Paul Askonas may have been the first cinematic Dracula, and Bela Lugosi the most famous, but no one captured the soulless bloodsucker’s smiling cruelty and predilection for animalistic violence like Christopher Lee. Appearing eight times as the count between 1958 and 1973, Lee marked his midpoint in the franchise with 1970’s Taste the Blood of Dracula (actually one of three times that year he donned that black velvet cloak). A weird tale of addiction and Victorian aristocrats getting their comeuppance, it features one of the series’ most innovative deaths for the vampire. – Richard Whittaker
