What's the Deal with Vampires?

You know, I enjoy mythological tales about vampires as much as the rest, but there can be such a thing as too much of a good thing.

Okay, in case you haven't guessed, I'm talking about Twilight. It's just been reported that the latest Twilight movie, New Moon, has broken the record to become the highest grossing midnight showing of all-time with $26 million, surpassing both Harry Potter and The Dark Knight. It really astounds me that this film is bringing in these kinds of numbers, and it makes me wonder what to expect in the long term for this film series at the box office.

I could easily see this being a very profitable franchise, and if it brought in these types of numbers in just one night, it could easily become one of the highest grossing films of the year. I can see it having Titanic-syndrome, every teenage girl is gonna see it over and over again, each time dragging along a different friend who hasn't seen it yet.

Now I will preface this by saying I have never read any of the Twilight books, nor have I seen the first film in its entirety, because from the little I have seen, I knew I wouldn't like the rest of it. While I am often frustrated when someone makes comparisons between Twilight and Harry Potter, I typically try to brush them off. Hey, even when I think about the fact that the vampires in Twilight walk around in the daylight, I simply have to accept it and move on. My biggest question is what's making stories about vampires the big thing right now to where Twilight is breaking records?

At the current moment there are two hit TV shows about vampires, The Vampire Diaries and True Blood. As well, aside from Twilight, there is at least a handful of movies about vampires currently in production at all of the major studios in Hollywood. Hey, even foreign language films are getting into the fray with stuff like Nightwatch and Let the Right One In. What was the thing that triggered this current wave of vampire phenomenon, and which films or TV shows about vampires should you watch?

I don't know what triggered this current vampire obsession other than its time on the pop culture cycle finally came. Personally, I'm still a fan of the original Dracula films from Universal Studios during the Golden Age of Hollywood, but I look at this current resurgence of vampire obsession, and very little of it has anything in common with Dracula or any of the other classic stories about vampires told over the centuries. In a way I guess vampires are the next wave of phenomena, much how superheros were for about the last eight or nine years. I'm just wondering how many more stories about vampires can be told before the well dries up? Of course, for every vampire story like Twilight, there is one that is wholly-original like Let the Right One In.