I have always blamed Buffy.

It was just one vampire TV series after another and then endless vampire movies and clearly ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ was to blame. Maybe it is when you reach a certain age that you begin to incorrectly assign all occurrences of a cultural event to one particularly irritating occurrence of it?

Never-ending Kristen Stewart and Robert Patterson? Buffy caused that!
A seemingly good movie takes a detour down a vampire path – Blame Buffy!!
A muppet starts counting in Dracula-speak on Sesame Street – BLAME BUFFY!!!

Wait a minute – that cant be right. And of course it isn’t. I had always known that Bram Stoker was Irish but I had never realized that he grew up less than a mile away from our house on the northside of Dublin, near to Fairview Park. I doubt very much if the Irish creator of one of literature’s most famous characters could ever have guessed at the impact his creation would have on so many other art forms. Hundreds of movies and thousands of TV programs later we have arrived at a point where vampires are so ‘in’ that it is next to impossible to avoid them. For a species that thrives on secrecy they are certainly putting it about lately.

I thought the zenith had been reached when Dianne Weist and Jason Patric battled Kiefer Sutherland in ‘The Lost Boys’ but no. This was only a precursor to the next generation of vampire-annihilators. And no end in sight. Blaming Buffy the Vampire Slayer for it all is just so much easier (for a person of a certain age) but of course the truth will always out in the end.

So now you know who to blame for it all – not Buffy, not Sesame Street’s ‘the Count’, not even Rpatz or KStew, but a Victorian-age chap from Dublin named Bram Stoker, the creator of Dracula.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
Michael