"Sorry Bella, I can't stop coffin!"

With the Twilight series ruling the box office and teenage girls’ hearts, fans of the more traditional blood-suckers are fearing for the fate of their murderous anti-heroes. With Stephenie Meyer (literally) defanging her vampires, are they in danger of becoming about as scary as mildly ticked-off kittens?

Vampires began their lives as body-horror, a far cry from the handsome predators we’re used to – just look at Nosferatu. When Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, the novel which created the modern concept of the vampire, blood transfusions were a new development, and not yet fully understood (blood groups wouldn’t be discovered for some years after). His monsters were all about the fear of introducing someone else’s blood into your body, corrupting it from the inside out.

But the element of Dracula that really captured imaginations was the hypnotic nature of the Count, his ability to have good, virtuous women offering up their jugulars in no time flat. Werewolves are all about raging hormones and repressed animalistic urges. Zombies are about mindless consumerism. And vampires are about sex. It’s the way of the world.

Seduction is inescapable in the vampire genre, and is by far their defining feature. The idea of being completely under someone else’s control is both terrifying and freeing, and the reason that vampires have always been the female monster of choice (and whether that’s sexist or not could spawn an entirely separate article). Of course, the nature of their sexual threat is adapted for the purpose of the film. There’s the heavy, louche romanticism of Anne Rice, the bromance of The Lost Boys, Buffy and Angel’s nightmare morning-after (riffing on the idea that the man you sleep with isn’t always the same man you wake up to), the Deep South sin’n’sweat of True Blood – and then there’s Twilight: sex for the purity ring generation.

"We're dead, and lovin' it!"

Of course, there are exceptions – namely, the ‘vampires as drug addicts’ angle. Blade needs his fix to keep him on the side of good. Being Human’s Mitchell is forever hovering on the edge of the wagon. Even Twilight’s saintly Edward Cullen calls love interest Bella his ‘own personal brand of heroin’.  True Blood cleverly reverses this theme by having humans addicted to vampire blood. And just like that, we’ve gone full-circle to Dracula’s transfusions.

But the big criticism thanks to series’ like Twilight and the forthcoming Vampire Diaries, is that our fanged fiends have lost their sense of danger. Yes, the Cullens are the Care Bears of the vampire world, and yes, Blade would kick their glittering arses. But the series also contains more conventional creatures of the night (and overcast days), played with far more traditional viciousness and varying amounts of camp by Cam Gigandet, Michael Sheen and Dakota Fanning.

It’s not even like the manfully-struggling Edward Cullen is a new development in the world of vampires. As long as there have been blood-suckers, there have been characters who resist their vampiric nature. David Boreanaz’s Angel was falling in love with a high school girl long before Robert Pattinson donned the vampire contact lenses, and everyone from Mina Harker to The Lost Boys’ Michael have been fighting their murderous tendencies. Quite why vamp-fans have taken such offence at the Twilight series is a mystery – if there’s one thing Stephenie Meyer is definitely not guilty of it’s originality.

Besides, it’s hardly spelling the end of the more traditional ‘scary’ vampire genre. Let The Right One In is a purer vampire tale, while also being unique in its depiction of a child monster, while True Blood is ticking boxes for the people who believe that a vampire isn’t a vampire unless they’re sucking on the throats of virginal lovelies. It also seems to be creating its own sub-genre, something that can only be described as ‘vampsploitation’.

If anything, we are currently witnessing the most imaginative and varied exploration of the vampire genre in over a hundred years. They are coming out of the coffin, going to prom and living in a houseshare with a werewolf and a ghost all at once, while still finding the time to bump off the neighbours. Okay, so Edward Cullen isn’t going to embark on a killing spree anytime soon, but he does still have the ability to rob women of all self-control and free will, on and off screen. Which is really what vampires were always about anyway.

By Abigail Chandler