Give me a vampire with bite!

I MISS Dracula.

I've been spending the last couple of weeks watching, and enjoying, vampires seeking equal rights on HBO's "True Blood," a James Dean-ish heartthrob fighting his lethal lust for a high school classmate in "Twilight," and a 12-year-old girl sucking her town dry in the Swedish film "Let the Right One In."

As good as these films are, I still yearn for the day when men were men and vampires were vampires. Until late into the 20th century, the undead were the devil's brood, not just metaphors for forbidden fruit or for the desirability of being an outsider.

Now, I realize that every generation is going to create its own pop culture mythology and I applaud the makers of all these new films. (How come it couldn't have been cool to be pale and weird when I was in high school?)

Anne Rice popularized the idea that vampires weren't Satan's spawn in "Interview with the Vampire" and "The Vampire Lestat," before her talent turned to pulp. Vampires weren't necessarily evil, anymore, but lonely, lustful types - Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise were cast in the film. Gay men saw the first book in 1976 as something of a metaphor for their ostracism; alienated youth took to them as well.

Today's vampires are similar. As in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," there are good vampires and bad. Robert Pattinson's Edward Cullen is obviously modeled after James Dean - talk about brooding alienation - in "Twilight" and refers to his family as vegetarians (they don't suck on humans). Stephen Moyer's Bill in "True Blood" is the adult version, the James Bond of vampires. And even if Lina Leandersson's 12-year-old Eli satisfies her blood-lust on innocent humans, her utter loneliness puts you on her side. All three are devoted to humans of the opposite sex, in her case fellow misfit Oskar.

Such moral relativism is all very well and good. It's admirable to find nuance and shades of gray in human behavior - "Dexter" is better than "Law & Order"; Roman Polanski's "The Pianist" is deeper than Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List."

But I'm not all that happy about applying those standards to vampires. There is good and evil in the world - look at Mumbai - and the vampire myth is one of the most powerful representations of that. There was something simultaneously frightening and comforting, for example, in the "Horror of Dracula," to borrow the title of the first Christopher Lee Hammer film from 1958. The horror came in knowing that pure evil existed, the comfort in thinking that if one were strong enough, that evil could be resisted and that there were gurus in the world like Professor Van Helsing to help us.

Tod Browning's earlier 1931 adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel with Bela Lugosi was an even more artful contrast - in glorious black and white - between the creepy soullessness of a life turned in on itself and the selflessness of the wise Van Helsing.

Sometimes you have to cast irony, detachment, and relativism aside and take a stand. The trick is in knowing when. In Polanski's excellent 1967 spoof, "Dance of the Vampires" (aka "The Fearless Vampire Killers"), a Van Helsing-like character and his assistant journey to Transylvania to take on vampires.

Polanski knew a thing or two about evil. As a boy he had to hide from the Nazis in Poland. While making the vampire movie he fell in love with Sharon Tate, who would soon fall victim to a real-life embodiment of pure evil, Charles Manson. In the movie, the two vampire killers end up spreading the scourge instead of eradicating it, but that doesn't detract from Polanski's ongoing ability to dissect evil as perhaps no other living director can.

So carry on, all you nouveau vampires. I wish you all the best in your quest for equal rights, I feel the pain of your alienation, and you've got my vote when it comes to interspecies marriages with humans. But I can't help thinking that when you weren't all so darn likable, there was more in the vampire myth to sink your teeth into.

Ed Siegel is a former television and theater critic for the Globe.