It's a vampire's world, we humans just live in it. The veeps are everywhere at the moment, glowering from movie screens, the television and towers of paperback novels, be they horny toothy teenagers or Southern gothic redux, filled up with lust for sex and death, they've even taken over the Vancity Theatre, as part of Vampyre Weekend. If you're not too terrified of sucking face with the undead, come and feast.

The choice of films on offer is curious, and often deeply wonderful -- everything from the Swedish delicacy Let the Right One In to Vampire's Kiss, a film that features Nicholas Cage's forays into the extremities of method acting, a bug-eating, eye-popping bag of tricks that, from all appearances, Mr. Cage has dipped back into for Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant. More obscure offering include Larry Fessenden's Habit, London After Midnight (a reconstruction of one of horror's most famous lost films) and Ganja & Hess, a '70s obscurity that owes more to Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep than to Blacula.

As different as all of these choices is the figure of the vampire, him or herself. (Speaking of which I refuse to believe that there was ever a more seductive pair of Euro trash vamps than Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie in The Hunger, which is also screening at VanCity this weekend). The different incarnations of the bloodsucking fiends collected in this group of films share a few common characteristics -- principal among them is their outsider status. Be they poor and famished or sleek and glossy as seals, they are fundamentally different from the normal folk living upright in the straight world. Forever set apart from the living, whatever their role (agent of madness, seductress, or random menace) they weren't us, and we weren't them. 

Vampires in biker bars

In Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark, a gang of vampires roams the American badlands, raggedy, desperate and forever stranded on the outside. When a beautiful young drifter named Mae kidnaps a young farm boy (Caleb) and attempts to indoctrinate him into the gypsy lifestyle of a band of traveling bloodsuckers, it is more than an education into avoiding sunlight, and dining à la carte at shit-kicker biker bars. It is also a peek into alternative culture, another family model, albeit one that requires some bloody mayhem.

The film has style to burn, but the one thing that leaps out and bites you square on the bum is the sense of sympathy engendered by their vampire's plight. Poverty and desperation are clearly as much a part of their lifestyle, as the need to feed on human blood. Living in the margins of society, in flea-bit hotels, grimy, dirty, and possessed of outlaw pride and a gonzo charm, this vampire tale contains elements of Kerouac-style American dystopia that emerge in all their classic romance.

Near Dark, while very much a film of its age (late '80s, complete with a soundtrack from Tangerine Dream), possesses a few more complicated ideas that lurk just below the surface of the skin. In attempting to live outside of society, the vampires are self-created, autonomous, amoral. Because of this, they must be punished and order restored. In the end, of course, moral rectitude in the figure of the patriarch (Big Daddy saves the day) is re-established, and all is made right with the universe. Still the peculiar charm and humanity of the vampires endures, even as they catch on fire in the stern glare of the moral sunlight. 

Vampires in pee-reeking pants

Director Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One does something similar to Bigelow's film, upsetting the natural order of evil and good, by arguing for the essential humanity of the vampire.

The story concerns a young Swedish misfit named Oskar, who is trapped in the midst of geeky pre-teen agony. A pale, awkward slip of a kid, you can almost smell the musty pee reek coming off his cords and awful sweaters. When a strange young girl moves in next door, and a slow sweet romance begins to bloom, the film subtly begins to subvert expectations. The normal world, with its confused adults, the secret cruelty of children and the mysteries of love, is as full of monsters as any gothic fairytale. The vampires on the other hand, with their clearly delineated rules of etiquette -- one must be invited in, or the consequences are dire (for the vampire that is) -- are somehow more civilized, more ordered. They keep their promises, which is more than you can say for most human beings. 

Having plowed through most of these films, it is an interesting exercise to look at the way the vampire has changed, over these many years, from Old European aristocrat, debauched and decadent, a creature of dead institutions and archaic traditions sucking off the live blood of living culture, to (increasingly) horny teenagers. The most readily available version of the vampire is apt to be a pale copy of the original Transylvanian aristocrat, a generic and white bread American, living somewhere outside of Seattle. If the terrible, punishing dullness of this notion hurts you, you're not alone. Stephen King's rant about Stephanie Meyer's glaring lack of talent, not to mention paucity of original ideas didn't stop her damn books from making a fortune.

Vampires in America

There is no point in bemoaning the issue. Times change and so we get a thin gruel of left-over ideas and rehashed hash. The success of Twilight, which is simply another bastardization of Jane Eyre (poor yet plucky girl, wins the heart of smoldering aristocrat, vaults over all class and economic distinctions) still works, even if is only a faint echo of the original. If Edward Cullen is no Rochester, on television, the vamp man is even further reduced into a smudgy charmless lunkhead named Stefan Salvatore in The Vampire Diaries. I find myself watching this show, like I would a slow-motion car wreck. It's terrible, but almost more interesting because of that fact. (Feast your eyes on the show's promotional material, which is virtually crying out for a master's thesis, crow vagina and all!)

Based on the series of best-selling teen novels, The Vampires Diaries features the hijinks of the Salvatore Brothers, and a beautiful young dolt named Elena, who attracts their interest, mostly through the correct application of lipgloss and hair straightening products. If you're looking for depth, venture not over to the CW Network, "there is no there there," as Gertrude Stein said (sort of, my apologies, Gertrude).

The Vampire Diaries joins a host of other half-dead shows such as Supernatural and Smallville, most of which seem to be shot in Vancouver (perhaps, they should simply be shot and put out of their misery). The Vampires Diaries is little more than your typical soap opera, with a thin smear of blood to add a piquant element. Sucky Elena may come between the two Salvatores, but she is essentially safe, because of her intact hymen (those things still come in handy). Girls who stray, however, quickly become lunch and bedtime snacks for bad brother Damon. Good brother Stefan, in full teen dream mode, resists his animal appetites, with the rare exception of a rabbit or two. Before your mind runs away with you, I mean he sucks on little bunnies, leaving their honour intact.

The most interesting thing that can be said about the show is that it is yet another example of the changing relationship between the warm-blooded and the cold. The notion of vampires as long-suffering noble souls isn't new, but the acceptance that they walk among us, take algebra, and hang out after school is. What self-respecting 1,000-year old ghoul would willingly subject himself or herself to high school, I ask you? Somewhere Bram Stoker is spinning like a top.

Essentially all the vampires' horror, their otherness, has been subsumed by mainstream middle-American, ironed out and flattened. The issue of class and social difference, central to many older vampire fables, is now somehow rendered moot. It's all stupid love triangles, artfully mussed hair, and dopey dialogue. This is somehow way more horrifying than endless buckets of blood and ravaged maidens.