Concerning the global hype that has been triggered by Twilight series, Neil Gaiman, who is one of my favorite fantasy writers, has said that "authors and publishers are guilty of 'over-farming' vampires."
I partly agree with Gaiman. Vampires have been a part of the popular literature since the early 19th century. Even though we're currently on one of the peak points of the production volume of the vampire-themed literature, it is surely not the historical climax. We've been watching more vampire movies in the 1970s and 1980s, for instance.
On the other hand, if there is a problem with the current "over-farming" of vampires, then this problem is not quantitative, but it is qualitative. What do I mean?
In the past, vampires have been a potentially emancipating subject as personas who look and act like us, but are not one of us. In the prehistory of the vampire fiction in Europe, you can see such a potential in the character of Carmilla, for instance.
Or as Werner Herzog had observed, in the aristocratic image of Dracula, you can read a symbolism about the parasitic counts of Ancien Regime who abused their peasantry with a nocturnal terror which is actually a shadow of the ways of capitalist bourgeois. Here, we can remember that Dracula was based upon Vlad III, an Eastern European prince of the 15th century, who resisted the centralist Ottoman expansion as a feudal lord in Wallachia.
However, with the fascinating fiction of Ann Rice, the vampire has been totally Americanized. Rice didn't really commodify vampires then, but she paved the way of their absolute articulation into the consumer society. We can argue that vampires have lost their emancipating potential as a challenger of the social establishment, right after Rice.
What we see in today's vampire fiction, based mainly on Twilight-esque pieces, is the decontextualization of vampires. In Twilight, Edward Cullen as the main vampire character is an idealized capitalist, who is liberated from all physical needs as an undead, absolutely potent and immortal, but still shackled to some earthly weaknesses like carnal desire and commodity fetishism in the shape of being an ardent collector.
In this framework, Bella Swan the female protagonist -who can easily anger the average reader with her utter superficiality and even stupidity- seems like she is in love with Edward, not just because of her romantic engagement to him, but because she is the symbol of the modern teenage girl, who craves to be with an idealized capitalist. If Edward is Justin Bieber, Bella is one of his millions of teenage fans who would even kill to appear on MTV with him or his likes. There is certainly a parasitic relationship between these characters in the form of mutualism.
To finish, I would like to add that I find it quite normal when vampires as a theme get adapted to contemporary literature. What is despicable is the fact that their original meaning is being undermined systematically, resulting with the corruption of their emancipating symbolism. It is how neoliberal capitalism works, though. It just absorbs anything as it had even managed to franchise Che Guevara...
The solution for today's vampire problem? I believe that sexually straight vampires like Edward Cullen suck. The emancipating potential of vampires has always been accompanying to their perversion . Take one of my favorite vampire movies, Vampyros Lesbos (1971). Many people hate this West German movie which portrays lesbian vampires in Istanbul and Princes' Islands. However, as a "psycho-sexadelic horror freakout", Vampyros Lesbos is still regarded as a cult movie. I like it, because it shows that you can modernize vampires without neoliberalizing them... Shortly, Countess Nadine Carody (which was played by Soledad Miranda) beats Edward Cullen, at least in my somewhat sexist view.
