Ugh.  The undead are everywhere.  There is no escaping them.  Believe me, I’ve tried!
 
Go into any bookstore at random.  Go into any Fiction subsection, be it Romance, Mystery, or Teen, and you will be facing a forest of fangs.  Vampires have permeated every corner of modern fiction.  Next, go to your local movie theatre, or simply turn to your newspaper’s Entertainment section, and again, you will be immersed in immortals.
 
Vampires have become cool and mainstream.  There are now vampire cults, fan clubs, websites, and television series centered around these bloodsuckers.  It’s at the point where they’re no longer scary.  They’re your neighbors.
 
Modern screenwriters have figured out ways of getting once-heliophobic monsters out into the sun and onto the beaches.  Just as you can’t escape them on the shelves of your bookstore, you can’t escape them inside the books, either.  The fictional demons have not only retained all their age-old powers and strengths, they have also found loopholes in their time-honored weaknesses, as well.
 
Now, the teens and preteens are sucked in (pun intended), and they think it’s so cool!  In Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight book series, vampires not only bask in the sun, they sparkle!!!!  They drink animal blood, and the main vampire falls in love with the shy new girl in town.  It’s West Side Story without the songs.
 
In the television series True Blood, we are introduced to a reality in which vampires can come out of the coffin and into the world, because they now have “synthetic blood” to drink.  Humans shouldn’t fear them, and what you end up watching is an allegory for racism, as we are urged to accept the “outsiders.”  Maybe that’s a neat way to teach 11-year-old Suzy about bigotry, but in the meantime, the monsters have completely lost their pizzazz.  This series actually features animated “convertible” fangs that fold up and down!
 
Yawn.
 
From the 1922 silent classic Nosferatu to as late as the 1980s, vampires could still be scary.  The 1987 flick The Lost Boys did an excellent job of turning Victorian counts into modern-day thugs, without taking away any of the fear.  You could still burn them with holy water and slay them with stakes, so there were ways out of the terror, but you did not find the undead fluffy or cuddly in any way.
 
Soon after that, we were treated to the film and subsequent series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Here, the creatures from the darkness can be routinely destroyed by a cheerleader from The Valley.  In many episodes, she seemed literally bored as she went out on nightly patrol, shoving stakes into whomever popped up from the cemetery soil.  The show had many clever elements, but the demons weren’t among them.  Most were minor characters with the depth and importance of crash-test dummies.  Granted, the show was centered on the slayer, not the slain, but my point stands.
 
These ominous beasts have become so overused, overanalyzed, and overhauled that they are no longer serving their purpose.  Preschoolers think they’re hip.  No one cowers under their covers when a bloodsucker comes onto the screen, because odds are that he or she will be sexy and harmless.
 
Harmless vampires!  That’s what the media is feeding us now.  May I suggest we call a moratorium on mortuary stalkers?  Give us five fangless years, while the writers of novels and screenplays rethink their villains.  Make them villainous, would you?  Give us back the creatures who are afraid of garlic and sunlight, who terrify villages for centuries until the last one is destroyed (with the typical cliffhanger leaving us to wonder if they have all been destroyed!).
 
If writers refuse to write their monsters as monsters, they should stop writing about them altogether.  Even TV’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer taught us that if we take the teeth out of our monsters, they are no longer scary, and no longer monsters!