by Marko Peric

Can someone please explain vampires to me? No, not the whole drinking blood/turning into a bat/no reflection/assorted super powers/severe allergy to garlic thing. As you can tell I pretty much have that down. I know what vampires are. I know they are fictional creatures based very loosely on the real disease porphyria, and that there's a girl named Buffy who exists to slay them. What I don't understand is the general fascination with them. Vampires are big. And when I say big, I mean utterly huge. There are a lot of people seriously into vampires, and there is an accordingly large quantity of vampire books, movies, TV shows, websites, and fan clubs.

What really throws me for a loop is the attention vampires get is completely disproportionate to the attention other creatures of the night receive. I went to yahoo and searched for vampire. Four hundred sites came up, and 391 when I searched for vampires. A mere 23 sites came up for werewolf, and 17 for werewolves. Sixty-three came up for mummy, 18 for undead, 66 for skeleton, 23 for ghoul, 12 for wraith, 29 for banshee. Need I continue?

I brought this up with a friend who is 'into' vampires. More specifically I brought up the vast number of vampire movies (searching on the IMDb under titles found 202 containing the word vampire, and 58 more with vampires, versus 51 with mummy, 38 with werewolf, and 16 with skeleton). To make my point complete, she produced a vampire movie guide that she happened to have on hand at work. That's right, a entire book dedicated to vampire movies. And it wasn't a small book, either. She's probably going to smack me upside the head when she reads this (well, the first time I see her after she reads it), but I digress. When one can buy a guide to vampire movies, I think it's obvious vampires are getting more attention than they should.

Do I have any solutions to offer? Not really. I suppose people who are 'into' werewolves and other creatures of the night could demand a bit more of the limelight, but as I'm not interested in seeing a whole bunch of werewolf and undead movies, I hope they don't. And I still don't understand why vampires get so much attention.

(On a side note, I am ironically writing this the week after The Mummy Returns opened and grossed 68 million dollars in one weekend. Let's consider that a step toward equality among the undead.)