The symptoms are unnerving: a taste for fresh meat—rare—an aversion to sunlight; and a passion for spectral-looking, fine-boned rakes. All are indications that the sufferer has been bitten by the vampire bug.

Sookie Stackhouse, the feisty young heroine of True Blood on HBO, risks doom whenever she visits her otherworldly beau. And Oskar, the adolescent misfit of the Swedish art film Let the Right One In, a favourite in fashion circles, courts extinction each time he ventures out with Eli, the eerily ageless shape-shifter he befriends.

Sookie and Oskar are in the throes of vampire lust, a pop-culture contagion being spread via television, films and fiction. What began with the Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer, followed by Twilight, the movie, has become a pandemic of unholy proportions.

No small part of this latest vampire mania seems to stem from the ethereal cool and youthful sexiness with which the demons are portrayed. “The vampire is the new James Dean,” said Julie Plec, the writer and executive producer of The Vampire Diaries, a forthcoming TV series. “There is something so still and sexy about these young erotic predators,” she said.

The June premiere of the second season of True Blood, in which Sookie, played by Anna Paquin, is reunited with her imperious fanged suitor, drew 3.4 million viewers, making it HBO’s most-watched programme since the Sopranos finale (2007).

Charlaine Harris has just published Dead and Gone, the ninth novel in her Sookie Stackhouse series, on which True Blood is based. The publishing world has been intrigued by The Strain, a first installment in a planned trilogy written by the film director Guillermo del Toro.

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