Vampires and Zombies for October 6. Enjoy!

Via Alyse Wax at Fearnet.com: Top 10 Sexiest Vampires

Vampires are pure seduction.  Let’s face it; there hasn’t been an ugly vampire since Nosferatu.  Or maybe Paul Reuben’s vampire in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie.  But for the most part, vampires are just hot.  We dug through coffins and caves to find the sexiest vampires cinema has to offer you this Halloween season.  Sorry ladies, Edward Cullen didn’t make the list – we found better.

Spike – Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Frequently called the Sid Vicious of vampires, Spike lives up to that moniker: bleached hair, British accent, sexy snarl, leather jacket, I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude.  He’s a bad boy with great bone structure, and when he falls in love, he falls hard.

Sophie-Anne aka The Vampire Queen – True Blood
Though she only appeared in two episodes, she made a lasting impression.  Besides being ridiculous gorgeous in her retro-glamour styling, she has a mouth on her.  The Vampire Queen speaks her mind, is in complete control, and is sexually dominant.  Talk about the total package.

See the full list here

From Jessica Barnes at Cinamatical: Why Zombies Make Better Horror Movies Than Vampires

Everybody has their personal preferences (and man I love those bloodsuckers), so even though I’ve watched more vampire content than I care to remember (I even sat through the pilot of The Vampire Diaries), and I’ll always be a dedicated ‘fan of the fang’, I think that sometimes those drooling bumbling walking corpses might be better suited (at least these days) to the world of horror. Here’s why:

3. There Are More Creative Ways to Kill a Zombie. As Zombieland showed us over the weekend, sometimes there really is more than one way to skin a zombie. Once again, the zombies have to take the win, because in the end, most vamps just get staked. Now, as True Blood has shown us the result of the staking can be something new, but seriously, I’d rather watch an old lady drop a piano over Van Helsing and ‘Mr. Pointy’ any day of the week.

See the other reasons (with pics) here

By Ellen Scordato at Beliefnet.com: Vampires, Zombies, Buddhism and the Undead

Zombieland was the top-grossing movie this past weekend. ..Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was one of the near-moribund book publishing industry’s few runaway success stories last year. HBO’s True Blood and its star Anna Paquin are very hot topics around the water cooler and chat rooms. The beautiful adolescents of the Twilight books and movies, in their perpetual teen sex/death swoon, are everywhere from People magazine to the London Review of Books.

Wow, do we love the undead. Over the past two years, if not longer, pop culture been full of animated corpse tales that are animating the bank accounts of creative folk of all kinds, from movie studios to publishers to gamemakers. What gives?

What does a curious Buddhist practitioner think about all this?

Buddhism’s message that after birth, old age, sickness, and death are inevitable is perhaps not so loud and clear to our ears anymore.

Jenny Turner, in that London Review of Books piece on Twilight, make the very observant point that the great popularity of the Twilight books–and, I would add, vampires in general–among middle-aged women is not due so much to the lure of forbidden sex as the lure of eternal youth. Vampires never become “cougars.” Vampires don’t have to eat. Vampires never have to worry about buying wrinkle cream. Impossibly thin and eternally unwrinkled — isn’t that pretty much ideal?

Read More here

That’s a great list of vampires, even though I think Stefen is hotter than Damon (sorry). And zombies are more creepy; at the very least you can’t reason with a zombie. And this isn’t the first time I’ve seen the argument for vampires/zombies/etc. as a way to cope with death, but it’s still interesting to see from this perspective.

What’d you think? Good list? Prefer your horror movies with vampires? Where do you think the stories came from?