THE symptoms are unnerving: a taste for fresh meat — rare, if you please; an aversion to sunlight; and a passion for spectral-looking, fine-boned rakes. All are indications that the sufferer has been bitten by the vampire bug. This generation of undead prowls high school hallways and dimly lighted dance clubs as menacing — and as seductive — as they have ever been. The June premiere of the second season of “True Blood,” drew 3.4 million viewers, making it HBO’s most-watched program since the “Sopranos” finale in 2007.
Charlaine Harris has just published “Dead and Gone,” the ninth novel in her Sookie Stackhouse series, variations on Southern Gothic fiction on which “True Blood” is based. The publishing world has been intrigued by “The Strain,” a first installment in a planned trilogy written by the film director Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, about bloodthirsty predators run amok in Manhattan.
The style world, too, has come under the vampire’s spell, in the shape of the gorgeous leather- and lace-clad night crawlers who have crept into the pages of fashion glossies.
Vampires, of course, are part of a hoary tradition that harks back to Nosferatu and Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” at least. Anne Rice updated the genre, introducing the ghoulishly aristocratic vampire Lestat. But the undead are returning with a vengeance, in part because they “personify real-world anxieties,”
“Especially during these post-9/11 times of increased vigilance, representations like the ‘Twilight’ series reflect a kind of conspiracy-theory mentality, a fear that there is something secret and dangerous going on in our own community, right under our noses.”
Given all that baggage, what keeps vampires so alluring?
One might point to their combination of deathless good looks and decadent sexuality. Their faces, as described in “Twilight,” “were all devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful. They were faces you never expected to see except perhaps on the airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine.”
Vampirelike glamour figures strike come-hither poses in a flurry of recent fashion publications. Portrayed as androgynous creatures in the June issue of W, they affect killer glares, their menace accentuated by their chalky pallor. In the magazine’s current issue,Bruce Willis appears about to be raked by the talons of his new wife, Emma Heming, in a series of photographs by Steven Klein.
Italian Vogue has also succumbed to the vampire’s cold charms: In the June issue, the latest to arrive on American newsstands, models pose as willfully spooky night crawlers like those who once haunted Manhattan clubs; one image captures a female stalker whose supper, the smear of scarlet on her cheek suggests, has just been interrupted.
The vampire’s attraction is “all about the titillation of imagining the monsters we could be if we just let ourselves go,” suggested Rick Owens, a fashion bellwether whose goth-tinged collections sometimes evoke the undead. “We’re all fascinated with corruption, the more glamorous the better” and, he added, with the idea of “devouring, consuming, possessing someone we desire.”
Comely upper-crust demons haunt the corridors of Duchesne, the Upper East Side private school of “Blue Bloods,” a young-adult vampire series by Melissa de la Cruz. In “The Strain,” Mr. del Toro’s gory tale, which is framed like a police procedural, the vampires are lowlifes, unremittingly vile. Saya, the eternal schoolgirl of “Blood: The Last Vampire,” a supernatural action film that will open July 10, is a reluctant monster in a middy blouse, living a Spartan existence. “
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