing, dry acting, and manic cinematography. What a waste of time.

By 2009, James Corden and Mathew Horne were major TV stars in the U.K., catapulted to fame by the sitcom Gavin & Stacey. While you can’t blame the pair for trying to parlay that success into a movie career, Lesbian Vampire Killers is an immature romp about killing sexy gay women in a desperate bid to appeal to lowest-common-denominator teenage boys. It’s leeringly horny, never funny and, with its foul-mouthed “humor,” strips away at the wholesome image that Corden especially was trying to create for himself.

This bizarre and ultra-cheap-looking DVD flick is obviously a cash-in on Twilight, given that vampire-human romance is a key theme. However, beyond that, is incomprehensible, centered around a horde of bloodsuckers preying on a town and fighting the illuminati, or something? What makes it even worse is that—with the flat lighting, jarring soundtrack, and uninvested performances—you’d assume half the movie was plucked from the outtakes of a soap opera. Oh, and the effects suck.

It’s an Uwe Boll movie—enough said. Joining the director’s series of piss-poor video game adaptations (which also includes House Of The Dead and Alone In The Dark), turns a hack-and-slasher about a Nazi-hunting vampire into a sloppy medieval fantasy. All potential for badassery is squandered by a disloyal script, unlikeable characters and some of the worst wigs ever caught on film. Factor in an incoherent plot and not a single actor caring about their job and you get an irredeemable failure.

Towards the end of the 2000s, parody died. Directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer flooded the market with their crappily written and lame-looking cash-ins, which enjoyed using the name recognition of established properties without actually saying anything funny about them. was mercifully released towards the end of this string of knock-offs veiled as “comedies,” but that doesn’t make it any better. If anything—with its persistently witless attempts at jokes and countless dated references—it marks the nadir of both the comedy and vampire genres. Being slowly turned into a blood-craving demon of the night would actually be less painful than sitting through this again.