Why Young Women are Lapping up Vampire Stories
By Christopher Goodwin | The First Post
Are retroviral drugs the reason today's vampires are so sexy and ubiquitous? For much of the 1980s and 1990s, as the spectre of rampant and then untreatable Aids haunted the world, blood-sucking was a distinctly fatal and unappealing pursuit. A metaphor for "an act of love that kills", author Neil Gaiman called it.
Today's vampires are not about death, or even its cursed mirror, immortality, as True Blood, the red-hot new vampire series from HBO, illustrates. No. According to the show's creator Alan Ball: "Vampires are sex." Sex without the attendant fear of death.
But even that doesn't quite catch the phenomenon, or explain why the new strain of vampires who have overrun popular culture have particularly seduced impressionable young women. Truth is, women know that these sexed-up new vampires, like Bill Compton, the 173-year-old blood-sucker played by Stephen Moyer in True Blood, are really about the ultimate penetration - of the soul.
Yet True Blood had a shaky start when it premiered in the States last autumn. Critics were initially cold about the show, which is based on the best-selling Southern Vampire Mysteries novels by Charlaine Harris.
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