Vampire

Before Taika Waititi achieved his current state of half-ironic, half-irritating ubiquity, he made small, often brilliant films. One of the most notable ones was the 2014 New Zealand comedy horror picture What We Do in the Shadows, which he co-created and co-directed with Flight of the Conchords star Jemaine Clement. Horror comedies are notoriously tricky to get right tonally, but the film — which admittedly leant far more heavily on the comedic aspects — was a modest box-office hit and became yet another step on Waititi’s stroll to Hollywood dominance.

Thirty years after it was first released in America, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula is returning to theaters, appropriately enough for a Halloween re-release. (It also serves as a soft preview for Coppola’s newly announced passion project, Megalopolis, an epic drama starring Adam Driver and Aubrey Plaza.) It is hard to overstate what a difference the past three decades have made in Dracula's popular reception. Although it was a significant commercial hit upon release, thanks in part to Annie Lennox’s enormously popular theme tune "Love Song For a Vampire," it was critically derided as poorly acted, overblown, excessively bloody without being frightening and a travesty of the original novel.