...that wonderful Victorian bestseller Dracula.... Dracula is a great novel of sexual seduction...and rape and sex. Vampirism is always an excellent way of talking about sex without talking about sex. So it makes complete sense that your solid Victorian vampires were fundamentally evil. And you can have that nice big stake hammered through them as a way of putting them to rest.

I think the next big, huge, cultural, 'somebody's just written a vampire story' [moment] is probably Stephen King's Salem's Lot, which is 1975. Steve basically wants to do Dracula again, only do it in a small town in Maine and see what would happen if Dracula's plan to take over America had won....

...you had Lost Boys, which is essentially vampirism as wish fulfillment.... 'What is the downside of this thing again? ...what you're giving up is daylight.' And this from people who aren't seeing a lot of daylight anyway. Seems like a very, very good exchange. So I think now you got vampirism firmly built into pop culture as a kind of beautiful, magical defect.

I [took] an enormous amount of joy in having a very sympathetic character, probably the most sympathetic character in the book, be a vampire....when an entire culture understands that vampires cast no reflection, that vampires only go out at night; then you can use a line like 'Silas only ate one kind of food, and it wasn’t bananas.'

...or the intelligent, sympathetic Dracula...

...or the intelligent, sympathetic Dracula...

Then of course there's Sesame Street, which I think may well have really created the sympathetic vampire for the world.

To be honest, I don't think vampirism, at least from my point of view, is ever about power. It's not about power because it's always about people exiled to the fringes.... Even when you get to things like 30 Days of Night, you're looking at people going and invading a little town that's on the edge of nowhere and that nobody's going to notice....