The vampire mythos (are we being groomed?)

Having just watched UltraViolet again, and it's only after the second or third viewing that you realise just how good this series is, it brought to mind a theory I had about 3 years ago when I was watching a re-run of Angel on syndication here in the UK.

The Vampire. An interesting concept. The legend tells of entities who become immortal after death, sustaining themselves on human blood. We all know this. We probably also know that the "modern" concept of the vampire grew up in eastern europe , places like Romania, Hungary and Slavic countries, all had the concept of the undead, in some form or another, although entities with some of the characteristics of vampires can be found in much older texts, the Romanian Strigoi (vampire) has it's origins in Roman legends of the strix, a bird inhabiting the underworld who devoured human flesh and blood, even old sanskrit texts reference the Vetalas, ghostly beings who inhabit corpses.

Mostly fuelled by ignorance and paranoia, coupled with
influences of so-called "Vampire" bats (although, the bat was named after the vampire, not vice versa as many people believe), the legend compounded and expanded. In our modern society, we now understand a lot about things which previous societies knew very little, pathology being the most obvious. We now understand that the human body can survive in the right conditions
pretty much unchanged (to the human eye, at least) for many months. We know that piercing the human body after death (the "stake through the heart") can cause muscular contractions and gaseous emissions that can be misconstrued as pain and screams of agony. No wonder then that the legend persisted, and persists even to this day.

So, what's the theory? Well, I reasoned that there is a social bias in the media to portray the vampire as being "cool". Previously, the vampire was definitely depicted in the media as an evil monster, think Nosferatu and Dracula, to name but two. Now look at the current state of the media, vampire's have come out of the monster-closet and are now successful business people, coordinating efforts rather than ripping some young virgin's throat out (although, this can still be an option). Think Underworld, Angel, Blade, UltraViolet, The Lost Boys, Interview with the vampire, the list goes on and on. All these shows / films are pretty much about one thing, vampires being cool.

I also reasoned that maybe there's a controlling influence behind all this. Maybe, we're being
prepared by entities to accept vampires as cool entities, as opposed to blood-sucking monsters.
In the same way that there are conspiracy theories floating around about the existence of shape-shifting lizards controlling our destinies, again which we are being prepared to accept with shows like V, maybe vampires are an alternative and opposing force. Behind the scenes, who knows, maybe there is a battle between vampires and other forces for our attention and respect.

Maybe.