U.S./ Vampires Steal Summer Spotlight with TV's True Blood and the Latest Twilight Film

Good news for bookstore owners looking to save space: the “teen” and “sadomasochism” sections can now be merged. Americans, teenagers in particular, show no sign of slowing the obsession with vampires, werewolves, and other harbingers of dark magic that has swept the nation in recent years.

A look at Google search trends for today shows that, with the release of Eclipse, the latest installment in the Twilight film series based on the popular books for middle- and high schoolers (but also read by millions of adults), vampire-related topics have claimed three spots of the top ten most searched terms in America.

The Twilight series, now being released as films, is a collection of four novels by Stephenie Meyer. The protagonist Isabella “Bella” Swan falls in love with vampire Edward Cullen. Most popular among young adults, the four books have received many awards, including the 2008 British Book Award for, creepily, “Children’s Book of the Year.” Debate rages in some communities over the contents of the books, which describes the desire of a vampire for a person’s blood in sexual terms. A more widespread complaint by parents and teachers is that, unlike the Harry Potter series, considered by many to be well-written as well as wildly popular, the Twilight series is not written in good English.

True Blood is a hit television series produced by the network HBO, and is also based on a series of novels, The Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris. The first season received critical acclaim, and captured a Golden Globe and an Emmy, among other awards. It chronicles the co-existence of humans and vampires in a small Louisianna town, centering on protagonist Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic cocktail waitress, who like Bella Swan has a romantic and sexual relationship with a vampire.

The vampires featured in pop culture today are not the spooky, fearsome creatures of old legends and early books and films. Rather, in a trend some credit to the 1994 film Interview With The Vampire Chronicles, starring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, they are highly sensual, and their relationship to the people they feed on is a predominantly sexual one.

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