Vampires underwent a drastic change, from Carmilla and Dracula, to Twilight and the vampires presented in The Vampire Lestat. Is our obsession with the occult a reflection on our own cultures desires?

This transformation of the traditional vampire could be a play on the angst of young adults, a commercialization for profit. This transformation could be a snowball effect resulting from popular occult fiction.

 

Young Adult literature easily hops onto the vampire fiction train by playing off of adolescent anxieties of aging, subsequently leaving behind their youth means inevitable change. Taking these same anxieties and adding in a young adults idea of a romantic conquest allows for them to escape their circumstances and enjoy a fictional world. This is in part a main reason why the Twilight series was so successful, the book series set the stage for an entire subculture of young fans to lose themselves to the fantasies and the movies simply gave them an idol to pine after. The vampires depicted today are sexual creatures, eternally youthful, mysterious, and commonly have some sort of power (strength, night vision, etc). Whereas vampires and ghouls of the past were more akin to modern zombies than anything, were considered for the most part to be soul-less, there was no physical attraction.