8 Greatest Vampire TV Shows

What is it about immortal beings with an insatiable hunger for blood that has captured our imaginations for so many years? Vampires have moved from folk legend to literature to cinema to television and from horror to fantasy to somewhere in between, and yet their popularity remains undiminished. TV may be their newest home (although not as new as you might think), but it has reinvented and reimagined bloodsuckers to produce some of the most compelling genre shows ever made. In this article we're listing the best of the best vampire TV shows, right from the earliest efforts to the present day. It seems that every time someone declares that vampire shows should be left to rest in peace, they rise with renewed strength and vigour and sink their teeth into us once again. Funny how that works, isn't it?

8. Dark Shadows

Dark Shadows aired on ABC from 1966-1971 and was ostensibly a soap, but it's best remembered as the ancestor of the modern vampire TV series. Barnabas Collins, a debonair 200 year old vampire, is the show's most famous character, although he was introduced about a year after the premiere and was never intended to stay. Unlike the recent film adaptation with Johnny Depp, Dark Shadows took itself rather seriously, despite its melodramatic dialogue and frequent line flubs and prop malfunctions, which made it addictive then and keeps it watchable today. The influence of Barnabas Collins on later vampires in TV and film is pretty difficult to underestimate, because he is the archetypal lovelorn bloodsucker pining for all he has lost. Bear in mind that the Hammer Horror take on Dracula with Christopher Lee was a recent memory when Dark Shadows first aired, so a vulnerable vampire was quite a revolutionary concept. Jonathan Frid, who played Barnabas, received fan mail with such sane requests as "I wish you'd bite ME on the neck". Robert Pattinson should have seen it coming, shouldn't he?
 
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Grace Murray hasn't written a bio just yet, but if they had... it would appear here.