El Vampiro

The film that kicked off Mexico's gothic-horror boom, and it put fangs on screen a full year before Christopher Lee bared his for Hammer. Germán Robles is Count Lavud, all cape and courtly menace, stalking a cobwebbed hacienda where a young woman has come home to a family in trouble. Fernando Mendez shoots fog, candlelight and crumbling stone with far more atmosphere than the budget had any right to buy. It was popular enough to spawn an immediate sequel and a whole national appetite for caped bloodsuckers. Later dubbed into English for American matinee kids, which is how a lot of people met it. Cheap, elegant and quietly historic.