Get Ready To Make Googly Eyes

There used to be a time when vampires were cool. This oft-romanticized era, a time where vampires were ghouls and things that went bump in the night, isn’t too far removed from the present either.

Vampires dressed like that Goth kid no one wanted to talk to in class. They wore black, they were sort of creepy/sort of tragic, and there was always a way to kill them dead with some handy UV rays. Now they are all good looking and always striking a pose as if they’re about to be photographed for a GAP ad. That’s right folks, no more burning to a smoldering pile of ash anymore.

“I think…the thing that changed everything and that gave vampire fiction a new lease on life and death was AIDS…suddenly you have something in the blood that is an exchange of blood that kills and is altogether fundamentally about sex,” Neil Gaiman, best selling fantasy/comic author, says in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly.

Gaiman claims that the vampire mythology took a turn for better or worse in the 80s and things weren’t the same after that.

But even decades later, the mythos thrived and was even quite good in some formats. Blade, the infamous hybrid self-hating vampire, had been a Marvel comics character since the early 70s and was featured in dozens of books, three movies and several TV outings right up until the mid 2000s.

Interview With A Vampire, the movie based on the book of the same name, was an authentic tale that featured a plot that adhered closely to the “Undead Rules and Regulations” (i.e. sunlight kills). Even the Underworld trilogy, a much-maligned franchise, featured vamps that people could get behind or at least run away from.

“[Vampire stories have] always about people exiled to the fringes. Vampires, I think, should be outsiders…But they aren’t buying nice suits and calling the shots. And if they are, the book is about something else,” Gaiman says. It would seem, probably due largely in part to Stephanie Meyers’ Twilight and its movie counterparts, that the vampire fundamentals are about something else these days.

Why have the world’s most dangerous inhumans become pretty boys who would rather take a girl out to eat than eat the girl?

An article from the Vancouver Sun, published over the summer, may have a possible answer. "Our post-9/11 world no longer looks favorably on people or beings that hide in plain sight yet have the ability to kill us," Mary Findley, a vampire scholar at Vermont Technical College. says "Therefore, it isn't surprising that our vampires have recently become less monstrous . . . even living amongst us in relative peace in the True Blood (TV) series."

When the craze will die is anyone’s guess as more and more media outlets are scrambling to hop on the Vampire Bandwagon. According to Gaiman, vampires come in waves and “it kind of feels like we’re now finishing a vampire wave…it’s probably time to go back underground for another 20 years or another 25 years.”