If you thought the world was already thoroughly inundated with vampiric books, stories, music, comics, events, clothing, web sites, film, TV and lunch boxes, it's nothing compared to what you're going to see in 1997. This year marks the centenary of the publication of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula . Now instead of wanting to be the guys with the stakes defeating evil incarnate, we want to be vampires.
Vampires are the good guys now.
In a world with real evil everywhere, with human monsters that overwhelm any fictional monsters, we've turned the vampire into a sex symbol. Popular and bloodless. Ironically we've drained the image of its more horrifying elements and made the vampire culturally acceptable. The vampire isn't really evil, because society as a whole no longer believes in institutionalized, satanic evil. Vampires have been permutated by modern culture into permissible bloodsuckers.