This Halloween season, television is indulging its dark side with new series such as AMC's Interview with the Vampire, SYFY's Reginald the Vampire, Peacock's Vampire Academy and Showtime's Let the Right One In. All are based on books or movies, as is FX's What We Do in the Shadows, whose four fang-tastic seasons are streaming on Hulu (more on that below). So draw the curtains and pour yourself a warm red one, because emmy is spotlighting TV's most memorable vampires — classic characters and series that will always be undead to us.
THE MUNSTERS
CBS, 1964–66
Fred Gwynne’s Herman — based on Frankenstein’s Monster — may be the most famous Munster, but Lily (Yvonne De Carlo) and Grandpa (Al Lewis) were both vampires in this satire of family sitcoms and monster movies. In fact, Grandpa was supposed to be the Count Dracula. Sophisticates may prefer The Addams Family for its tony origins (New Yorker cartoons!) and dry wit, but The Munsters scored higher ratings. We never saw these vampires drain a victim’s blood; the show’s harmless monsters were more focused on getting laughs than taking lives. Ironically, a bat sucked their ratings dry when Batman started airing opposite and won the Thursday night timeslot. Like good vampires, The Munsters rose from the dead again and again in assorted revivals and reboots.
DARK SHADOWS
ABC, 1966–71
Jonathan Frid’s Barnabas Collins is the O.G. of serious televampires, having staked his claim in the black-and-white terrain of the mid-‘60s. He reigned over Collinsport, Maine, for almost 600 daily episodes, prefiguring the soapy nature of the teen vampire shows that would follow decades later. Like them, Dark Shadows featured a variety of supernatural entities including witches, ghosts, werewolves, zombies and even that modern trope, a parallel universe. (Just one, though. No multiverses in Maine.) Ever a cult classic, creator Dan Curtis’s Dark Shadows has spawned two TV movies, two features, a short-lived remake starring the late Ben Cross, as well as a 2012 Tim Burton feature film starring Johnny Depp and Michelle Pfeiffer. Plus, of course, a daily newspaper comic strip and board games.
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER
The WB, UPN, 1997–2003
The vampire crypt lay largely undisturbed for two decades, but Joss Whedon’s adaptation of the 1992 movie he wrote (but didn’t direct) revitalized the supernatural on TV. It spawned spinoffs, imitations, something called “the Buffy-verse” and a significant number of academic papers and courses. Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy reluctantly embraced her destiny as a “slayer” and fought vampires and other supernatural creatures. (Her high school was perched atop a “Hellmouth” that drew deviltry to her doorstep.) Blending comedy, horror, romance and sheer lunacy — so many demons! So much evil! — the soapy series spoke to teens and young adults. One of her exes, a quasi-reformed vampire named Angel, was spun off into his own show.
ANGEL
The WB, 1999–2004
Long before he met Buffy, David Boreanaz’s Angel was a very bad Irish vampire, but after being cursed with a human soul, he rediscovered remorse and changed his ways. Helping Buffy battle evil on her show led to romance (doesn’t it always?), but when the love was gone, Angel moved to Los Angeles to work as a private detective. He ran into vampires there, plus werewolves, zombies, ghosts and plenty of just plain bad people. Buffy writer-producer Marti Noxon called L.A. “a pretty competitive, intense town, where a lot of lonely, isolated and desperate people end up. It’s a good place for monsters.” Comparing Angel to Buffy, Joss Whedon noted, “It’s a little bit more straight-forward action show and a little bit more of a guys’ show.”
TRUE BLOOD
HBO, 2008–14
Alan Ball adapted Charlaine Harris’s bestselling Southern Vampire Mysteries books into this sex-and blood-soaked show, which was among premium cable’s top hits in its era. Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) was a psychic, half-fairy waitress living in a world where synthetic “Tru Blood” let vampires live without killing mortals. Vampires were divided into those seeking to assimilate into society and those wishing to stay wild, and humans were divided into those who believed vampires deserved human rights and those who wanted to destroy them. Deep societal metaphors ensued, as did soapy interspecies romances, most notably the charged love triangle between Sookie, Stephen Moyer’s Bill and Alexander Skarsgård’s Eric. Werewolves, witches, shapeshifters and other oddities abounded. A reboot is in the works.
BEING HUMAN
BBC, 2008–13; SYFY, 2011–14
A vampire, a werewolf and a ghost walk into a shared living arrangement. Putting aside the eternal antipathy between their kinds, vampire John (Guy Flanagan) and werewolf George (Russell Tovey) tried to cohabit among humans while refraining from their lethal habits. Mostly. As it happens, Annie the ghost (Andrea Riseborough) already lived in the flat, so they all had to get along. The horror comedy-drama was a hit on BBC Three, spawning a SYFY remake which found vampire Aidan (Sam Witwer) and werewolf Josh (Sam Huntington) working at a Boston-area hospital. Meaghan Rath played Sally the ghost. Other supernatural beings figured in, and humans were turned into werewolves and vampires, thus bringing assorted curses and spells into play. The show was among SYFY’s most popular with female viewers.
THE VAMPIRE DIARIES (AND SPINOFFS)
The CW, 2009–22
Hm…. Wonder why this premise was a hit. Orphaned teen Elena (Nina Dobrev) moves to Mystic Falls, Virginia, where she meets two preposterously hot vampire brothers and has — get this — no adult supervision! She falls for Paul Wesley’s broody nice guy Stefan, but who could resist Ian Somerhalder’s bad boy Damon? Turns out Elena looks just like a vampire they both loved when they were still human a century ago. Writer-producer Julie Plec teamed with Scream and Dawson’s Creek creator Kevin Williamson to develop what Rotten Tomatoes calls “one of the most addictive and action-packed” TV shows. Spinoff The Originals (2013-18) moved the action to New Orleans, and spinoff two, Legacies (2018–22), featured characters from both shows. Plec recently promised, “There will be another one.”
FROM DUSK TILL DAWN: THE SERIES
El Rey, 2014–16
When Robert Rodriguez launched his El Rey Network in 2014, he chose to reanimate his popular 1996 film as its first scripted series. D.J. Cotrona and Zane Holtz starred as the Gecko Brothers, replacing George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino (also the film’s screenwriter). “We couldn’t just put up my name with a project no one had ever heard of,” Rodriguez told emmy at the time. “We had to make a splash, we had to get people talking. And I knew lots of people loved the movie.” Finding vampires too European and seeking fanged creatures more relevant to El Rey, he plundered Aztec and Mayan mythologies and found the more serpentine culebras that inhabit the infamous, deadly strip club. Danny Trejo, from the film, even showed up.
VAN HELSING
SYFY 2016–21
In Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, Abraham Van Helsing hunts and kills the lead character. In this horror-fantasy series (no relation to the 2004 feature Van Helsing), Kelly Overton starred as Vanessa, his descendant. In a post-apocalyptic world where ash blocks sunlight, vampires have taken over the world (shades of The Walking Dead!). A quirk of her blood, however, lets her turn vampires back into humans. In later seasons “the Dark One” — the most senior of all vampires — occupied the body of Countess Olivia von Dracula (Tricia Helfer). Notably, show creator Neil LaBute, whose plays and movies have been called misogynistic, didn’t invent this genderswapping; it came from the graphic novels that inspired the show.
WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS
FX, 2019–now
Created by Jemaine Clement — who starred with the omnipresent Taika Waititi in the film of the same name — this bone-dry mockumentary follows four vampires sharing a house on Staten Island while half-heartedly hoping to conquer civilization. Harvey Guillén plays Guillermo, a human “familiar,” and Colin (Mark Proksch) is a modern innovation: an “energy vampire” who drains energy by being boring or annoying. (He’d be at home in any workplace comedy or real office.) Nominated for seventeen Emmys, including Outstanding Comedy Series in 2020 and 2022, the show has lured notable guest stars, including Fred Armisen, Mark Hamill, Nick Kroll, Wesley Snipes, Tilda Swinton and Danny Trejo as well as executive producers Clement and Waititi. Two more seasons are already on order.
HONORABLE MENTIONS: KOLCHAK THE NIGHT STALKER * DRACULA: THE SERIES * FOREVER KNIGHT * PORT CHARLES * ULTRAVIOLET * HELLSING * BLADE: THE SERIES * MOONLIGHT * BLOOD TIES * SHADOWHUNTERS * PREACHER * V WARS * FIRST KILL * FIREBITE
This article originally appeared in emmy magazine issue #10, 2022, under the title, "Fangs for the Memories."
