Although they are considered an enduring species, vampires do not scare people any more the way they did in the past, probably because the contemporary world has replaced their outmoded look – made up of sharp teeth, dark robes, pallid faces and foreign-sounding accents – with more terrifying realities. What is indisputable is their capacity to survive and to adapt, in almost Darwinian terms, to a society which always needs menacing and vampirising ‘others’ to haunt its institutions and its (presumably) advanced civilisation. In this view, Nina Auerbach's definition of the ‘children of the night’ seems appropriate: ‘an alien nocturnal species, sleeping in coffins, living in shadows, drinking our lives in secrecy, vampires are easy to stereotype, but it is their variety that makes them survivors’. Rather than being unchanging creatures, vampires have undergone a slow evolution from scary ‘myths’ to mutating ‘tropes’, with the latter term intended in the double meaning of rhetorical figure (connected to the way vampires have been textually inscribed and described) and ideological strategy, referring to the modalities according to which these creatures have become an expression of the ‘political unconscious’ of society.