Fangsgiving

In 1972, early into his tenure at Sesame Street, Norman Stiles thought up a pun. The former Merv Griffin comedy writer had spent his first year penning scripts around the kids program’s strict curriculum, but he was always encouraged to…

In the late 1980s, toy company Hasbro was adding to its slew of entertainment offerings with games like Battleship. Video games were still treated with suspicion by much of the general public, but Hasbro started pursuing a different kind…

Stories, especially beloved stories, have a tendency to bleed past their borders and escape their original bodies. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is among many well-loved works that have long since taken on new shapes, shifting forms constantly.…

The Lost Boys’ poster made the prospect of becoming an undead creature of the night pretty attractive: “Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It’s fun to be a vampire.” But the movie’s story is full of teenage…

Comic books — that great gutter medium — have always been worlds of fads and crazes. Cowboys, cops, romances, and, starting in the late 1940s, horror. Publishers like EC, Avon, and Atlas churned out lurid tales of murder, betrayal, and…

The allure of vampires is as immortal as the undead creatures themselves. But while vampires have always been supernatural icons of sexiness, what that sexiness manifests as, and how it reflects the aspects of human desire commonly left…

A Taoist priest grapples with a demon, using a lightning-emitting dagger to slice the chain wrapped around his neck. The succubus — who has taken the form of a beautiful human woman with a popped-out eyeball bulging out of a mass of…

I often joke to my friends that I’m a second-generation vampire nerd. My mom filled our home with Anne Rice, Vampire: The Masquerade, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, plastic fangs, Gothic art, and ironic pins declaring a willingness to suck…

When Kevin suggested we get dinner together, I thought he was asking me on a date. He actually was asking me to run a Vampire: The Masquerade live-action role-playing game with him. The dating would come later; we celebrated our 11th…

Climate change is full of spooky phenomena (see zombie fires, ghost forests), but the widest-reaching is “global weirding,” a term coined by Hunter Lovins that takes an expansive look at the Anthropocene, the current era of human-caused…