Trigger Happy

Shoot first, ask questions later

- STEVEN POOLE

Are vampires back? If so, the times are ripe. Robert Eggers' remake of Nosferatu had critics drooling in 2024, the release of Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines 2 at least had players reminiscing fondly about the original, and Ryan Coogler's Sinners (2025) is a stunning celebration and complication of traditional lore. According to an immense new survey, John Blair's book Killing The Dead: Vampire Epidemics From Mesopotamia To The New World, what he calls “epidemics” of corpse-killing erupt in various times and places when an existing set of supernatural beliefs coincides with a particular context of novel “stresses and anxieties”. Our time, I think Edge readers will agree, has no shortage of those.