While pop culture has been ruled by the superheroes for the last few years, from Kavalier And Clay through Heroes and the box-office draw of movies like the Spider-Man series, Iron Man and The Dark Knight, it's worth remembering the words of the most dour of the Fab Four and realizing that All Things Must Pass. But while movie studios may be hoping that toys are the next nostalgia-fueled craze, it's beginning to look like our future may just be one big pain in the neck.

The current craze for Vampires was probably kick-started by the success of last year's movie version of cult comic 30 Days of Night, which did for bloodsuckers what 28 Days Later did for the undead years before. That movie may have snuck in on the back of the comic book craze (starting, as it did, as a 2002 comic by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith), but it also heralded today's new lust for blood: While HBO's True Blood may not be entirely winning us over, the channel is happy enough with the ratings - or perhaps just the zeitgiest-surfing qualities of the show - to order a second season. And why not? Once the David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve made sucking blood weirdly sexy twenty years ago.
Maybe that explains why both Cloverfield director Matt Reeves and Hellboy's Guillermo Del Toro are turning to Nosferatu's children for their next projects (Reeves will be directing a remake of cult Swedish vampire movie Lat den ratte komma in, while Del Toro has just signed a deal to co-write a trilogy of vampire novels). We thought that it might've been pirates, or maybe ninjas, but no - it really is Vampires that are the new superheroes, who were the new zombies. Give it a year, and we'll all be bored of the sight of blood.

Send an email to Graeme McMillan, the author of this post, at graeme@io9.com.