THE GOOD OLD DAYS OF VAMPIRES

Nostalgia, like arthritis and constipation, is a curse of the elderly. Some get teary about the house they grew up in or the joys of their high school years.  Others yearn for their first car or the songs that accompanied their courtship.  Personally, I pine for the days when vampires didn't look like J Crew models.

It's hardly news that the undead have returned as a major force in popular entertainment.  The Twilight series of books and movies and the HBO series True Blood have captivated a new generation of gore-addled youth.  But compared to their predecessors, this crop of vampires is a pretty anemic lot.  I've only seen a few episodes of the TV series and a couple of trailers for the movies, but what I have seen is about as scary as a Clearasil ad.  The "children of the night" have devolved from Dracula to Dawson's Creek of the Damned.

My love of the bloodsucking genre dates back to my childhood when Chiller Theater on Channel 40 in Springfield would show horror double features on Saturday nights.  The movies were the classic 1930's films about the unholy trinity - Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman - along with their sequels, "Return of...", "House of...", and "Bride of..."  My first vampire role model was the great Bela Lugosi, who played Bram Stoker's Count with a debonair malevolence yet to be matched.

But for sheer terror, you cannot beat F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922.)  I first saw it in a college course on German Expressionism and nearly ripped the writing board off my lecture hall seat from fright.  While the film is technically primitive, the brilliant Max Schreck endowed his vampire with a repulsive exterior that perfectly matched his soulless interior and evil inclination.

Which brings me to problem number one with contemporary vampires; the notion that they can be good as well as evil.  A good vampire is as ridiculous a concept as a helpful tornado or beneficial dose of the clap.  Once you allow them moral ambiguity, you effectively neuter the species and turn their gruesome behavior into nothing more than an alternative lifestyle.  Where's the conflict?  A vampire saga used to be a battle where heroic but fragile mortals fought against more powerful and thoroughly depraved creatures bent on enslavement and exsanguination.  Today, it's just a cross-cultural teen romance with some supernatural arm wrestling thrown in.

Not only are today's hemoholics well intentioned, they are sometimes cast as the sympathetic victims of anti-vampire prejudice.  Aren't there enough real issues of bigotry and hatred to be dealt with in the world?  Can't we have one fictional realm apart from Santa's list where there's a general consensus on who's good and who's bad?

Once you allow a vampire to be just like you and me except for an unusual eating disorder, you drain the genre of its primal terror and diminish its ability to be cathartic.  I also think you lose the fun, but that's likely a factor of my age as are my other preferences for how the undead should be portrayed.

• Vampires don't have gooey romances with mortals.  Even during the censorship-heavy thirties, it was all about sex and blood, not dinner and dancing.  Vampires don't have "relationships" and never discuss their feelings.  They don't have any.

• Vampires don't shop at Urban Outfitters.  Draining blood requires a more formal look than a trip to Starbucks.  A frock coat with black pants a la Schreck is acceptable, but the full Lugosi monkey suit and cape is preferable.

• Vampires come from Eastern Europe.  I know it's the era of globalization, but what else has Romania to boast about? The rec room of a split-level in Dayton is no place to stow a coffin.  Home should be a castle in the Carpathians with a weekend retreat in Berlin or London to stock up on fresh provisions.

• Similarly, Vampires speak with an accent.  Lugosi's Budapest-flavored speech and drawn-out cadence were the result of never learning English properly, but the effect is unsettling.  No one is afraid of a vampire who sounds like a GAP clerk or Delta Airlines pilot.

• Vampires don't drink artificial blood.  You might as well have them swig Red Bull.  I'm not a natural food fanatic, but the organic stuff right from the source is the only way to go.  Which would you prefer, biting a beautiful woman's neck or dropping by 7-Eleven for a six-pack?  "Try new Plasma Lite® - more taste, less clotting."

Immortal though they may be, I don't expect the vampires of yore to make a comeback soon.  Kids today won't even watch a black-and-white movie much less a seventy-five minute parlor drama starring a tuxedoed Hungarian with halting English.  But back when visual effects were in their infancy, there was a greater reliance on mood and character to make the audience shriek, and I doubt any of today's blood-sucking millenials have that power.  You don't need garlic or wolfbane to scare them off; just threaten to block their Facebook pages.