Vampires uncloaked, from ‘Nosferatu’ to ‘Twilight’

Great article with lists of vampires stuff ...

From Buffalo News

He was a tall, cadaverous old man with white hair and eyebrows so bushy they almost created a unibrow. His fingers and ears formed points; his palms were hairy. The breath, rank.

This Dracula, as immortalized by Bram Stoker in 1897, was not the handsome, romantic figure that vampires have become in modern film and literature. No, this evil creature is far removed from the face of the vampire today: actor Robert Pattinson's portrayal of the angst-ridden Edward Cullen in "Twilight," an impossibly beautiful, porcelain-skinned teen with a loving soul who refuses to drink human blood.

Stoker's "Dracula" wasn't the first book about vampires — John Polidori's "The Vampyre" from 1819 is given the credit for that — yet Stoker's book remains the definitive vampire novel even as hundreds of similar books continue to be released. The hunger for vampire stories is so intense today that these new books are quickly spawning film and television adaptations.

The Sookie Stackhouse novels, a series of books by Charlaine Harris, are the basis for the lustful — and popular — HBO series, "True Blood." "The Vampire Diaries," based on the books by L.J. Smith, is a new teen drama on the CW.

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