There are so many vampires in fiction that picking just five to represent the best of the best is a blood-curdling experience, but with True Blood and Being Human back on our screens, CultBox has picked out a selection of our favourite blood-suckers.

Jack Beresford (Ultraviolet)

Before he was Bill Compton in True Blood, Stephen Moyer cut his fangs in this stylish 1998 Channel 4 series.

Creator Joe Ahearne updated all aspects of the vampire mythos, their lack of reflection extending to their non-appearance in photographs and video, as well as their voices not recording to magnetic tape or travelling down telephone lines.

The vampire hunters – played by Jack Davenport, Idris Elba and Susannah Harker – are similarly updated with carbon bullet and allicin grenades. While Jack is the “leech” most frequently seen in the series, this is essentially a vote for Ahearne’s hugely successful update as a whole.

Ronnie Strickland (The X Files: Bad Blood)

The X Files only did vampires twice – in the distinctly lukewarm episode 3 and in Bad Blood, a hilarious, Rashomon-inspired episode penned by future Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan.

Ronnie is a genuine vampire but one without many of the trappings of the genre, such as fangs (he has to wear falsies). He is, however, hampered by one which is not often explored: the extreme OCD of the vampire.

He cannot leave knots tied and must pick up and count any items dropped on the floor, a fact exploited by the sunflower seed-loving Fox Mulder. As such, his existence as one is pitched somewhere between mundane and miserable.

Spike (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

On paper, Spike and the series’ other main male vampire Angel have had similar journeys: painfully average men who become vampires, create chaos for decades and then have the capacity for villainy removed from them by outside forces: Angel by the restoration of his soul, and Spike due to a Clockwork Orange-style procedure that makes violence painful to him.

The fact that he largely becomes a good man even while his soul is lost to him but retaining the capacity to make dreadful mistakes that he simply doesn’t realise are wrong, makes him the single most interesting vampire in the series.

Miriam Blaylock (The Hunger)

You may have noticed that female vampires are under-represented in this list. Sadly, though, female vampires are under-represented in fiction generally.

Usually they take the form of a temptress to seduce a man into becoming a vampire, almost always acting as an adjunct to a dominant male vampire. Even Buffy’s Darla, despite being the most senior of that series’ big four vampires, was often overshadowed in favour of her masculine compatriots.

Miriam, from Whitley Strieber’s novel (and played by Catherine Deneuve in the 1983 Tony Scott film version), by comparison is her own agent. She has lived for centuries and for companionship, she turns her lovers into vampires too.

Sadly, these men and women only last a certain amount of time before rapidly aging and becoming emaciated, still-conscious husks while she remains exactly the same. As a result, Miriam is a deeply sad character who finds that not even her centuries of hot bisexual conquests are enough to ease her solitude.

Dracula

The big boss. Bram Stoker didn’t create vampires with Dracula. Rather he collected a lot of superstitions and beliefs about the creatures and combined them into this creation.

Dracula has the lot: defiance of gravity, a seductive thrall, a dislike of sunlight, problems with his reflection and the ability to transform into a bat, a wolf and a cloud of fog. Such a successful creation was Dracula that, like the misused “Frankenstein” and “Jekyll & Hyde”, his name has entered the language and even more amazingly he’s given goths and the residents of Whitby something to talk about for over a hundred years.

A vote for Dracula is also a vote for Count Orlok. This copyright-evading version of the character was played by Max Schreck in F. W. Murnau’s unofficial 1922 film version Nosferatu. In addition to this, a version of Schreck himself, reimagined as an actual vampire and played wonderfully by Willem Defoe, was a principal character in 2000’s Shadow of the Vampire.

No matter how many steps removed you get from Stoker’s creation, Count Dracula casts an indelible shadow across all vampire fiction created since.

> Buy the Being Human: Series 1-3 boxset on Amazon.

> Buy the True Blood: Seasons 1-3 boxset on Amazon.

Who’s your favourite vampire? Let us know below…