Wake me when vampire season is over

Or should that be: Wake me when vampire season is dead and buried with its fanged head cut off and a pointy wooden stake through its dessicated undead heart.

Even the creator of the Twilight phenom (venom?) is tired of the pasty, pointy-fanged ones (thankfully). Author Stephenie Meyer told Oprah Winfrey she’s not sure about a fifth Twilight book at the moment.

“I am a little burned out on vampires right now,” she said. “I think I need a little break. I might go spend some time with my aliens. I might do something completely different. I’ve got to cleanse the palate. I may come back to it. I did envision it as a longer series. But I wrapped Breaking Dawn in a way that I felt satisfied with, so if that moment didn’t come, I’d be okay.”

She's not the only one who's feeling a little over it all. Aren't we all?

There seems to be a ridiculous fervour for all things vampirical right now, which - while Twilight and True Blood et al can be quite fun - seems to be dominating the entertainment world out of all proportion. Zombies and werewolves come and go, but we seem stuck in Vamp-ville. So much so that it's easier to figure out the years when we have not been in the midst of a vampire craze, aka The Garlic Years. 

Whether you put it down to romantic escapism from a world full of doom and gloom about the economy and swine flu, or a secret desire to be dominated, vampires are hot right now.

But surely we've reached some sort of blood-soaked saturation point? I wouldn't mind if they actually sucked some human blood every now and then, but most of the Transylvanian antiheroes these days seem to be devoted "vegans". Like Buffy's mate Angel, only paler and not so well built.

It's nothing new, of course. Everyone from Anne Rice to Stephen King and even CS Lewis wrote about vampires back in the day. The modern breed of vampire heroes tend to be more romantic than evil, but the romance has a definite edge of autoerotic asphyxia about it...

Author of the recent creepy (but in a good way) kids film Coraline and numerous other fabulous fantasy stories, Neil Gaiman reckons it's all about what the vampire character represents.

"Dracula was a great novel of sexual seduction, full of repeated sexual seduction and rape and sex. So it makes complete sense that your solid Victorian vampires were fundamentally evil. And you can have that nice big stake hammered through them as a way of putting them to rest. After that, I think the next big, huge, cultural, “somebody’s just written a vampire story” is probably Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. Steve basically wanted to do Dracula again, only in a small town in Maine. At that point you got vampires still sort of representing the “other”. Then Anne Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire, which as a teenager I thought was a rather drippy book. I have to say as a teenager who loved vampire fiction and wanted vampire fiction, I thought they all sort of sat around being miserable.

"But I think then the thing that changed everything and that gave vampire fiction a new lease on life and death was Aids, because you hit the early ‘80s, and suddenly you have something in the blood that is an exchange of blood that kills and is altogether fundamentally about sex. And vampirism essentially came out of the closet as a metaphor for the act of love that kills. Stephen King once said, using the Erica Jung quote, that vampirism is the ultimate zipless f—. And then a sort of continuous transmutation, you had Lost Boys, which is essentially vampirism as wish fulfilment. Finally, of course there’s Sesame Street, which I think may well have created the sympathetic vampire for the world in Count." 

While it's well known in the more conservative parts of True Blood's population that "God hates fangs", I don't so much hate vampires as I'm bored with the genre. Time to move on... especially the boring teenage ones who aren't allowed to have sex until they're married (sorry if that was a spoiler for anyone, but the books have been out for yonks... and if you're into perving on vamp-human sex, you'd have switched to True Blood ages ago).

Roll on Zombieland! (Which opens here Dec 3, coincidentally...) Funny how no one finds zombies such a big turn on...

So, what're your thoughts on all things vampirical on film? Enough of the fangbanging, or can't get enough of the stuff?

(Personally, I'm curious to see what they'd do on the big screen with the fourth Twilight book, which Meyer seems to have written under the influence of various hallucinogens. If you've read it, you know what I'm talking about. Cra-zee. And yes, I've already got my tickets to New Moon, but it is my job... it's not just cos RPattz gets his bright white chest out...)

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