Vampires staking a bloody claim on audiences' hearts

Hollywood loves a romantic lead, even if landing that hunky man means defiling the crypts of the undead.

On screens big and small, vampires are increasingly becoming less demonic and more sympathetic, less evil and more nuanced - and have become the most eligible bachelors around.

In recent years, the shift has become especially pronounced.

Prime's new show True Blood takes these caped corpses further still towards social respectability, as Oscar winner Anna Paquin plays a young woman who falls for a 150-year-old Civil War veteran played by British Shakespearean actor Stephen Moyer.

These days, modern, morally brooding vampires abound.

Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight saga, about a 17-year-old girl who falls in love with a sexy young vampire, was recently called the "new J.K. Rowling" in Time.

Will Smith's I Am Legend grossed $US250 million at the box office.

And before that, TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer ran for seven seasons through 2003; its spin-off, Angel - about a vampire whom Buffy fell in love with - ran for five.

With heart-throbs like that, it's easy to see why humans keep falling in love with the toothy Lotharios.

Vampires in pop culture have come a long way from their 19th-century roots in penny dreadfuls and countless film versions of Bram Stoker's Dracula.

They were demons, sex fiends in a deep Freudian sense, rebelling against Victorian repression in ways that gentlemen never could.

They hissed at crucifixes and seduced women and men from righteousness into evil.

But they started gaining moral complexity, especially with Richard Matheson's 1954 last-man-on-Earth novella, I Am Legend, about a lonely human in a vampire-overrun world who lives only to kill his undead neighbours, until he realise he and they are not that different.

Matheson introduced the notion of vampire multiculturalism, explaining that while the undead who lived as Christians fear The Bible, those who lived as Jews are repelled by The Torah.

The Will Smith film version changed crucial plot elements in the climax, but one thing remained the same: The line between vampires and humans was getting blurrier.

In 1992, two very different takes on the legends appeared on-screen: Bram Stoker's Dracula, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, an otherwise middling teen vampire comedy that unexpectedly led to a fantastic TV show.

Coppola's Dracula made a concession to modernity by going outside Stoker's text to write a back story for Dracula's moral bankruptcy.

In Coppola's telling, the count became so overwhelmed with grief at the death of his one true love that he damned his soul to perdition and fell into madness and blood lust.

But the film sagged under the weight of its ambition to be true to the text and to the changing conception of vampires, and the villainous bloodsucker was too one-dimensional to be satisfying.

Neil Jordan more successfully explored these themes of love and loss of humanity from a vampire's point of view in his lavish, moody 1994 film rendering of Anne Rice's hugely popular Interview With the Vampire, which contrasted Tom Cruise's pitiless Lestat with Brad Pitt's more humane Louis, the titular interviewee.

But Buffy was the way of the future.