9. I Am Legend

Are these f**king things vampires or infected? Around this time in the early aughts there was a slue of horror movies that straddled the line with science fiction because the monsters no longer had supernatural origins but virological ones. 28 Days Later comes to mind because it featured a zombie apocalypse without any paranormal activity. Vampires have always been liminal creatures, having emerged at the end of the late Middle Ages and the beginning of the Enlightenment. The witch trails were over in Europe when vampires emerged from their graves in the Balkans as undead, hybrid figures somewhere between medical subjects and the occult, which provided enlighten, Protestant, Western Europeans yet another opportunity to gawk at the "primitive" Eastern European proclivities for superstition and Catholicism. But the Van Helsing of I Am Legend, aptly played by the legendary face slapper Will Smith, is no longer versed in the dark arts, but is a modern man of science, working to find the cure for the retrovirus that inadvertently infected the population of New York with a disease that cause its victims to turn pale white, hate the sun, and become considerably less articulate than Bram Stoker's Count Dracula.

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