This sort of thing has been happening more frequently in my dotage. Apparently the prettyboy in question starred in the movie Twilight, which is based on a series of popular books and which is about to spawn a sequel, or perhaps it already has, or perhaps there have been five or six sequels released in theaters without my knowledge. It's possible.

I have never read the "Twilight" books, or any of the kajillion goth-lit teen novels they inspired. But vampires are suddenly trendy again, and vampire-themed books and movies seem to be everywhere.

And why not? Like teenagers, vampires are persecuted, alienated, and angst-ridden. Plus they sleep all day and think they'll live forever. I'm actually surprised nobody exploited this similarity before. Specifically, I'm surprised that I didn't exploit this similarity before.

I would have made a complete mess of it, of course. I'm too fond of the old stuff. My early education in film was largely provided by Mel's Matinee and the late lamented Horror, Incorporated, the latter of which featured an impressive library of old Universal horror films of the 30s and 40s. Those were great movies for kids, and I delighted in seeing Lon Cheney, Jr. leap around the woods in a garage mechanic's uniform, and Bela Lugosi hamming it up with a silk cape and a thick accent. But even as a small child I found those movies comforting, not scary. They were phantasmagorical morality plays that took place in the misty past of a faraway land.

Hammer studios produced a memorable string of updated Dracula films in the 1950s. By that time Lugosi's vampire seemed campy and silly. Christopher Lee brought new menace to the role and Hammer gleefully splashed around a good deal of Technicolor blood and let their cameras linger over the busty Transylvanian barmaids.

But as the Lugosi movie had already proven, shock value inevitably devalues into kitsch.

The Richard Matheson-penned movie The Night Stalker placed a vampire in 1970s Las Vegas, with profitable results (it was, in fact, the highest-rated TV movie of all time when it aired in 1972). But that film's vampire, Anton Skorsny, was simply a hissing, growling monster, without any evidence of intelligence. It was Anne Rice who created what we might regard as the modern version. Her 1976 novel Interview With the Vampire depicted creatures who are tormented individuals. Some -- like Louis -- are overwhelmed by their immortality, and suffer greatly under the weight of the nightly feast of blood that they must pursue. Others, like Lestat, are cheerful hedonists who revel in their eternal lives and resent the gloominess of their more moralistic brethren.

This more nuanced take of the vampire's motives clearly influenced the British miniseries Ultraviolet, a police procedural in which the word "vampire" is never spoken. An elite police unit pursues "Code Vs", but their task is made difficult by the fact that their quarry don't show up on film, videotape, audio recordings and cannot be heard over the phone.

The Code Vs, we learn, are using their sophisticated organized crime network to develop a way to artificially synthesize blood. Are they a persecuted minority who only want to find a way to live in peace with the humans? Or is there something else afoot?

But now, with the teen vampire craze, we are overdosing on beautiful, morose goth kids who can't die. And they're not really plotting anything except how to survive the living death of their teenage years. I went through it once; that was enough. But thanks anyway.