Nopes-feratu.

If you keep one ear to the ground regarding film and television you'd have been hard-pressed to have missed the fact that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is 20 years old. Worldwide phenomenon that is was, pretty much everyone has seen at least one episode and probably more with the amount it's repeated. You will probably recognise the theme tune which will trigger a shudder of some variety, either of excitement or in my case that sort of weird mix of deja vú and revulsion. Of course I'm not a Buffy fan, why would I mention it otherwise? You must be new here.

Truth is, I never got on with BTVS from the get go. I was really planning to let rip as well (if my sister's reading this she's probably about to go into apoplexy) but to be honest, I haven't got much to say about it. I found the titular heroine just plain annoying and her little band of merry men/women/vampires/werewolves were almost as bad. It boils down to a will she/won't she love triangle between her and two despicable bad guys with centuries of mayhem and bloodshed behind them, who precariously now have souls; honestly if she'd have been any good at her job she would have offed the pair of them somewhere in the early seasons and had done with it. Granted, there is the whole strong female lead argument and that's great, but I thought it was a bit samey and although Joss Whedon does write quite the one-liner, there wasn't enough there to pull me in. And while I'm no stranger to voicing unpopular opinion, I know this one is going to go down like the Hindenberg; the musical episode, (Once More with Feeling I believe it's called) was gimmicky and cringeworthy. Sold loads of CDs though, so maybe everyone should get on that. You wouldn't pay to listen to the Criminal Minds team profile a serial murderer who wears his victims like a pelt whilst dancing round the office to a show tune in an episode called 'One More Skin Peeling'? Philistine. The less said about the Angel spin-off the better, because I found no redeeming features in that full stop. So when you really delve deep into the core of it, as much as Buffy does my head in, I've managed to avoid it enough that it doesn't enrage me terribly any longer. So why are we here? Because it reminded me how much the vampire genre as a whole burns my toast.

If my sister is reading this, she's probably speaking to a solicitor about disowning me as we speak. Sorry, not sorry.

Vampires have been popular for so many years now, everything about them has either been done to undeath or is such an outlandish attempt to do something new it ceases to be much like a vampire at all. Which actually works really well on occasion, but we'll come back to that. If I think about decent vampire movies, there's a handful I would say are actually worth bothering with. If you include TV shoes that number drops off a cliff really quickly.

I am unapologetically a Nostalgist (is that A Thing? It's now A Thing). I have a particularly effective pair of rose-tinted glasses that allow me to look back at stuff from my teen years and remember it as the most awesome stuff ever created. Sadly whenever I revisit stuff now, there's a massive percentage chance it will all be gash. Lost Boys and  Bram Stoker's Dracula for example aren't completely horrible, but only because of the cult status they enjoy now. I defy anyone to tell me Gary Oldman didn't brush giant chunks of the set out of his teeth after every scene and what the actual hell are Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder doing with those accents? It's not English that's for damn sure. Ironically, the two British actors in the film are doing weird quasi-european regional accents too, but I'm not convinced where from. Lost Boys is just a teenage girl's wet dream from the 80s (those mullets though. Damn, son!) but is at least quotable. 'It's only spaghetti Michael' or something.

I just look at the vampire films I have enjoyed and realise that the cool thing about them is never the vampires. Blade and particularly Blade 2 are great examples because without Blade, those movies are dead in the water. You could argue that the second Blade movie is barely a vampire movie at all really, it just has them in it. Priest, which was a good little movie based on a Manga; you could have replaced the vampires with zombies, humanoid reptiles, aliens, or pretty much anything else and it would have worked just as well. Daybreakers was interesting because everyone was a vampire and the whole thing revolved around not being blood-sucking undead cretins any longer.

Twilight effectively ruined the genre if we're honest. I've never watched any of the movies or read any of books because despite outward appearances I do still have a shred of dignity and there are levels to which even I can't bring myself to stoop. I know parts of the plot, mostly from social media and conversations with poor unfortunates who have for some unfathomable reason subjected themselves to it. Apparently it's perfectly OK for the vampire hero to be a creepy, manipulative stalker but still be considered a protagonist and good boyfriend material. It's also apparently a fantastic new addition to vampire lore that rather than turn into an easily wind-swept pile of ash in the sun, Twilight vampires sparkle. Somebody somewhere will be able to tell you why but not here and not today. It's always love triangles with this lot as well; this time our heroine has to choose between essentially an undead paedophile and a broody man-dog. Tough times indeed. Of course she chooses the walking corpse and somehow manages to procreate with him, which is just the slightly charred icing on the dumpster fire cake some of you have put yourselves through. My condolences.

I think what really does it for me is there's this long held theory that vampirism is somehow sexy or at least it often gets treated as such. I'm struggling to find anything less sexy that a half dead demon draining your blood and condemning you to an eternity of wondering where your food has been and whether it washed its neck before it left the house this morning. The practicalities and logistics of surviving on a obligate diet of human blood are staggering even before you consider the more romanticised parts of the concept. Being ginger means I've elevated avoiding sunlight into an artform and I haven't dragged my ass out of bed early enough to catch a sunrise in years. It'd just be like being a student again and I'm damn sure my liver still hasn't forgiven me for the first time...