Vampires on screen

Hear that ominous squealing sound echoing out from just over the horizon? Possibly not; personally, my ears haven’t stopped ringing since the last instalment of High School Musical. But, yep, whatever the condition of your auditory paraphernalia, there’s no escaping the fact that it’s that time of year again - Twilight: Eclipse is soon to be unleashed to the hormonal masses, and consequently every single pre-pubescent girl in existence is shortly going to spontaneously combust with excitement and repressed sexual feeling. They literally won’t shut up for months. It’s going to be like living in a Jonas Brothers concert. Don’t you just love it when a Mormon housewife’s plan comes together?

Now, I’d hazard a guess that when Bram Stoker first published Dracula back in 1897, there weren’t swarms of screeching 13 year olds camped outside bookshops with ‘Team Vlad’ sewn onto their parasols – they were all too busy lying in the gutter dying of cholera, for one thing. These days, however, we’ve got girls literally slicing their arms open in order to thrust the freshly dripping wound into Robert Pattinson’s chiselled features, presumably amid hopes that he’ll forget all about that pesky restraining order and gratefully get sucking. And I’m not even joking. It’s all a bit creepy, to be honest, and raises a number of questions. Namely, why is modern society suddenly so bloody obsessed with vampires? Or, to put it another way, does WHSmiths honestly require a dedicated ‘vampire’ section? Do all Hollywood executives have shares in plastic fang manufacturers or something? Oh and also, is Pattinson actually even that attractive? His face is weird. Go on, look at it. Properly. See? Yeah. Told you so. Weird.

I digress. Why are vampires suddenly such an omniscient screen presence? Today’s TV listings are positively infested with the things; US import True Blood’s just begun its third season, having been one of 2009’s most popular series, and the never-knowingly original ITV is also busy flogging angsty teen soap The Vampire Diaries. Cinema’s no better – this year we’ve got Daybreakers, Lost Boys 3 and Stake Land all desperately attempting to cash in on the post-Twilight vampire mania. It’s genuinely got to the stage where it’s cliché to even call it a ‘phenomenon’. General consensus amongst the journalistic pseuds writing faux socio-analytical pieces on this current fanged screen monopoly (such as this, in fact) is that the appeal lies mostly in society’s similar, all-consuming passion for sex. Since Dracula first took a nip of Mina and Lucy back in the 1800s, there’s always been a hint of the sexual predator about vampires, pandering to our modern pansexual tastes very nicely. The romances central to these stories are a far cry from the snarky, repressed exchanges of the Austenian mating ritual – vampire love tends to be very much focused around sex, or (in the case of the Twilight series) lack thereof. It’s all smouldering glances, sinking teeth, heaving bosoms and so on. And in the case of True Blood it’s full-on, howling soft porn. No wonder modern audiences love it so much.

And the other attraction lies, perhaps, simply in a need for escapism. Modern life is, currently, one long relentless slog through many and varied forms of misery - culminating of course in protracted, agonising death caused by too much Diet Coke or too few aduki beans. We’re all obese. The economy has effectively hurled itself, screaming, off a cliff; most of us are now rapidly hurtling towards the day we’re forced to trade in our left kidney for that week’s thimbleful of water. Every day we’re expected to cope with yet more devastating news of frail Cheryl’s secret heartache. It’s impossible. No wonder we need something mindless to distract ourselves from this wretched 21st century existence, and, let’s face it, you can’t get much more mindless than sparkling, romantically-inclined vampires. Twilight, True Blood and even that odious ITV wannabe thing, The Vampire Diaries, all let us switch off and lose ourselves in a world of attractive lead actors, enjoyably preposterous storylines and expensive sets, all of course dished up with a hefty portion of bodice-ripping action. Twilight even provides us with a conveniently characterless personality vacuum to all project onto, aka Kristen Stewart. Everybody’s happy.

Well, particularly Stephenie Meyer of course, who is no doubt already concocting a few spin-off series to ensure that this especially lucrative cash-cow keeps ‘em squealing well into the next decade. It’s summer 2010, and vampire-mania shows no sign of letting up.