Boys like zombies, girls like vampires. Think about it:  teenaged boys stink, shamble, and are in desperate need of brains… Teenaged girls, on the other hand, will drain you of all life if you let them and will eventually all become old bats. Open and shut. I love show-ciology—it’s so simple!

Our current preoccupation with zombies and vampires is easy to explain. They’re two sides of the same coin, addressing our fascination with sex, death and food. They’re both undead, they both feed on us, they both pass on some kind of plague and they can both be killed with specialist techniques – a stake through the heart or a disembraining. But they seem to have become polarised. Vampires are the undead of choice for girls, and zombies for boys. Vampires are cool, aloof, beautiful, brooding creatures of the night. Typical moody teenage boys, basically. Zombies are dumb, brutal, ugly and mindlessly violent. Which makes them also like typical teenage boys, I suppose.

Zombie stories are life lessons for boys who don’t mind thinking about bodies, but can’t cope with emotions. Vampire stories are in many ways sex for the squeamish. We don’t need Raj Persaud to tell us that plunging canines into soft warm necks, or driving stakes between heaving bosoms, are very basic sexual metaphors.

Listen, let’s be honest, boys might like vampires a whole lot more if they were able to form marauding hordes like in Left 4 Dead and offer themselves up to your shotgun in wave after hideous, satisfying wave of spattering blood. But, nooOOOoo, they have to be all aloof and intellectual and bent on kissing and such. Come on, Vlads, you’re dead. Get freaky and start rioting. We’ll show up.