Deadly serious

Audiences continue to be fascinated by vampire classic's like Dracula as depicted by Christopher Lee in 1972. Photo / Getty Images

I think it must be the "what if" factor. Then of course there's the sex, nothing's ever failed for having too much of that. And the gear: all steampunk Matrix with a dash of Beau Brummel. Dead cool, the lot of it.

Other than that, though, I'm stumped. Can someone please tell me why we never seem to have our fill of vampires? People queue to watch the same damn movie with the same damn lines every time, which is why Dracula has spawned its very own porn genre, it always ends the same way. For a short while during the 90s I did think we'd reached saturation point. Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas and even Leslie Nielsen had swished the cape and got the stake for their trouble.

Then, out of the sunset, came Buffy and it seemed the anti-vampire might be the way and the light. Erm, no ... the Count is back with more emerging from their coffins even as you read. Of course there's the doe-eyed Twilight series - who knew a Mormon would be cunning enough to use the darkest side to promote abstinence and family values? Still, Stephenie Meyer's clearly on to something if sales of 42 million books cross 39 countries mean anything. But is True Blood much more than Melrose Place with dental issues? They don't stop there. Did you know Bram Stoker's great-grand-something-or-other has churned out his own version of the family jewel? There's even a movie in the offing, although we'll get to enjoy the mock-horror Lesbian Vampire Killers well before that gets out of the ground.

Clearly, Dracula's immortality has nothing do with his undeadness, it's more the never-ending supply of gullible punters. Plenty of high-powered brains had entirely serious debates over their existence during the 18th century, a period that was something of a high-water mark for reported vampire infestations - check out this contribution from revolutionary philosopher and brainbox Jean-Jacques Rousseau: "If there ever was in the world a warranted and proven history, it is that of vampires; nothing is lacking, official reports, testimonials of persons of standing, of surgeons, of clergymen, of judges; the judicial evidence is all-embracing." But he wasn't talking about your now-standard saucy chap in a cape, the vampires of his day were squalid types who mingled bloodsucking with antics like tying knots in cows' tails, and they remained that way until Polidori, Lord Byron's doctor, wrote a thinly disguised attack on his employer in 1819.

The good doctor clearly enjoyed painting the self-annointed Sith Lord of poetry as a pointy-toothed son of Satan but he couldn't have anticipated how it would capture the public's imagination. His masterstroke was to swap the centuries-old vampiric image of a low-rent, animalistic, slasher with sewage breath and turn him into an omnisexual charmer in a lacey shirt whose method of dispatch is more slap and tickle than Freddie Kruger. If you're going to be a monster, why not be one with great skin whose victims swoon all the way to their early graves?

Which is why you don't see sad-assed teens yearning to be creatures from the Black Lagoon. If you're going to be an outcast, be a pretty one, eyeliner beats gills any day, just look at the Bebo site for young New Zealanders who suspect they may have the odd bloodsucker in their whakapapa. But if Polidori put new life into an old story, it was Stoker's book at the end of the 19th century that made vampire mania rampant and utterly fashionable. His vampire, Count Dracula, was a throwback to his butt-ugly 18th century forebears, but Stoker loaded him up with historical realism by connecting him to a nasty chap called Vlad Tepes - a 15th century Romanian defender of the faith who liked nothing more than taking tea as his victims squealed atop pointed sticks - while telling his story through first-person accounts.

The effect was to beg the question: What if it were true? After all, these legends have been around as long there have been legends. This was deadly serious stuff to a lot of people. Consider the skeleton recently exhumed in Italy with a brick in its mouth, a technique once used as a sure-fire means of stopping a vampire from chewing through its burial shroud - I guess it worked. That would be a mere historic curiosity if crazy people still didn't believe all this stuff.

In 2002, a Welsh kid murdered his neighbour and drank the blood he'd squeezed from her heart in an attempt to become a vampire; there are still Londoners who will swear on anything you fancy that a vampire lurks within Highgate cemetery; and, of course, there's always some plain peculiar goings-on going on in eastern Europe and Africa.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm as much a child of the Sunday Horrors, Count Homogenised and that muppet on Sesame Street as anyone born at the far end of Generation X, but I still don't see the need for this constant revision. Maybe I need some expert advice to explain my mistake.

Enter Agnieszka Zabicka, a Polish academic with an passion for all things Gothic except, it seems, for Marilyn Manson. Her family, back in the very old country, live smack in the middle of the traditional vampire stomping grounds. She has just concluded a six-week continuing education course at Auckland University looking at the history of vampires in literature and film. With the right marketing I'd have thought she could just about fill the Vector Arena with screaming teens, but instead the first night boasted us and four old-school fans.

All very educational though. Who would have thought Dracula wasn't so much a vampire as a social barometer? Zabicka makes a convincing case that while vampire movies follow certain rules, each retelling reflects the fears of its time. For example, Stoker played on worries about east-European Jews moving west to escape the pogroms. Francis Ford Coppola was referencing Aids, the femme fatale vampire was an attack on the "new" vote-toting woman, while True Blood is apparently saying all sorts of worthy stuff about civil rights and women getting their tops off. I can see how that makes sense, but everything gets a bit cloudy when she moves onto the stuff about sexual politics. Was Dracula really an early attempt to grapple with homosexuality?

This seems a little like having it both ways - on one hand he's undead, sexless and unnatural, while on the other he's this uber-seductor with a thing for virgins of any flavour. But if you really want to squeeze your brain in a vice, try dipping into the academic tangles over the gender politics of vampirism. There's more than a hint here of Dracula nerds legitimising their cheap thrills with big words and lofty ideas; just get a room, fellas and be done with it. All the same, if this sort of thing gets your blood pumping then forget all these bright and randy nu-vampires.

According to Zabicka, what you really need is a Swedish book, now a movie as well, called Let The Right One In. From those that know these things, it's the best fangfest in ages - at least until the next one.

* Twilight: Director's Notebook, by Catherine Hardwicke (Hachette $39.99), and the Twilight DVD are out now. True Blood, starring Kiwi actress Anna Paquin, screens on Wednesdays at 9.30pm on Prime.