It's on now: I'M BLOGGING TWILIGHT.

I don't watch that many horror movies. When I do, they tend to involve zombies. But if I had to pick a second favorite monster, it would be vampires.

When I was a kid, I caught a bit of Bram Stoker's Dracula on television. I can't remember exactly what about it hooked me, but watch the trailer and it's not hard to see how it draws you in. There's a chaotic energy to the camerawork and editing, and a sumptuousness in the costumes and art design that borders on erotic. The effects are straight-up old school. And every inch of it is dripping with sex.

Yes, sex. They might be undead and totally evil but there's something damn sexy about a well-dressed, smooth talking vampire. Martin Landau mentions as Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood that "If you want to make out with a young lady, take her to see Dracula." If you'd rather see a young lady make out with a young lady, there's always the lesbian vampire genre. Lesbian zombies? Not in a million years. But you can't have sex without violence, and vampire movies provide plenty of that, too. The vampire movie, it seems, is tailor made for the part of the male human brain that never evolved past "caveman." Or "high school freshman" for that matter.

So imagine my surprise when a year or two ago, a new kind of vampire takes America by storm. He doesn't feast upon our fragile, virginal women. He doesn't mow through victims, leaving a trail of demolished jugulars in his wake. He's not even European. He's a sparkly brooding pretty boy and he's stolen the hearts of tweens and lonely housewives everywhere.

Seriously?

Let's not be so reactionary, you say. Remember Interview with the Vampire? It's a who's who of beefcake. Not so fast, I counter. Brad Pitt and Antonio Banderas are men's men. There is no "Team Lestat."

It would be easy to mock the Twilight series sight unseen, to write off its success as the product of an easily manipulated female fan base (their brains are smaller than men's, you know). God knows I've done that with enough of pop culture's drecks already. But the Twilight series is different. It's not a phenomenon on the level of Hannah Montana or High School Musical, it's an actual, honest-to-God phenomenon; the film adaptation of the first book was the 7th highest grossing film of 2008. It earned almost $200 million. That's more than any James Bond film.

I must know my enemy.

I must read Twilight.