The Zombie mob lusts for the blood of Vampire Pattinson. Photo Credit: Eduardo Parra/FilmMagic

While publishing houses and TV producers jumped on the Vampire and Zombie bandwagons with bloodlust, Sam Leith at Prospect Magazine wondered, from his lofty intellectual perch, why we were all so gaga. Why now?

In his essay, “Days of the Undead,” Leith compares the Zombie craze to the Vampire maelstrom, and what he sees is a political division. Roll with it for a minute:

“Vampires are monsters of the right; zombies are monsters of the left… Vampires are individualists; zombies are the mindless, nameless, faceless mob.Vampires are about hierarchies, tradition, bloodlines. They have mittel-European honorifics, live in castles, dress up and have manners…”

The key to his argument is looking at our lust for Robert Pattinson:

The excitement of the vampire story is that the girl half-wants to be bitten. Buried in there is a highly suspect rape fantasy—but the myth also encodes the envy and fascination of the bourgeoisie for the aristocracy. It fears the lord of the manor descending on its women, but it is also slightly titillated by what he gets up to in that castle with those hot dead chicks.

So why are we so into seeing characters battle either the aristocracy or the mindless masses right now? Why, because we’re caught somewhere in-between (thanks, recession!):

Zombies and Vampires “represent two opposite and incompatible social crises. It’s a sign of how anxious the culture is at the moment that we are fixated simultaneously by both.”

Yeah, werewolfs are so out. We’re team Edward.