Why Has America Become Fascinated with Vampire Literature and Shows?

American TV viewers, moviegoers, and readers can't seem to get enough of vampires-yes, the blood-sucking, daylight averse fantasy creatures that we sometimes dress up as at Halloween when we are too lazy to attempt anything more creative.

HBO's True Blood is a popular new drama series about life in a Southern town where vampires "co-exist" with humans-and occasionally prey on them. The Twilight series of books by Stephenie Meyer has sold millions of copies; among teenagers, vampires are the new wizards and hobbits, it would seem. In addition, the books have spawned an unfathomably bad film adaptation, also called Twilight, which was very popular among high school students.

Aside from all this, web sites are abuzz with vampire fan-fiction and numerous romance novels now have a vampire as a character. Also, the film Underworld (about vampires fighting each other, naturally), is slated for release in theaters nationwide quite soon.

Why the new obsession with vampires? Your guess is as good as anyone else's, but I suspect it boils down to boredom with many other genres-hobbits have been done, The Lord of the Rings has already been thoroughly exploited, people are tired of science fiction and space fantasies, dinosaurs have been done, witches and wizards (hello, Harry Potter) have been done ad nauseam, even dead people (The Sixth Sense) have been explored as a paranormal theme in movies and print... It seems as if vampires were the only thing left for authors and Hollywood to focus on. Oh, and dragons, which have also been done recently (Christopher Paolini's extraordinarily popular series).

I think there may also be subtle economic and societal factors. As we increasingly become a globalized and accepting society, vampires are the ultimate "other" to fantasize about-they are dangerous, prey on people, and have interesting powers and limitations that most of us do not normally concern ourselves with (we can go outside in broad daylight, for example, without risking spontaneous combustion).

Also, vampires are not clearly evil as many other supernatural things are marketed. In fact, in HBO's True Blood we see vampires as mostly benevolent beings just trying to get by in a surprisingly backward Southern town.

I think this ambiguity between good and harmful is something American television viewers and fantasy fans crave right now-we are in the midst of a stifling economic recession, and yet it does not always feel "bad" or "harmful" to us. We still have a lot of prosperity and opportunity around us, even though news outlets are painting horror stories of lost jobs and irreparable personal debts. I think this ambiguity plays itself well in the vampire story: we want something we can relate to somewhat, yet also condescend and cast into an "exotic other" category. We want to fantasize about something that is dangerous, yet accessible-much like the stock market over the past year or two.