The huge success of the film version of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight has been entirely predictable: the books were bestsellers, the target audience (pre-teen and teenage girls but not exclusively) are rabid consumers of the product and repeat viewers – think how girls made “Titanic” a hit and their interest wasn’t the ship) and the rise in vampires and werewolves and other characters has eclipsed most other popular genres.

So why the fanatical interest? Once upon a time, in the last century, vampires were the stuff of the wearily predictable movies some of us remember from childhood and teenage years, especially the output of Britain’s Hammer studios. There was barely a cliche that didn’t get revisited in these (Christopher Lee striding about in his castle, the villagers rhubarbing away when there’s even a mention of Dracula’s name, the beautiful young woman wandering the corridor at night in her diaphanous nightie with not a thought for her health on those cold Transylvanian nights) and the audience was male and female. The former were attracted by the way Hammer tried to get a bit more flesh in each production until Dracula had a coterie of bosomy female vampires prowling around.

What is different now is that we have all these series (by the likes of Laurell K. Hamilton, Christine Feehan, Charlaine Harris et al) who gallop off from where Anne Rice, once the queen of vampire fiction left off (Anne is now a born again Christian and has turned her back on the neck nibbling that made her fortune). Stephenie Meyer is a good Mormon lady and her vampires hold off from consummation of their dastardly desires but in the work of other writers the undead are pretty frisky.

So why does this appeal to women so much? Is it the old bad boy syndrome – a lot of men will recall the ratbag at high school who appealed to girls more than the others who treated them well. Is it the “He’s really nice underneath” and all he needs is a good woman (rather like Elaine from “The Catherine Tate Show” who goes off to marry a serial killing cannibal and is convinced he’s just misunderstood) syndrome? The bad boy is one of the archetypes of fiction that has been around for years. This bad boy has the potential to become a nice guy if only he meets the right woman.  The vampire is a good example of this and being undead can’t be a barrel of laughs so he’d be a bit of a mission for a good woman although his having a permanent night shift jobwise might be a problem for the relationship.

When will this genre run out of steam?  It may be some time as the success of Twilight on the big screen and the success of the Charlaine Harris books with Anna Paquin starring in an HBO series (HBO being for cable means they can get in the blood and the sexy stuff) and the fact that all these authors are playing the lucrative game of the series to hook readers – and men with big incisors may be around for a few more years yet.