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From the Twilight films to the HBO scries Tnie Blood, from the alternative rock band Vampire Weekend Io the TV series TIw liniipiiv Diaries indeed, from Count Choeula on cereal boxes to Sesame Street'?, Count von Count - you would have lo live in a coffin not Io have your path regularly crossed by vampires.
In New Orleans, thanks to novelist Anne Rice's Vampire Chn.mieles sagas on the page and on the screen, it seems one can't thro\\ a stone wiihout hitting the undead. New York is \ampire ground zero in the 2007 Will Smith-driven movie. I Am Legend, the third adaptation of Richard Matheson's apocalyptic 1954 novel about a world taken over by vampires. California is Nosfcratu Central, teenage-style, in The Lost Rays ( 1987) While vampires take on the Heartland in director Kaihryn Bigalow's vampire western. Near Dark (1987). E ven Alaska is vulnerable - exceptionally so, given its prolonged winter darkness - in the bloody 2007 cinematic adaptation of writer Steve Niles and illustrator Ben Templesmith's vampire comic book minisenes. 30 Days of Night.
Lest one think vampires are merely a domestic concern, Sweden has a vampire problem in Ld the Righi One in (2008), which puts an unusual spin on the familiar boy-meets-girl story: The young teenage girl is actually an aged vampire. The 2009 South Korean release. Thirst, creates vampires as a result of medical testing gone awry while the Russian fantasy epics Night Watch (2004) and Day Watch (2006) include vampires among a host of supernatural creatures. In any number of modern imaginings, vampires have gone global: In True Blood as well as the Blade. Undent-oriel and Twilight franchises - to adapt Percy Bysshe Shelley's famous phrase - the "unacknowledged legislators of the world" no longer are poets hut vampires.
Vampires, vampires, everywhere. Why? What explains their persistence - and appeal? Here are a few possibilities about the strange attraction of the munslrous undead. principles that my forthcoming book, I umpires: Undead Cinema (due out from Wallflower Press in late 2011), develops in much greater depth.
Principle I: Vampire narratives are always about sex
Vampire narratives are always, inevitably, about sex - although what each has to say obviously will vary depending upon time and place. From the "vamps"...