Why are zombies and vampires so popular?

Why are zombies and vampires so popular? Television shows such as The Walking Dead and novels such as Twilight have inserted these once-human supernatural creatures into our collective subconscious.

In his essay Our Zombies, Ourselves, James Parker attempts to explain why zombies are such a resonant part of popular culture.

In the same vein (pun intended), Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, in their essay Why Vampires Never Die, attempt to explain why the image of the vampire remains such an iconic image in our minds. According to Del Toro and Hogan, the two main branches of vampiric fiction are (a.) the vampire as romantic hero and (b.) the vampire as the undead monster (292). Del Toro and Hogan also claim that the story of the ultimate vampire, Dracula (originally written as a novel by Bram Stoker in 1897), is a mash-up of ancient myth in conflict with the world of the present (293).

Your assignment is to write an essay in which you use Parkers essay and Del Toro and Hogans essay to explain the popularity of zombies and vampires in twenty-first-century society. Please use quotations from both essays to support your thesis, as well as cite passages from six to ten (or more) scholarly sources (one or more from each of the following categories) and list them on your works cited page.

one book;
one periodical (magazine, journal or newspaper) article;
one website;
one multimedia source: a film, video, DVD, photo, musical piece, etc.).

Your writing task is to synthesize these sources in order to support a thesis about the popularity of these two supernatural creatures.

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