2012: Year of the Vampire

Written by Kyle Slagley

At the risk of sticking my neck out, I’d say this was a monster year for the vampire fad. Audiences everywhere thirsted for the numerous movies and TV shows that were featured. Leave it to Hollywood to stake their claim on the trend-du-jour.

Vampire films accounted for a big bite of this year’s box office numbers, but here are a few to sink your teeth into.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter – The premise, although different and maybe a little twisted, is nonetheless quite simple: Abraham Lincoln, 16^th President of these United States, hunts and kills vampires throughout his entire life. I read the book first and wondered how the heck they were going to make a decent movie out of it. A couple weeks later I decided to see what all the fuss was about, so I borrowed the DVD. I must say I was surprised at just how entertaining the movie was! This may be one of the few cases when the movie was better than the book.

Hotel Transylvania – The vampire (and other monsters) craze bled into kids’ entertainment with this one. When Dracula invites the entire who’s who of monsters to his daughter Mavis’s birthday, nobody was expecting the human Jonathan to stumble onto the party. With a cast of voices that looks like one of Tinseltown’s best all-star lists, audiences will be dying to get their hands on it when the DVD streets on January 29.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part II: Who could forget the most successful vampire film of the year? The final installment of the record-breaking movie series inspired by Stephenie Meyer's bestselling books sparkled in theaters, ranking number four overall in box office sales with $282M. Although BD2 was supposedly the final film, the coffin lid may not have completely closed. At Comic-Con this year, rumors began to pulse that a spinoff focusing on the Wolf Pack and/or Jacob and Renesmee may be on the horizon.

Vamps – This one is on my list of movies to see. Directed by Amy Heckerling and starring Alicia Silverstone and Krysten Ritter, this film was in theaters a whole week and a half before being released on DVD. Silverstone and Ritter play Goody and Stacy, two vampires addicted to the club-hopping party-girl life in modern-day New York. Although this film won’t be the one to raise Heckerling’s career from the (un)dead, it has the same campy charm as Clueless, providing a tongue-in-cheek take on vampire romance.

Television networks rode the vampire craze all the way to the blood bank this year too. HBO’s summer series True Blood had a successful fifth season and has already been renewed for a sixth. Being Human, originally a BBC series, finished its second season on SyFy in 2012 and is set to begin season three in January. Last but not least, the CW continues to lure in audiences with the successful drama Vampire Diaries.

Even though audiences were drawn by bloodsuckers in 2012, with the Twilight franchise finished (at least for now), the popularity of vampires may not continue. I predict a different creature will sit on top of the supernatural heap in 2013, which is fine with me because coming up with all these vampire puns is a real pain in the neck.