In the last decade, vampires have been pulled from the annals of folk legend, B-movies and… In the last decade, vampires have been pulled from the annals of folk legend, B-movies and novels with names like ‘The Bloody Night Darkness Trilogy’ to the forefront of popular culture. They now have movies, television series, books, video games and apparently their own weekend. Long gone are the days of the cape-wearing, coffin-dwelling vampire, whose meals consisted mainly of roving gangs of noblemen whose horse-drawn carriages always managed to conveniently blow a tire directly on the doorstep of Castle You’reallgoingtodie, which I guess they always assumed was Transylvanian for ‘Holiday Inn.’ The typical vampire of today’s media is almost as pale as he is androgynous. He’s a lanky, hypersexual being who’s ashamed of his animalistic tendencies, yet is drawn by his condition to go searching for people to drain in the middle of the night. So, where did this vampire obsession come from? I think it’s because vampires are the ultimate bad boys, the mythological equivalent of the seniors in high school who got to stay out as late as they wanted and smoked cigarettes in the parking lot after class. Vampires as protagonists aren’t really evil anymore, they’re just bad influences. Of course, there are usually evil vampires who the good vampires end up defying through the power of true love, a newfound respect for humanity or whatever feel-good message drives the plot. But even these antagonists are less like demonic murder machines and more like Hans Gruber in ‘Die Hard.’ They might make a snarky comment and kill a person every once in a while, but you just don’t get that same sense of them being an immortal force of darkness anymore. The origin of this problem can be traced all the way back to ‘Sesame Street,’ which introduced a friendly vampire named Count Von Count, who had supposedly replaced his lust for blood with a love of counting, priming an entire generation of children with the idea of the good vampire ‘mdash; but you can’t completely pacify a vampire, as became shockingly clear in an unaired episode from 1996 where the original Count got away from his handlers and drained the life out of two cameramen before Big Bird could drive a sharpened No. 2 pencil into his heart. A new Count was hired soon after, and everyone who works with him is outfitted with a vial of holy water and the letter T. So now that authors have fully explored the horror aspect of vampires and audiences are willing to accept the gentle but tortured vampire as a character, they’ve moved on to romance. ‘I know he’s a soulless, unholy killer, but I can change him,’ the love interest says, making doe eyes at the vampire as he dabs the blood of his last victim from the corners of his mouth. We even have vampire family dramas now, where the vampire husband comes home from a rough day at the vampire office, hits his vampire wife in front of the vampire kids and is carted away by the vampire police to vampire jail. Not only do these writers have the gall to subject us to these awful plotlines, but they go on to completely rewrite the mythos as they see fit. The whole ‘vampires die if they come in contact with sunlight’ thing tends to screw up normal settings, so either they write about a post-apocalyptic world where vampire scientists blow up the sun, or they just make up a reason why their vampires can go to high school without turning into a pile of dust. In the end, nothing is sacred. Vampires can’t step foot on holy ground? Mine are atheists and just get really uncomfortable around the clergy. Vampires hate garlic? Not really, only Dracula did. He was allergic. But all of these changes serve only to cheapen the conflicts that would make a vampire character’s life interesting. I would have been far more inclined to see ‘Twilight’ if it were about a girl and her odd, pale friend who darts nervously from shadow to shadow and mysteriously disappears from the lunchroom on Pasta Day. But as we speak, the idea of the good vampire is becoming as entirely played out as ‘a normal guy becomes the Grim Reaper’ or ‘comic relief Jesus,’ and something else will soon be dragged out to take its place. Personally, I’m pulling for Frankenstein. I can see it now. ‘Frank and Stein,’ a novel about a young monster named Frank who must come to grips with the reality of being an abomination stitched together from scavenged body parts while also getting up the courage to ask a cute werewolf to the prom. But when townspeople begin to show up strangled, Frank falls under suspicion and must find the real killer: his half-brother, Stein. Hold on, I need to write this down. If you’re a big-name publisher looking to buy the rights to ‘Frank and Stein,’ send your proposals to Andrew at [email protected].