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.

The Twelve Picks Up Where The Passage Left Off

In 2010, Justin Cronin released his novel The Passage. Beginning in a plausible near future on the verge of a breakthrough in human longevity, the book then delves into the dystopic far future created when that breakthrough instead unleashes twelve vampire-like beings (eventually known as “virals”) into the world.

Cronin, a graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, brought a credible reputation to his foray into the horror genre. He was awarded the PEN/Hemingway Award in 2002 for Mary and O’Neil, a “novel in stories.” Before The Passage, he was known as a writer of mainstream literary fiction. Indeed, The Passage garnered strong reviews, being called “one of the creepiest books of 2010” by the National Post and “the best book of the summer” by USA Today. It drew comparisons to both The Stand and The Road. Readers responded as well, with the book debuting at #3 on the New York Times best seller list.

Of course, success on that scale is rarely contained solely on the page. The Passage will be adapted into a movie, produced by Ridley Scott and written by John Logan (who wrote the screenplay for Gladiator). That’s tentatively scheduled to be in theaters sometime in 2013.

Before The Passage was even released, it was announced that it would be the first volume of a trilogy. The second novel, The Twelve, hit shelves on Tuesday of this week; the third book, The City of Mirrors, is due in 2014.

The plot of The Twelve shifts back and forth in time. On one hand, it follows up the story told in The Passage, as the characters deal with the events in that book and forge on in their quest to vanquish the virals and return their world to some semblance of normalcy. It also introduces a cast of characters trying to cope in the initial aftermath of the outbreak, in the near future setting initially set up in the beginning of The Passage.

Anticipation for The Twelve has been strong, and what could be better as Halloween approaches than a creepy vampire tale? Make sure you have copies of The Passage and The Twelve for your patrons to enjoy.