Vampires

Between Twilight, True Blood, and The Vampire Diaries, the good-looking undead have had their moment. While I don't expect them to retreat to their coffins in 2011, I do think we're headed for a supernatural shift. After years under the glamour of vampires, zombies are overtaking every outlet of pop culture.

• TV: Buzz readers love AMC's new zombie-centric show, The Walking Dead, which gained Mad Men-like traction during its short first season. It's been renewed for a full, 13-episode season two, so you'll only be hearing more about in 2011.
• Books: Banking on the success Pride and Prejudice and Zombies found by mixing literature and the undead, there are more zombie-literature concoctions in the pipeline. Look for I Am Scrooge: A Zombie Story For Christmas, Alice in Zombieland, and (my favorite) The Adventures of Huck Finn and Zombie Jim. Other notable titles include a cookbook (Zombie Cupcakes), a right-wing rant (Obama Zombies), a children's book (Attack of the Zombies, Spongebob Squarepants), and so many more.
• Movies: Stuck in a few years of planning, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is expected to finally start filming, but there are plenty of other zombie flicks to come, including Bollywood Zombie, World of the Dead: The Zombie Diaries, and Zombie Hamlet.
• Art/fashion: Last week Australian artist Jonathan Zawada re-imagined the hottest runway looks for 2011 as zombie drawings.
• Education: This goes back to last Fall, but you can enroll in a zombie class — Zombiemania: 80 Movies to Die For — at the University of Baltimore.

Are you dreading it?

It's almost Halloween, and I have a treat for all you vampire-crazed home cooks: it's The Complete Vampire Lover's Cookbook, Love at First Bite ($10). This ghoulishly good paperback is a festive cookbook with over 300 "suckulent" recipes. Although there are no pictures of the dishes, the tome is full of great ideas and delightful inspiration. Read on for more details!

• Rick Bayless is hosting a food contest via Twitter. — Grub Street CHI
• Find out just how much money a chef makes. — Huffington Post Food
• What wine to drink with a burger. — Chow
• Would you buy a vampire-themed cookbook?— The Epi-Log
• British children are consuming an appalling amount of junk food. — Eater
• Taste testing Wendy's new salads. — Serious Eats
• A closer look at New York City's latest Shake Shack. — Feast

Have an intense desire to become a sparklevamp, but at a loss for how to get bitten? Well, Body Fantasies, the drugstore perfumer you may remember from middle school, has just the thing. Its new scent, Vampire ($13.50), is sure to have any nearby monsters prowling for you. According to the box, Vampire "incites notice, comment, and, inevitably, desire." Inevitably!

While it's slightly preferable to wearing a bulb of garlic, most people over the age of 11 probably aren't going to find it toothsome (or fangsome, as the case may be). However, it would make an excellent gag gift for your favorite Twihard or True Blood fan, and it's a masterpiece of zeitgeist-y marketing. Well played, Body Fantasies. Well played.

As teen girls and grown women run to see Eclipse today, what messages about sex and gender will the third installment of the Twilight saga send them? I asked myself this during an early screening of the movie, and while you might expect the wait-until-marriage message from an author with a Mormon background, some of Eclipse's love lessons do surprise. If you haven't read the book, my observations will spoil the story, so keep reading at your own risk.

A man must protect a woman's virtue: "Stop trying to take your clothes off," Edward says midway through the movie. He's a traditional vampire, so he wants to marry Bella before they do the dangerous deed. Bella, on the other hand, is a modern-day Eve who couldn't care less about saving her soul. If the conservative message of the movie gets teen girls to think twice about having sex when they're not ready, that's great. But I could do without the implication that a woman will be damned for tasting the forbidden fruit of sex before marriage.

Immortal men and women can be physical equals: Fighting scenes take up much of Eclipse, and it struck me how male and female vampires battle on the same level. In addition, female vampires act as leaders. Victoria controls the army of newborns, Dakota Fanning's Jane gives the Volturi pack orders, and in the flashback scenes we learn about Civil War-era female vampires who acted as generals. It's all relatively refreshing.

For two more lessons, read more

We know why humans are infatuated with vampires, but why do vampires return the obsession? There's, of course, the practical reason — vampires need human blood to live. Yet what drives vampires not to drink a woman to death? Oddly enough, I'd say the reasons are very human.

• Fleeting: A human's lifespan is hardly more than a long night to a vampire, so you can imagine how fleeting youth seems. We all want what we can't have, or can't have for very long. Whether it's a fleeting Summer or a fleeting life, transience is hot.
• Human nature: In last week's True Blood, Eric says to Sookie when she's crying, "Please don't do that. It makes me feel disturbingly human." And we know — as if we didn't already — he's bitten. Vampires either try to preserve their humanity (Bill Compton, Edward Cullen) or suppress it (Eric Northman and Twilight's James), so is it any surprise they want to date it?
• Psychic bond: Bonds are intense — whether they're between humans, vampires, or humans and vampires. When a vampire drinks a human's blood, or vice versa in True Blood, a permanent bond and undeniable attraction forms.

If I had to guess the real, less glamorous reason, it's that vampire tales have always be written for humans, particularly women. What better way to draw her in than to make her the object of the hottest vampire's affection?

Vampire tales change the rules to suit the story's time and place, but little changes when it comes to the human-vampire attraction. It's intoxicating, addictive, and eternally hot.

Twilight may be a safer, chaster look at vampires, but obsession is obsession. See the five laws of attraction that govern both tales below

We're counting down to Sunday's third-season premiere of True Blood with new pictures, miniepisodes, and objectifying its male characters, but that hasn't given us a chance to go over the show's layered meaning.

Vampires were created as a metaphor for sex and have always been a vehicle to talk about something else. Stephen Moyer, who plays Bill Compton, told The Daily Beast the show is all about metaphors. “The show is so multileveled. You can watch it and think of it as pure bubblegum for the eyes, but you can also completely immerse yourself in the subtext, the metaphors, and the underlying mirroring of society," he said. "It is all things to all people.” So what is it actually about?

• Gay rights: The most pervasive metaphor in the series, vampire rights as gay rights makes nearly all subsequent metaphors possible. From the back-woods bigotry to vampire's quest for equal rights with lobbyist groups and sympathetic legislators, the outline is the same — right down to a "God Hates Fangs" sign in the pilot to vampire Bill suggesting he and Sookie go to Vermont to marry in season two's finale.
• Racism: Set in the deep South, vampire rights could just as easily stand in for civil rights if this show was made 50 years ago.
• Christian fundamentalism: The Fellowship of the Sun took up a lot of air time last season. Except these religious zealots don't hate gays, they hate vampires and the "fang bangers" who love them.
• Ecstasy: It wouldn't be complete without creating a new drug out of vampire blood. By enhancing consciousness and heightening arousal, vampire blood works just like E — with Viagra mixed in — and is conveniently called V.

This is barely scratching the surface — can you think of what I missed?