Buffy The Vampire Slayer

We are currently in the midst of an explosion in the popularity of vampires, with the Twilight movie franchise and HBO’s gothic soap True Blood leading the undead charge—suddenly, it seems, audiences want blood. Why now? Is it the parlous state of the world, economic anxieties, the end result of a morbidly sex-and-youth obsessed popular culture? It’s a pop-culture phenomenon that Entertainment Weekly has been following closely. Here’s Tina Jordan, senior editor at EW:

Though vampires have been the object of fascination for centuries, there’s been perhaps no culture as besotted with them as ours. An ongoing love for Dracula movies—whether they were cheesy or scary, whether they starred Bela Lugosi, George Hamilton, or Klaus Kinski—was first stoked in the mid-1970s, when both Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire came out. Then came the subsequent movie versions of those books, and the blockbuster success of TV shows like Buffy and Angel. But it wasn’t until Stephenie Meyer came along, corralling tens of millions of teenagers (and their mothers and grandmothers!) into bookstores and movie theatres that we became a nation obsessed. Now, thanks not only to Twilight but to authors like P.C. and Kristin Cast, Charlaine Harris, and Laurell K. Hamilton, as well as to hit shows like True Blood and The Vampire Diaries, it’s clear that most of us have succumbed to the lure of the sexy undead.

As Jordan points out, our current infatuation with bloodsuckers is just the most recent iteration of the enduring appeal of these dark avatars; our fascination with the vampire never really dies, though it goes underground from time to time. Here we present a brief survey of vamps from the small screen, encompassing interpretations that range from the repulsively horrific to the seductively suave. We even have vampires for children, who, of course, like to be safely scared too.

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http://paleycenter.org/tv-vampire-stakedown/