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Why are zombies and vampires so popular? Television shows such as

• The Walking Dead and novels such as Twilight have inserted these once-human supernatural creatures into our collective subconscious. In his essay "Our Zombies, Ourselves," James Parker attempts to explain why zombies are such a resonant part of popular culture. In the same vein (pun intended), Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, in their essay Vampires Never Die", attempt to explain why the image of the vampire remains such an iconic image in our minds. According to Del Toro and Hogan, "the two main branches of vampiric fiction" are (a.) "the vampire as romantic hero" and (b.) "the vampire as undead monster" (292). Del Toro and Hogan also claim that the story of the ultimate vampire, Dracula (originally written as a novel by Bram Stoker in 1897), is "a mash-up of ancient myth in conflict with the world of the present" (293).

• Your assignment is to write a four-to-five-page essay (with 1,000 or more words) in which you use Parker's essay and Del Toro and Hogan's essay to explain the popularity of zombies and vampires in twenty-first-century society. Please use quotations from both essays to support your thesis, as well as at least two pieces of imaginative literature (one piece of fiction, film or television show depicting zombies, and one piece of fiction, film, or television show depicting vampires). Your writing task is to synthesize these sources in order to support a thesis about the popularity of these two supernatural creatures.