A trend I’ve noticed especially over the last year is the growing popularity of vampires in various mediums of popular culture. It’s been in the movies, television, and books notably in that span of time. And they’ve become a very popular tool for storytellers to convey various feelings or stereotyping and the like. The most obvious example of vampires is the Twilight saga. If you don’t know what Twilight is, my sister-in-law will kill you, no really, what have you been doing for the last 4 months/ how big was the rock you were under. So the books and recent movie of this saga have been a huge boon to the vampire population.

At the same time, True Blood won a fairly large viewership on HBO over the summer and was renewed for a second season. True Blood is a show based on a series of books where vampires are an allegory for persecuted populations in modern America. Blogger: pop ramblings – Create PostI personally didn’t latch on, but I did hear it got better as the series picked up. A show called Vampire Diaries was recently picked up for a pilot for the fall season as well.

Movies include Let The Right One In, the Underworld trilogy, and tons of them beforehand and quite a few more to follow.

I’m not saying they weren’t around before. Vampire stories are old as dirt. But recently they’ve really stepped into the limelight and become a viable mainstream entity. It’s part of the overall geekification of popular culture which allows sci-fi shows like LOST, Battlestar Galactica; movies like The Dark Knight and Iron Man, and graphic novels become top earners and best sellers (Watchmen). Certainly part of this process has been the excellent talent which is associated with it and thank goodness for them! But another part is that the stuff is just plain interesting and people see the value beyond the supernatural or sci-fi element of these stories to see the story as a whole.

Whatever the reason, I’m excited because I’m really thinking with the uptake in vampires, unicorns are probably pretty close in line for a prime spotlight. Wait for it.