If you don't practice abstinence Dracula, err, Nosferatu will come get ya!

Alongside news that the abstinence-preaching vampire romance novel adaptation Twilight took the top spot at this week-end’s box office, New York Times super-critic Manohla Dargis narrates a historical survey of vampire movies that, like their main characters, haven’t really aged. Before exploring the cultural graveyard for undead treats, Dargis covers the vampire canon (vamnon?):

• Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922)
• Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931)
• Horror of Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958)
• Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)

Having quenched the thirsts of cultural conservatives, Dargis moves on to consider less likely vampire classics, while forgetting others. See what’s missing after the jump.

Dargis’s survey touches on time-capsule entries like Tony Scott’s The Hunger, allegory-driven adaptations like the gay parent period epic Interview with the Vampire, and blockbuster action entries like Blade and Underworld. Sadly, she leaves out Let the Right One In (which she liked at least more than Twilight) this year’s Swedish coming-of-age child vampire thriller set in a modern design catalog. Dargis also misses the vampire’s foray into other sections of pop culture, like Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (best vampire narrative ever?), Alan Ball’s True Blood, or these Ray-Ban-peddling bloodsuckers:

Most conspicuously, there’s no mention of the character who introduced so many of us to the vampire archetype:

Notice the numbered thrusts of the undead couple’s “dance” and the Count’s (orgasmic?) ecstasy… These may not be Twilight’s abstinent vampires, but their fuzzy fangs deserve a chapter in Dargis’s bloodlust chronicles.