A vampire in art is a picture of the dead feeding on the living, and for a long time nobody agreed on its face. The word first appeared in English in 1732, in a London journal reporting on corpses dug up in Serbia with fresh blood at the mouth.
Writers of the nineteenth century made the vampire a pale, seductive aristocrat. Painters rarely named it in a title, so few paintings qualify here, and most of the works are prints and posters.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
How These Were Chosen
A work gets in only if a named source ties it to the vampire. The tie can be the work's own title, a text or film it was made for, or the name Dracula.
That rule leaves out Henry Fuseli's nightmare demons and Gustav Klimt's deadly women, which only the internet calls vampires. It is also why most of the twelve are prints, illustrations and posters, made before and after Bram Stoker's Dracula of 1897.
Number 1 is the best known, Munch's canvas of 1893, and it stands outside the timeline. The other eleven count back in time, from a horror film poster of 1968 at number 12 to a portrait from the sixteenth century at number 2.
12. Tom Chantrell, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave poster (1968)
A snarling head fills the middle of the sheet, fangs bared, with two clenched fists raised above it and a black cape spread behind. Along the bottom runs a strip of smaller scenes, from a cracked tomb marked DRACULA to a priest holding up a cross.
The British artist Tom Chantrell painted this design for the UK release of Dracula Has Risen from the Grave in 1968, a film by Hammer, the British studio known for its horror pictures.
It was printed as a quad, the landscape poster of 30 by 40 inches that British cinemas had taken up by the end of the 1930s.
From The Nanny in 1965 to Taste the Blood of Dracula in 1969, Chantrell painted the artwork for every Hammer film, and the historian Sim Branaghan calls him the studio's "House Artist" of those years.
At Hammer, the poster often came before the film. The studio's boss, James Carreras, liked to order artwork for a film that did not yet exist and use the picture to raise the money to make it.
So the artist rarely watched the films he advertised. A synopsis and a handful of stills were enough, and when no still fit, friends and family posed for snapshots.
Dracula Has Risen from the Grave began with even less. By his own account, Chantrell had nothing but a title, and he painted a first version from models.
He still needed a face for the Count. He photographed a colleague, Denis, with the light coming from under the chin, which throws the shadows upward across the face. Then Denis took the same pictures of him.
Denis was "too benevolent-looking," so the second version used the photograph of the artist's own face. Stills arrived later, and a third version added a neck-biting scene with Christopher Lee, the actor who played Dracula for Hammer.
Then the British distributor, Warner-Pathé, announced that the film was opening in two weeks and wanted the poster at once. No still of Lee's face had come in, so the third version went to print as it stood.
Lee's name sits in white capitals to the left of the big head, but the face is the artist's own. "Nobody ever questioned the poster," Chantrell said years later. "They all think it's Christopher Lee, but it isn't."
At a Glance
Artist: Tom Chantrell (1916 to 2001)
Printed: 1968
Medium: Printed poster, from a design painted by Chantrell
Size: British quad, 30 × 40 in (76 × 102 cm)
Where to see it: Printed copies surface on the poster market, such as the quad credited to Chantrell that Heritage Auctions offered in June 2019. No museum copy is documented.
About This Work
Is Christopher Lee on the Dracula Has Risen from the Grave poster?
Only in the small neck-biting scene at the right. The huge snarling head above it was painted from a photograph of Tom Chantrell himself.
How many film posters did Tom Chantrell design?
About 7,000 designs, according to his obituary in The Guardian. He usually made three layouts and one finished artwork for each film, at an average of three posters a week.
What other famous posters did Tom Chantrell paint?
His first film poster, in 1938, was for The Amazing Dr Clitterhouse. Later came the British posters for Brighton Rock, One Million Years B.C. and, in the late 1970s, Star Wars.
11. Universal Pictures, Dracula poster, Style A (1931)
A man's face emerges from a deep blue ground, half of it in shadow, the eyes turned sideways toward the viewer. Below him, DRACULA runs across the sheet in huge yellow letters.
The Hollywood studio Universal Pictures printed this one-sheet, the standard upright poster of American cinemas, for the release of Dracula in 1931. Studios often printed several designs for one film, and collectors know this one as Style A.
The film opened at the Roxy Theatre in New York that February. Very few copies of this poster have survived. The one shown here stayed with a single family for decades, until the day it went up for sale.