While a stake through the heart or a shaft of sunlight should be enough to kill cinema’s most determined vampires, the one thing that is guaranteed to reanimate the undead is the scent of box-office success. Right now, audiences are hungry for blood: the vampire is back.

Anticipation about Twilight, the movie adaptation of the first book in Stephenie Meyer’s hugely successful series of vampire romantic novels, has the internet fan base frothing at their keyboards. The high-school love story between a new girl in town and a beautiful, troubled vampire boy has seduced an ever-growing, mostly female readership and, although the film is not released here until January, according to the influential IMDB website it has been in and around the top ten most popular searches for the past five months or so.

Fans will have the opportunity to catch a first tantalising glimpse of some footage from the movie at the BFI Movie-Con event at the BFI Southbank in London this weekend. The young actors cast in the central roles of the ordinary teenager Bella Swann and her vampire beau Edward Cullen (Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson) suddenly find themselves labelled as the hottest of Hollywood properties.

Darren Nash, Meyer’s British editor, says of the Twilight fever: “There was a queue of some 100 to 150 people outside Borders in Oxford Street when [Breaking Dawn, the final book in the Twilight series] went on sale. They sold almost 400 copies in the first 20 minutes. Fans had come dressed up; there were some brides, the assumption being that Bella and Edward would get married in the book; bizarrely I saw one girl who had come dressed as one of the chess pieces from the cover of Breaking Dawn.” He anticipates a “tipping point” in the fan hysteria once the film is released.

Another title that is generating a great deal of excitement among fans of horror and arthouse cinema is the exquisitely macabre Swedish preteen vampire movie Let the Right One In. The story of Oskar, a bullied 12-year-old boy who strikes up a friendship with Eli, a mysterious little girl who is new to the neighbourhood, the film unfolds with a visual wit and a clear-eyed matter-of-factness. The director, Tomas Alfredson, says of his realistic approach: “It’s really hard for a film-maker to make sense when people start biting each other or flying around and climbing walls.”

This moody, darkly comic film, already a prizewinner at numerous festivals including Tribeca and Edinburgh, is one of the most original and satisfying movies of the year so far. Again, the film’s general release is not until January but a lucky few can catch the movie at the Film4 FrightFest in London on August 24. Writing inThe Timeslast week, the horror buff Kim Newman lauded it for “the most impressive massacre I’ve seen all year”.

Meanwhile, Hilary Swank is about to star in the latest film to bring Count Dracula back to the screen. Fangland, now in preproduction, is based on a novel by John Marks, a former 60 Minutes producer, about a TV producer who is sent to Romania to interview a crime boss who turns out to be the Count himself. Also in development is a TV series called True Blood, an adaptation of Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries.

It’s the latest television project from the writer Alan Ball, the man behind Six Feet Under and American Beauty. The books feature a telepathic Louisiana barmaid called Sookie Stackhouse and are set in a world where vampires and human beings live side by side – the invention of synthetic blood having solved the neck-chewing problem.

So what has prompted the current popularity for vampire stories? And did they ever really go out of fashion? Vampire mythology has provided material for movies since the silent era, when F. W. Murnau stuck a pair of rat-like incisors on Max Schreck to create Nosferatu (1922), a vampire story closely based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. So closely based, in fact, that Stoker’s estate sued and won the case, ordering that all known copies of the film should be destroyed. Fortunately several prints survived and the film was restored in the 1990s.

But while Nosferatu depicted the vampire as a hideous creature with poor personal hygiene and negligible physical charm, a more popular image rapidly evolved, arguably starting with Bela Lugosi in Todd Browning’s Dracula (1931) – that of the vampire as a creature with an unusual and alarming sexual magnetism. The addition of sex into the mix – and the innumerable helpless young women in diaphanous blouses who have been snacked on over the years – contributed more to the longevity and enduring popularity of the vampire story than perhaps any other factor.

That appetite for tales of undead bloodsuckers has led to more than 200 film versions of Stoker’s Dracula alone, not to mention bizarre vampire-themed spin-offs and subgenres by the coffin load (including vampire pornography, vampire blaxploitation, vampire stripper films and lesbian vampire movies).

Ultimately the sheer volume and variety of the vampire genre comes down to the fact that the vampire myth is so versatile in its symbolism. The vampire is a shape-shifter that can take the form of society’s fears at any particular time. Thus in the 1920s an emancipated, sexually aggressive young woman, unsettling for society, was labelled a “vamp”; her wicked ways would leach the very manhood from her unfortunate victim. Later on, the vampire would come to symbolise, among other things, Aids and drug addiction (Abel Ferrera’s The Addiction) but it could also represent the allure of the outlaw or rebel, the cool gang to which everyone secretly wanted to belong, as in Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys. But most of all the vampire represents the outsider, and by extension every confused, misfit teenager in the world.

It is this that perhaps explains the growing trend towards a more sympathetic treatment of the vampire, which started with Neil Jordan’s Interview With the Vampire and its elegant examination of the crippling ennui of immortality. In Twilight, for example, Edward’s vampire status is not so much a threat as a trait that makes him even more desirable to Bella. He’s an old-fashioned tortured romantic lead in a series of stories that have arguably more in common with 19th-century romantic melodramas than with the savage Dracula myth.

Nash attributes the success of the books partly to their innocent approach. “Because of Stephenie Meyer’s background and her upbringing – she’s a Mormon – the books are very emotionally charged but there is no sex, no bad language, no drug use. There is none of the stuff that a parent looking for a book for their daughter would be turned off by.”

Meanwhile, although the vampire in Let the Right One In is altogether more dangerous, she symbolises as much the dark side of the human psyche as an external threat. “I was thinking about these two characters as though they are mirrors,” Alfredson, the director, says. “She is everything that he is not. She is awake when he is asleep: he is very afraid, she is very brave; she is strong, he is weak; she’s dark, he is blond. She is everything that he would need to be to survive. They are two sides of the same coin.”

The vampire craze shows no signs of abating. An English language remake of Let the Right One In has been announced. With three remaining books in the Twilight saga, there is potential for a vampire franchise. And although the Twilight books series is complete, Nash reveals that “Stephenie does have the bare bones of a chapter of a book provisionally titled Midnight Sun, which is the Twilight story but from the point of view of the vampire not the human girl”.

Twilight is released on Jan 9; Let the Right One In shows at Frightfest on August 24 (www.frightfest.co.uk). The pilot of True Blood is scheduled to show in the US next month

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