These 9 vampire shows slay it like ‘What We Do in Shadows’
“What We Do in the Shadows” has risen from the coffin. In honor of the vampire-centric FX series having recently returned for its fourth season, sink your teeth into these nine other fang-tastic shows.
‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and ‘Angel’:
“Buffy,” starring Sarah Michelle Gellar as a teenage girl fated to fight the world’s demons, and its spinoff, “Angel,” which focused on the brooding vampire (David Boreanaz) and his motley crew of sidekicks, are the go-to in vampire shows. They’re dramatic in the most ’90s high school drama sense and feature different villains, with a “Big Bad” to carry each season. A forbidden love? Oozy, evil, creepy monsters? More apocalypses than you can count? “Buffy” and “Angel” have it all. (Hulu)
‘True Blood’: It’s a tough competition, but “True Blood” takes home the trophy for the horniest of all the vampire shows. A Louisiana waitress (Anna Paquin) who can read minds suddenly finds herself in the middle of the war between vampires who want to assimilate into society and those who still prefer to hunt humans, even with the advent of synthetic blood. But don’t let the fight for equality fool you: “True Blood” was also about love and lust. (HBO)
‘Vampire Diaries’:
“Vampire Diaries” was more about teen drama than bloodsuckers. But a love triangle gets messy when two sides are vampires — and brothers. As the seasons went on, the supernatural came out in full force in Mystic
Falls, adding werewolves, witches and who knows what else to the town roster. (Netflix)
‘Chapelwaite’: The TV adaptation of Stephen King’s “Jerusalem’s Lot” took a while to get to the vampires, instead letting Captain Charles Boone (Adrien Brody) and his children face their internal demons first. But by the time the vampires show up, there’s a Gothic, bloody showdown to make it worth the wait. (Epix)
‘Dracula’: The series starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers saw Dracula moving throughout London society pretending to be an American entrepreneur who wants to bring modern science to Victorian England.
His real motivations are taking down a mysterious, power-hungry organization that ruined his life when he was alive, but a woman gets in his way. “Dracula” was melodrama at its finest, for all 10 episodes it lasted. (Amazon Prime Video for purchase)
‘The Strain’: “The Strain” was a stomach-turning nightmare that’s even more nightmarish after a pandemic, truly a Guillermo del Toro special. The series kicks off with Dr. Ephraim Goodweather
(Corey Stoll), the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s New York-based Canary Project, as his team begins an investigation into a viral outbreak that looks a whole lot like vampirism. By the end, there’s a full-on war between humans and vampires. (Hulu)
‘Dark Shadows’: “Dark Shadows” was one of the first popular TV shows, a daytime soap opera that began in black-and-white and moved into color. But that wasn’t the biggest change to the series: 10 months after its premiere, “Dark Shadows” added a vampire to its wealthy Collins family, the fanfavorite Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid). With Collins’ awakening, the show opened up its world to all sorts of supernatural occurrences, and it went on for more than 1,200 episodes. (Tubi)
‘Preacher’: A preacherin-training merges with the spawn of an angel and a demon, then teams up with his ex-girlfriend and his best friend, who just happens to be a vampire, to find God. “Preacher” was bizarre in the best way and gorier than you could imagine, pulling off its comedic elements without forgetting the supernatural and vice versa. (Hulu)