Ever since the first silver screen adaptations in the early twentieth century, the vampire has been a recurrent villain—and sometimes the tragic hero—of feature films. Count Dracula, the archetypal vampire, has been the main character in over 200 movies since the genre-defining Dracula from 1931. This makes him second only to Sherlock Holmes in appearances on the big screen (Melton, 1999: xxviii). Few characters can claim similar persistent success as popular cultural icons. With the screen adaptations of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) and Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire (1994), starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, vampires hit the mainstream and have stayed there ever since. Hence, as a commercial venture, mainstream vampire films have been a considerable success. On the week of its release Blade (1998) went to number one at the box office, replacing Steven Spielberg's highly acclaimed Saving Private Ryan (Jordan, 1999: 15).

Concurrent with the mainstream success of vampire films and TV series (especially Buffy the Vampire Slayer), the last ten to fifteen years have witnessed a definite upsurge in the amount of scholarly interest in vampires, both mythological and fictional. Religious studies scholars and anthropologists have studied the vampire as a part of a wider “monster culture” which reflects the dark side of the world's cultures and religions (e.g. Beal, 2002; Gilmore, 2003). Literary scholars have a long history of studying the vampire as part of cultural history (e.g. Auerbach, 1995; Rickels, 1999; Mäyrä, 1999).