Christopher Lee's Dracula Movies, Ranked

The late Christopher Lee was a compelling character actor and a genre icon whose career saw him land parts in numerous pop culture favorites throughout his more than two hundred film roles. He’s Saruman in “The Lord of the Rings” films, he’s Count Dooku in the “Star Wars” universe, and he stars in sequels to films like “Gremlins,” “Police Academy,” “The Howling,” and more. From Tim Burton’s dark fantasies to the realm of Sherlock Holmes, Lee has seen it all, but for many fans it’s his horror output that they love most. Sitting atop his dozens of horror efforts, it’s his unforgettable portrayal of Count Dracula that reigns supreme. 

Below are all nine feature films in which Lee plays Count Dracula as a lead/title role. For completists, he did don the fangs for a 10th film, a 1970 comedy called “One More Time,” but it’s for no more than a thirty-second cameo. The film is directed by Jerry Lewis, stars Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford, and it’s a sequel to Richard Donner’s buddy comedy from two years prior, “Salt & Pepper.” If this is all news to you, well, there’s probably a reason for that, but both films are mild fun and worth a watch for fans of swinging good times.

Numerous factors are taken into account when ranking the nine Dracula films below, including the visuals, the atmosphere, and Lee’s presence and performance. Ultimately, though, we’re ranking the films on the entirety of what they have to offer fans of horror, Lee, and vampire movies. 

Now, we invite you to read our ranking of Christopher Lee’s Dracula movies!

Dracula decides one day that he’s in need of an heir, but after having a son from a non-vampire woman, the boy called Ferdinand hasn’t become a proper vampire. When forced to flee from Transylvania, the duo head west for a more friendly climate. They get separated, though, with Dracula landing in London and scoring a job as a horror film actor while Ferdinand winds up homeless in Paris. They finally reunite only to compete over the love of a woman.

Comedy is easily one of the most subjective art forms. What makes us laugh is often personal and unique to each of us. What makes you giggle might bore me, and what makes me guffaw might shock you. To that end, “Dracula and Son” is a French comedy sans laughs. It’s goofy and broadly comic, and it searches for laughs in jokes about overweight people, immigrants, and eating cats. Some of the physical gags sneak a chortle or three, but the rest might just be lost in translation (or maybe even lost in the English dub).

That said, Christopher Lee is the reason you watch the film anyway. You may not laugh aloud, but it’s clear that he’s having fun with his final turn as Count Dracula. There’s real joy in seeing Lee enjoy himself, especially knowing that he had long grown tired of playing the role for Hammer. He pokes fun at Dracula’s formality and at the details of vampire life, and he even dabbles in pratfalls and physical comedy. The prince of darkness has earned the smiles.

A lawyer arrives in Transylvania to wrap up a real estate deal for a certain Count Dracula, but he quickly realizes something is amiss. Three baby-eating women try to nibble on him, an old man locks him in a room, and he winds up in an asylum. Only Dr. Van Helsing believes his wild claims.

Having grown increasingly tired of Hammer’s shenanigans, Christopher Lee sought professional satisfaction elsewhere. That included stepping outside Hammer’s purview to film what he hoped would be a more faithful production of Bram Stoker’s novel. He got his wish, to a degree, but the Spanish production was even lighter on budget than Lee was used to back home in the UK. The end result is a film that lets a mustachioed Lee reign over the limited landscape with authority and evil intentions, and he emanates an intoxicating blend of charisma and gravitas as the expected beats play out.

Director Jess Franco’s films typically lean messier, sleazier, and more amateurish, but “Count Dracula” sees the filmmaker demonstrating restraint and an eye for Gothic chills on a tiny budget. It’s a slow burn, for better and worse, that gives an esteemed actor the role he’d wanted for over a decade. While much of the film demonstrates a sedate control, Franco brings the character of Renfield into the mix played by the expectedly erratic and wild-eyed Klaus Kinski. It’s not quite enough to breath lasting life into the film, but it adds to the overall appeal for fans of the novel.

Dracula’s ashes sit atop an altar, undisturbed for some time, but something devilish happens when a large bat vomits blood into the remains. Dracula returns, once again thirsty for blood and the tender flesh of young women, and it’s up to a square named Simon to save the day.

Director Roy Ward Baker was a genre king during the 1970s making films for Hammer and Britain’s other big house of horror, Amicus. “Scars of Dracula” isn’t among his best work, but he still packs the film with highlights, starting with a brutal opening sequence as villagers return from burning Dracula’s castle to find their wives slaughtered in the church. It’s a gory, colorful set piece that sets an ominous tone, and Baker adds additional artistic thrills with the film’s great use of a matte painting revealing the sheer cliffside drop next to the castle. We also get to see Dracula scaling that outer, wall which is pretty darn cool.

This is the first entry to fully embrace the connection between Dracula and bats, but the furry, flying beast is just too rubbery, too silly, and too visibly connected to strings. It tears into people’s flesh, but it’s just never as unsettling as it’s meant to be. The film teases a Lothario hero before dispatching him and saddling viewers with his dullard brother, and too much time is spent with characters talking about the castle, going back and forth to the castle, and generally wasting our time. But hey, at least we get a stunt man in a Dracula mask set ablaze and dropped off the castle wall.

A small town huddled in the shadow of Dracula’s abandoned castle still fears the fear each night, so a religious official decides to exorcise the vampire’s former home to make the townspeople feel safer. He succeeds, but a small tumble on the hillside sees his blood reach the lips of a submerged Dracula which awakens the terror once again.

“Dracula Has Risen from the Grave” might boast a great poster — a woman with Band-aids on her neck and the tagline, “Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (obviously)” — but as a Dracula franchise entry it’s something of a mixed bag. Freddie Francis takes over the director’s duties, and the genre stalwart does a fine job with the material, but the script arguably affords too much time to characters and ideas it doesn’t end up exploring. 

Our hero is an atheist (and amateur Roger Daltrey impersonator) who, of course, finds his faith in the metaphorical foxhole. More interesting are two characters, a priest and a bar girl, compelled into Dracula’s servitude without the benefit of the bite, but one is dispatched unceremoniously, and the other gets off without what could have been an interesting moral engagement.

There are some visual highlights here, starting with an opening sequence that sees a young boy climb a church tower only to find a dead woman falling out of the bell, and we also get some rooftop action, as both our heroine and Dracula himself run atop the elaborate sets against the moonlight. Francis imbues the film bold colors, and the finale goes for the gore as the Count is impaled on a large cross. These are all great beats, but there just aren’t enough of them in a film that spends too much time elsewhere.

A government agent escapes a house of horrors as a human sacrifice unfolds, but what looked to be a murder is actually a ceremony revealing dark arts capable of bringing the dead back to life. It seems a devilish cult has wooed four members of high society into joining their ranks, but even they’re unaware as to what exactly their leader is planning.

“The Satanic Rites of Dracula” was the final Dracula film from Hammer Film Productions starring Christopher Lee in the title role, and as with its predecessor, “Dracula A.D. 1972,” it’s one hell of a swing for a franchise that started with Bram Stoker’s humble creation. The film starts with a blend of conspiratorial governmental intrigue, motorcycle action, and graphic satanic rituals — animal sacrifice, full frontal female nudity. This ain’t your grandma’s Dracula, baby! That’s all before bringing back Peter Cushing’s modern-day Van Helsing as an advisor for officials unconvinced about the existence of black magic and vampires.

General consensus is that this is the weakest of Lee’s Dracula outings for Hammer, but it’s once again difficult to dismiss a movie that throws cliche to the wind and instead embraces a highly unexpected genre mashup. There’s also something very intriguing about a supervillain plot that boils down to the destruction of all human life, doubly so when that villain is a vampire who needs human blood to survive. It’s the story of an undead creature so tired of “living” that he’s trying to orchestrate his own ultimate demise, and returning director Alan Gibson enlivens that pathos with bullet squibs, motorcycle assassins in fur vests, hungry vampiric women chained up in a basement, and more. Respect the swerve!

It’s been 10 years since Van Helsing destroyed the evil of Dracula with a bright cleanse of sunlight, but evil is never fully gone. Despite a warning by locals, two British couples on vacation wind up at the dead Count’s castle for the night, and soon the legendary vampire is once again roaming the halls, woods, and necklines nearby.

Hammer, director Terence Fisher, and Christopher Lee waited a surprising eight years before reuniting for a second Dracula film, but “Dracula: Prince of Darkness” is another winner, even if it can’t touch its predecessor. Van Helsing’s absence is felt, but the film finds its footing and showcases marvelous sets, chilly atmosphere, and that garishly Gothic feeling you can only get from a Hammer film. The final encounter atop cracking ice is fresh and thrilling, and it results in probably the only time a film dispatched its vampire problem by drowning it.

Lee’s commitment to the character and material, though, saw him once again feel a bit turned off by Hammer’s approach. He reportedly found Dracula’s dialogue in the script to be laughable and refused to speak it, with the result being that the Count doesn’t utter a single word throughout. It’s easily addressed, as he was just resurrected from mush, but it also makes for a more frightening Dracula. He’s more animalistic and monstrous without speech, but his sexual drive is still intact, as evidenced by a scene where he silently compels a woman to lap the blood from his bare chest. Paired with fangs and those blood-red eyes, Lee is more terrifying than ever before.

Van Helsing defeats Dracula once again, but a mutton-chopped young man takes the vampire’s ashes and passes them on through the generations. Cut to a century later, and a group of cool, young party animals decide to take part in a groovy ritual that once again resurrects the Count. Good thing Van Helsing’s grandson still lives in town too.

Hammer horror was on the way out in the early 1970s, so the studio decided to make a final push with a double feature moving the vampire action to modern day London. Naysayers will tell you it was a mistake, but such people should be shunned as haters of swinging fun and groovy good times. This is the first time Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing has faced Dracula since they met in “Horror of Dracula,” and that alone makes “Dracula A.D. 1972” a horror film of note. Cushing jumps right back in with both feet and has some fun brawls with both Dracula and a punk named Johnny Alucard — get it? get it?! — and it’s also one of Tim Burton’s favorite films ever made.

Director Alan Gibson’s film opens with a thrilling action sequence featuring the two leads battling it out atop a racing carriage before jumping ahead to the present, and while it will only race the hearts of horror fans, Caroline Munro also co-stars as one of the young party animals. Alucard was originally planned to be the film’s vampiric villain as Lee was over his time with Hammer, but the studio wisely reconsidered and lured the legend back into the fangs. The resulting contrast between Lee’s ancient Dracula and modern London might not get enough play here, but it’s still an engaging variation on the norm.

Jonathan Harker is a young man with a bright future as a librarian. Unfortunately for him and his love of the page, to quote the great Clive Barker, everybody is a book of blood… wherever we’re opened, we’re red. Jonathan meets his demise at the hands and teeth of Count Dracula and his vampiric concubine, and it falls to legendary vampire hunter named Dr. Van Helsing to stop this evil scourge.

Hammer’s very first Dracula film with Christopher Lee is regarded by many as the best of the franchise, and it’s easy to see why. “Dracula,” or “Horror of Dracula,” as it was retitled for the U.S., is a technicolor resurrection giving vibrant, new life to Bram Stoker’s creation. It’s a direct adaptation of the novel, and while it plays it a bit loose when it comes to sticking with the book — something that reportedly irked Lee — the basics are here for a wonderfully atmospheric and thrilling tale. Certain characters from the book are dropped or mashed together, and the geography of it all is condensed to better suit a low budget production, but it works to create a fairly fast-moving horror film that builds to an epic face-off.

Lee and director Terence Fisher bring a marvelous, erotically tinged pathos to the character of Dracula that gives his neck-biting conquests a sexual charge absent from previous iterations, and the allure he holds over the women becomes one of arousal and physical thirst. Similarly, Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing is dialed up from the novel to become a far more active hero. His encounter with Dracula in the finale becomes an action sequence that raises the heart rate and ends the film on a high note.

A traveling salesman stumbles across a scene of horror as Dracula writhes and dies while impaled on a large cross. Seeing a business opportunity, though, the man collects some of the vampire’s remains, including his dried blood, and later sells it all to bored men seeking a devilish thrill. Oops.

Christopher Lee’s fourth outing as Dracula doesn’t get much love it seems, but I’m going to argue that it’s actually the best of the franchise. “Taste the Blood of Dracula” eschews the normal accidental route to the Count’s resurrection, and instead it introduces viewers to three respectable gentlemen who are pillars of proper, church-going society, do charitable work, and keep their wives and daughter in check via insult and judgement. Oh, and they also frequent brothels, seek dark thrills, and foolishly decide to sell their souls to the devil. That last choice sees the return of Dracula, and things really get interesting from there.

Lee’s Count is freshly imbued with a thirst for revenge, and he finds it in fascinating, satisfying ways. He still woos the ladies, but he exacts his revenge by making — and encouraging — the grown children of the three men to kill their parents with vicious and violent intent. It’s a film that explores evil not just in its title monster, but in the hypocrisies of humankind as well. Dracula still gets his teeth wet, but the film suggests that the rest of us only need a slight nudge to match his unforgiveable ways. Hammer and director Peter Sasdy move the franchise into a new decade by upping the bloodletting, revealing more skin, and delivering a gut punch to the patriarchy, and it makes for a fun, thrilling look at evil’s reach.