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Charting 20 Years of Pop-Culture Witches, Zombies, and Vampires

Five years ago, the first Twilight movie was released and True Blood debuted on HBO, ushering in an age of vampire pop-culture dominance. But something has changed: Now zombies are dominant (The Walking Dead, just today renewed for a fifth season, is the biggest hit on cable) and witches are ascendant (American Horror Story: Coven, The Witches of East End), while vampires have sunk to the point that NBC’s Dracula has Jonathan Rhys-Meyers’s bloodsucker obsessed with the future of sustainable energy. But so goes the endless Zeitgeist horse race between these three scary subjects. For the last twenty years, each one has had its trendy moment, only to be bumped by another and then come back again. Vulture has tracked all of their pop-culture highs and lows in a handy chart. Perhaps you can use it to extrapolate when vampires will make their comeback.

Witches, Zombies, Vampires: Who’s Up, Who’s Down