I don’t understand the recent vampire craze
The hype around vampire movies and books such as Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series and Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels has made me wonder, “am I missing something here?”
I have never been the kind of guy to read fantasy novels or believe in the paranormal, so maybe that makes me predisposed to not jump on this vampire bandwagon, but I just can’t grasp why people get such a high off of watching a fanged person suck on somebody’s neck.
I have talked to many people who have read the recent vampire novels and they say that there is a legitimately enjoyable storyline or that in the case of the Twilight movie, that the main character is an attractive male who is nice to look at, if nothing else.
Fine, the storyline may be enticing, but why such a craze over vampires? It has gone from the young adult version in Twilight and Vampire Academy to the adult version of Harris’ novels, and the craze keeps on spreading. Multi-million dollar movies and television shows are being made and both readers and non-readers of all ages are buying into it. Is it a coincidence that these happen to deal with the same subject matter and all individually have a great storyline, or is the average American citizen hopped up on fangs and bloodsucking?
The recent South Park episode where many of the characters went “vampire,” resulting in the goth kids getting upset that the popular kids where intruding on their dark and mysterious look, made me laugh quite hard. It is nice to see a culturally relevant show mock the fact that so many people of all ages are jumping into this.
At this point, it seems to be more than just the story line. Vampire stories are now a recurring phenomenon that I’m not quite sure how to explain. Maybe it’s the media-induced edginess and sexiness of a vampire that attracts people. But I don’t see why a creature with inch-long canine teeth is sexy.
I can grant that there are people who have enjoyed vampire stories for their whole lives, just like there are with zombie and science fiction novels. The strange thing about what is currently going on is that I see people who would normally never enjoy a vampire story now going head over heels for the famous “Edward Cullen.”
It could be that people are just experimenting and are curious about this new fad, or maybe vampires are a wave of the future of American literature. Only time will tell. Who knows, maybe I’ll be writing in a few months about how groundbreaking the newest bloodsucking novel is, but I seriously doubt it.