Intacto (2001)

After two blockbusters, I want to talk about a quite unknown movie for a change. The movie is Intacto from Spain, and about a decade old. It is, while disguising itself as a thriller, basically a vampire movie, and it showcases how to scare an audience with the concept of the supernatural parasite. Classic vampires have changed from monsters to pure objects of desire, and there is not much the audience does not know about them. They drink blood, sunlight turns them into a five-minute household chore, they have great reflexes and are ripped as fuck. They are also conflicted about having those reflexes and a six-pack that will last them a few centuries. No wonder the girls like them. Some variables may differ, but that is your normal vampire, as experienced by the movie-going public. He might be good for a few jump scares, but then a cat in a refrigerator is. He has stopped from being uncanny or scary by himself.
The vampires of Intacto are different: They seem to be normal people in all respects, but they drain the luck of their victims, just by touching them, if they want to or not. There is one scene in the movie which especially creeps me out: One of the vampires is led to a group of victims and touches them in turn. They are rundown and obviously unhappy and seem to have gone through the procedure before: Quite the contrast to the come-hither eyed blood dolls common in vampire movies. Apart from the vampire grabbing them for a few seconds, nothing else happens. The victims get a few bills and are sent away. But it is far more terrifying than a conventional vampire sucking at the neck of a nubile girl: It is implied that these people will never catch a break again, or have a good turn, or be at the right place at the right time.
This is not only terrifying because, by now, every student of (popular) culture has come across the various readings of the vampire as symbol of sexuality, of reverse colonization, of social isolation, and so forth. We also understand blood very well. When Stoker wrote Dracula in 1895, the theory of blood groups was not yet invented. Blood was not "just" blood - it was your life force. Today, it's just the red juice that runs out of you when you cross traffic with your eyes closed.
But the vampires in Intacto drain your luck. No-one really understands luck, you just "know" it exists, that your life might have turned out very differently if you hadn't been lucky at some points. And that luck is beyond your control, ineffable, and yet in some ways critical to your happiness. And these creatures take it away! The disheveled victims in Intacto are worse off than any of Dracula's prey. Apart from that, the vampires in this movie are just like normal humans - but very, very lucky. The movie features some scenes where they test their preternatural luck, and these are more uncanny than every vampire flick, where a bloodsucker is "fast" or "strong" - because by now we know that a vampire is supposed to be that way. Intacto shows us real vampires: predators that take away the one thing that you do not understand but which you cannot afford to lose.