As I type this hordes of store owners are busy putting 50% off stickers on all their holiday merchandise to make room for a hoard of turkey or Santa themed items. Dentists are gleefully rubbing their hands in anticipation of a never ending string of sugar high children with cavities the size of golf balls from their impressive piles of candy they collected last night. I myself spent much of last night in the company of friends drinking, eating, dancing and fending off the never ending stream of questions as to what I was supposed to be – a question that could easily be answered by simply opening my mouth and showing whomever was asking a pair of neatly applied fangs. After showing my teeth to the umpteenth person of the night though curiosity got the best of me and I asked the man in front of me why everyone kept asking me what my costume was. Did I fall so short of what I was trying to convey?

“It’s the makeup and the dress I guess,” he replied. “At first I thought you must be a ghost or some sort of dead girl.” I looked down at my costume for the evening – a gauzy, layered, white dress with a rather modest neck and hemline. I had left my long, dyed black hair loose around my face, shoulders and back and had taken the time to powder down every visible part of my body including my lips before creating deep, reddish circles around my eyes. I thought I looked quite obvious and when I told him as much he simply shrugged and said, “well it’s just not the type of vampire you’re used to seeing now a days”.

Right now America and many other nations are caught up in what can only be described as a vampire feeding frenzy. Everywhere you go it’s not uncommon to see a pair of fangs and as a teenager I would have killed for such a large frenzy over the undead as there is now. Not that my love of vampires has waned over the years, if anything its become stronger even though I’m more picky on what I’ll read or watch. You’d think that I’d be in heaven and yet I’m not.

I, long time vampire lover extraordinaire, hate with every fiber of my being the current trend towards vampires.

A friend asked me recently if it was because I didn’t want vampires to be popular. I responded that I would love for them to remain in the public eye, I just with they were what they said they were. The vampires I grew up with were as wide and varied as they are today. They came from every walk of life, from all over the globe and were every shade and flavor of gender and sexual preference one could think of (and even a few you couldn’t). But they all had one thing in common and that was at their hearts, love it or hate it, they were true vampires.

Vampires used to fall in love with humans, moan about the problems of immortality and wax philosophic in ridiculous outfits as readily as they do today but there was always the need for blood. The trouble with the vampires of today is a fundamental facet of their existence has been castrated. Blood substitutes (True Blood), animal substitutes (Twilight), and willing donors (Anita Blake) have all done their part to take away what makes a vampire a vampire. Instead we have a long line of predominantly male vampires who look sexy, own clubs, talk about there feelings, go on dates and do everything except what a vampire is supposed to do and that is suck blood.

And on the human protagonist side of things the genera fairs no better. The Sassy Heroine ™ seems to have become the standard model for all vampire stories. She’s just as air brained, loud mouthed and sexually voracious (once she finally admits it – usually at a none too hasty 3/4^th of the way in to the series) as her sex kitten predecessor with the only difference being that she will give you shit about her choices. I’m convinced a strong female, human character doesn’t exist.

This blog is an attempt on my part to catalogue both the few redeeming facets of the genera and to catalogue just what went wrong with the rest. To discover just how we made it from midnight exhumations in peasant graveyards to tubes of body glitter being sold at your local Hot Topic.

Because love them or hate them you have to admit that the vampires today really suck.