All right, Americans, you asked for it, you got it. We, the producers and purveyors of everything in your country, are bowing to your demands:
From now on, everything we do is going to be all-vampire, all the time.
It started off slow, with Anne Rice and Buffy in the 90’s. Then there was prep-rock band Vampire Weekend, and soon our kid sister started talking about something called Twilight and a show called The Vampire Diaries, and before you knew it—fang!—we were knee-deep in displaced anxieties about America’s imperiled safety in the age of terrorism and ambivalence about male sexuality as projected onto pale-faced soulless bloodsuckers.
We’ve already adapted every movie in production to vampire-related characters and storylines. For most of the tween demo, that was easy enough, but some films required a little more script doctoring. We’re really excited about the upcoming Nora Ephron rom-com A Steak Through My Heart, about the side-splitting courtship between a bookish vegetarian who loves garlic stir-fry, played by Meg Ryan, and Matthew McConaughey as the fast-talking, carnivorous banker-vampire Count Vlad Schwartzbaum. It also plays up the hilarious “cougar” angle.
All local and national newscasters are now vampires.
Pre-K through twelfth-grade classrooms will be taught by vampires who have received their Masters of Education from the University of Transylvania. Your children will respect their authority, flexible teaching techniques encompassing the seven types of intelligence, and capacity to destroy them by sinking their teeth into their jugular veins while abstaining from grade inflation.
Race car drivers, nerdy IT tech guys, your eighth-grade crush Heather Mazursky who turned out to be not that hot anymore when you saw her on the street last October—these people have all been converted into the ranks of the undead who sustain themselves with the thirst-slaking taste of human blood.
People magazine has been sold and re-titled Vampires. Us Weekly remains the same, but with a new section: “Vampire Stars—They’re Just Like Us!” There’s a rumor floating around that Newsweek still exists; rest assured that if it does, it will soon feature the latest mildly conservative, milquetoast reportage about the neck-gashing descendants of Eastern Europe.
Athletes may play professional sports only if they are vampires. Day games have been eliminated, for obvious reasons (television ratings and attendance are stunted, and the players will all die).
Possession of a bed, and not a coffin, is punishable with a 10-year jail-coffin sentence. The production of mirrors has been halted except for one-way usage in focus groups and interrogation rooms about new vampire products and vampire crimes. Anyone without a gaunt figure, alabaster skin, and canines longer than 2.5 inches may be placed in an unidentified detention center without habeas corpus. If you do not pledge your undying—literally—love to Robert Pattinson, you will be immediately transferred to an Iraqi vampire battalion.
You ever go to a family chain restaurant, and instead of warmed-over chicken fajitas or a soggy Caesar salad, you wish you could just order a delicious gallon of fresh virgin’s blood? Now you can, and must: Solid food no longer exists anywhere, and especially not at T.G.I. Vampire’s.
Refrigerators, Microsoft Windows XP, the German word “schadenfreude”? Vampire coolant device, obsolete vampire operating system, untranslatable vampire emotion. Opening up a bank account? Deposit $500 or more and get a free vampire, and also, it’s no longer called a “bank account”; it’s called a “vampire.” Your cherished childhood memories of lazing in the sun by that tranquil lake without a care in the world? You are now a vampire, and vampires neither laze in the sun nor allow their adulthoods to be arrested by softheaded nostalgia. Grow up, get a real job, and drain a goat of its lifeblood under the four a.m. moon.
It’s near sunrise, so we’re signing off until tomorrow night. Join our mandatory FaceVampirook group, “I Am a Vampire, and So is Everyone and Everything Around Me.” (Note that the game “Vampire Wars” is now simply “Wars.”)
P.S. In case the trend shifts to werewolves anytime soon, know that we have 300 million DVDs of Teen Wolf we’re ready to unleash on the United Vampires of Vampire. Ah-whoo!