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The greatest female vampires in television and movie history include blood-sucking women from Swedish horror films, classic cult TV shows, and critically acclaimed independent movies. Vampires have always been an important part of TV and movies, and even earlier, books like Dracula were capturing the public's imagination with their tales of dangerous, hungry, and alluring creatures of the night. When most people think of vampires, they likely think of those strong male figures, such as the aforementioned Vlad Dracula or the vampire Lestat or Blade from the MCU.

However, some of the earliest depictions of vampires were actually women. Even before Bram Stoker's Dracula inspired numerous movies, vampires in fiction were often described as women. The 1797 short story, The Bride of Corinth, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is one of the earliest examples of vampires in fiction and tells the tale of an undead woman who stalks her former lover.

Though the Holocaust had no one architect, Rudolf Höss remains singularly responsible for the speed and efficiency of the atrocities committed at Auschwitz, later emulated at the other Nazi death camps, thanks to his approval of the use of the deadly Zyklon B gas. And for his efforts at the first Auschwitz camp in Oświęcim, Poland, he was rewarded by being made commandant of death camp administration throughout the Nazi-occupied lands. This is the monster on full display in Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest.

While the novel’s protagonist is named Paul Doll, Glazer chose to name Christian Friedel’s character Rudolf Höss. This immediately points to Glazer’s interest in bringing in the weight of a well-recorded historical character living in a specific place and time: the Höss household next to Auschwitz I in Oświęcim from 1943 to 1944. Much of the film follows...

Following The Film Stage’s collective top 50 films of 2023, as part of our year-end coverage, our contributors are sharing their personal top 10 lists.

Another year of films. Another year of depressingly hopeful favorites.

That’s not to say I didn’t love any comedies. The ones I did just had a tendency to punch you in the gut somewhere along the line. It’s a truth that probably says more about me than I could ever articulate on my own. Grief simply resonates—especially when it can hit hard while still allowing the affected character on-screen to smile in the face of it.

We need a little of that hope in the real world. An authentic, complex hope to mirror the dark, politicized era in which we currently reside. One where anyone who isn’t depressed twenty-four-seven is more than likely not paying attention to anything that’s happening beyond their own personal gain.

Canada, the home of winter, looks to have no shortage of snowy inns set against fairytale-like landscapes with piles and piles of the white, fluffy stuff.

That’s because Hallmark, long a major producer of Christmas TV movies, shoots a lot of holiday flicks in Canada, even if the plotlines are set south of the border. So do a lot of other U.S. producers for whom British Columbia, Manitoba and Ontario offer real snow, iconic mountains and other varied wintry locations to keep American producers in furry parkas coming north with their cameras and Hollywood stars.

In fact, there’s more to budget-friendly production tricks than fake snow on these TV movie shoots, as humble Canada stands in small-town America strung with colorful lights. Shooting north of the border allows producers to tap generous tax breaks and currency savings, seasoned local actors and crews and ample studios and costume...

Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi concentration camp in occupied Poland, will forever stain history in blood with its staggering, heinous slaughter of over a million innocent people. The Zone of Interest never shows trainloads of Jewish men, women, and children led to gas chambers before being incinerated to ashes in industrial ovens. There are no scenes of emaciated slave workers clinging to life as taut skin clutches frail bones. Writer/director Jonathan Glazer explores the callous banality and cruel indifference of supreme evil with a family portrayal of Commandant Rudolf Höss, his wife Hedwig, and their five children. They lived in luxury directly beside the razor-wired walls of indiscriminate murder, terror, and unimaginable suffering.

In 1943 Oświęcim, Poland, Rudolf (Christian Friedel) mills around his palatial house for an adventurous morning of celebration, meetings, and getting back to busy work. Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) sharply commands their Polish workers as the kids play in the yard.

It’s Christmas Eve, and you’re as ready as you’ll ever be. Presents under the tree? Check. Turkey in the fridge? Check. Mince pie for Father Christmas and a carrot for Rudolf on the hearth? Check. The thinning of the veil between this world and the next, allowing unquiet spirits to walk the Earth and the long shadows in the moonlit, frosty lanes to shift and darken with things not of this world? Check, check and check.

Because while Christmas might traditionally be the season of goodwill, comfort and joy, it is also very much the time of ghosts. And no one appreciates that quite as much as Mark Gatiss.

Gatiss is one of our most recognisable TV actors and writers, making his name with the surreal comedy of The League of Gentlemen and cementing his reputation with a starring role in Sherlock, his TV take on Dracula,...

Empress Elisabeth of Austria, a starlet of 19th-century Europe, refused to have her photograph taken after she reached her mid-thirties. It’s a detail that hasn’t been copied over to Corsage, Marie Kreutzer’s tastefully anachronistic film about the Hapsburg royal. But that absence of photos as Elisabeth aged remains central to Kreutzer’s vision. Elizabeth believed beauty was her only currency, and she would do anything to preserve it. That includes, most infamously, a tightly corseted waist that measured a mere 19.5 inches.

We’ve seen many onscreen Elisabeths before. Romy Schneider, in the Fifties, starred in a television trilogy that reimagined her life as a bouncy, sweet-souled fairytale. It soon became a Christmas staple in Germany and Austria. Netflix only recently debuted its more feminist-minded take, The Empress, starring Devrim Lingnau. Many depictions offer ample time to the controversy that rocked Elisabeth’s later years when her son,...