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Has anyone else noticed the vampire craze that has been unearthed in the last year? Vampire inspired books have been popping up everywhere from Stephenie Meyer’s beloved Twilight Saga, to the increasingly popular Vampire Diaries. It was not going to be long before vampire’s had a resurgence on the big screen, gone are the days of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Nosferatu, The Lost Boys, Interview with the Vampire, From Dusk til’ Dawn, the Blade trilogy and cult films like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Vampires have risen from the dead, to be reborn in the form of non-terrifying English actors, portraying the un-dead as heartthrob-like, elegant, cultured and worldly. Living corpses have never been so appealing, and with books like Meyer’s painting its lead vampire in the likeness of a Roman sculpture, it’s no wonder why we’ve all begun to swoon. Author’s like Meyer have deconstructed the Vampire myths we’ve come to know, her vampires aren’t afraid of garlic, they can go into the sunlight without bursting into flames, and they have no noticeable fangs. Even their diets have been altered to suit modern times and opinions, they feed off of animals instead of humans, and as her main character Edward Cullen puts it, they have become "vegetarians". Vampires are becoming human in their recent film and published adaptations, and we are finding them less repulsive and a lot more alluring and relatable than we used to. They are no longer the villains in the story, but the love interests, and it is this absurd irony of a love between the living and the dead that keeps readers and movie goers wanting more. While hardcore Twilight fans countdown the months until the anticipated release of the sequel to Twilight, New Moon comes out next year, those of us who have been bitten hard, have to satiate our blood thirst other ways. HBO has come out with their answer to the PG rated Twilight with their new series True Blood. While Meyer’s books attempt to romanticize the love between a human and a vampire, True Blood’s raunchy, vulgar, sexy, humour-driven and scary portrayal legitimizes the fear back where it belongs, and explores a new environment for the bloodsuckers, a small red neck town. The HBO series is based on Charlaine Harris’s equally popular "Sookie Stackhouse" novels, and digs deeper into ethical questions, dissecting the notion of vampires as equals amongst humans, posing such questions as, can vampires and humans co-exist, and if they can, what are their rights in society? The show examines the boundaries of human rights, but what if you aren’t human? Are vampires today what Rosa Parks was for her generation? True Blood is a clever new approach on the vampire mythology and delves into moral and political implications of co-habituating with vampires, while maintaining a sense of humour. And just when you thought the sun would come out and all the craze was dying down for at least a few months, vampires are not going anywhere, anytime soon. The CW network has just green lighted a pilot for the best selling novels The Vampire Diaries to be made into a series of the same name. As long as teenage girls and their mothers buy into the Vampire market, then we will be seeing a lot more of their pale faces around. Don’t be ashamed I say, jump onto the groupie bandwagon that is the Vampire phenomenon; embrace the un-dead.
Has anyone else noticed the vampire craze that has been unearthed in the last year? Vampire inspired books have been popping up everywhere from Stephenie Meyer’s beloved Twilight Saga, to the increasingly popular Vampire Diaries. It was not going to be long before vampire’s had a resurgence on the big screen, gone are the days of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Nosferatu, The Lost Boys, Interview with the Vampire, From Dusk til’ Dawn, the Blade trilogy and cult films like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Vampires have risen from the dead, to be reborn in the form of non-terrifying English actors, portraying the un-dead as heartthrob-like, elegant, cultured and worldly. Living corpses have never been so appealing, and with books like Meyer’s painting its lead vampire in the likeness of a Roman sculpture, it’s no wonder why we’ve all begun to swoon. Author’s like Meyer have deconstructed the Vampire myths we’ve come to know, her vampires aren’t afraid of garlic, they can go into the sunlight without bursting into flames, and they have no noticeable fangs. Even their diets have been altered to suit modern times and opinions, they feed off of animals instead of humans, and as her main character Edward Cullen puts it, they have become "vegetarians". Vampires are becoming human in their recent film and published adaptations, and we are finding them less repulsive and a lot more alluring and relatable than we used to. They are no longer the villains in the story, but the love interests, and it is this absurd irony of a love between the living and the dead that keeps readers and movie goers wanting more. While hardcore Twilight fans countdown the months until the anticipated release of the sequel to Twilight, New Moon comes out next year, those of us who have been bitten hard, have to satiate our blood thirst other ways. HBO has come out with their answer to the PG rated Twilight with their new series True Blood. While Meyer’s books attempt to romanticize the love between a human and a vampire, True Blood’s raunchy, vulgar, sexy, humour-driven and scary portrayal legitimizes the fear back where it belongs, and explores a new environment for the bloodsuckers, a small red neck town. The HBO series is based on Charlaine Harris’s equally popular "Sookie Stackhouse" novels, and digs deeper into ethical questions, dissecting the notion of vampires as equals amongst humans, posing such questions as, can vampires and humans co-exist, and if they can, what are their rights in society? The show examines the boundaries of human rights, but what if you aren’t human? Are vampires today what Rosa Parks was for her generation? True Blood is a clever new approach on the vampire mythology and delves into moral and political implications of co-habituating with vampires, while maintaining a sense of humour. And just when you thought the sun would come out and all the craze was dying down for at least a few months, vampires are not going anywhere, anytime soon. The CW network has just green lighted a pilot for the best selling novels The Vampire Diaries to be made into a series of the same name. As long as teenage girls and their mothers buy into the Vampire market, then we will be seeing a lot more of their pale faces around. Don’t be ashamed I say, jump onto the groupie bandwagon that is the Vampire phenomenon; embrace the un-dead.
Remember True Blood is set to air in June and New Moon will be out in the fall!
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