Clockwise from upper left: Sarah Michelle Gellar in Buffy the Vampire Slayer; fake vampire teeth are hot this Halloween; Stephen Moyer is a vampire in HBO’s True Blood; Bela Lugosi portrays the evil Count Dracula in the 1931 movie classic.

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Forget those vicious vampires made famous by scary guys like Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee. Today’s vampires are downright sweet: lovesick teenagers, studly heartthrobs, folks just like you and me — except for that taste for human blood.

And right now, the mythical creatures are sinking their fangs into every aspect of pop culture. Books, movies, television series, video games, even the cover of this month’s Playboy magazine, have put vamps front and center.

This Halloween, vampire costumes are in particularly high demand. Fancy $25 fangs are among the most popular things on the shelves, said Errin Johnston at Halloween USA, a seasonal costume store in Boulder, Colo.

“I’ve had young girls come in, and they wanted the teeth and the outfits to go along with Twilight. They think vampires are cool.”

The popular Twilight book and movie franchises aren’t the only things turning vampires from dark to desirable. The smash TV show True Blood and scores of adolescent novels present vampires as the coolest, and cutest, guys in school — attracting enamored teens and, undoubtedly, causing consternation for their parents, raised on the double-crossing vampires of Anne Rice novels and shows like Dark Shadows.

“For women, whatever age you are, it’s a fantasy world,” said Jennifer Brown, 27, who will make a vampire costume part of her Halloween this year. “Who wouldn’t want that, someone who smells sweet and draws you in with everything he is?”

Added Mindy Jones, 30, another vampire fan: “Before, they were scary and creepy. But with the Twilight series, they are romantic and seductive. Everyone is like, ‘Oooh, he’s so cute and dreamy!’ ”

This, more than anything else, explains vampires’ persistent stake in popular culture. They aren’t just Halloween “monsters” like mummies and werewolves. Zombies say “grrrr” and kill things and that’s about it. Vampires quote poetry.

“We have a relationship with these monsters,” said Lynne Edwards, a professor at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pa. “Think about every 98-pound weakling, every goofy girl. If you are the victim of a vampire and you are sired (turned into a vampire), then you get this ready-made family where you are wanted. They offer an escape from whatever miserable current life we are leading. It’s a great revenge fantasy.”

It’s also a way of exploring sexuality without explicitly dealing with the subject, Edwards said.

“They aren’t pouncing on you in an alleyway,” she said. “They want you to invite them in, they want you to be complicit in your seduction. There is something sexual about that. And if you are a teenager, there is something romantic about that.

”None of them are ugly and brooding. They are gorgeous and brooding.“

In other words, they are both sexy and complicated. In Twilight, the sex hinges on its absence — the lead vampire desires the blood of a fellow high schooler but refuses to despoil her (even though his love-object wants him to turn her into a vampire). The whole thing revolves around this dance: love, but not consummation.

Targeting an older set is HBO’s True Blood — which signed on for a third season — in which sex is everywhere: vampires doing it with each other, non-vampires seeking out the undead for sex, gay vampires, and so on. Still, the series pivots on the relationship between a vampire and his non-vampire girlfriend and, like the romance in Twilight, rests on frustrations that arise between them.

For those beguiled by sexy literature, they can turn to a subgenre of romance novels fixed on vampires. And there’s plenty of product for vampire fans eager to dispense with pretense and story.

It’s called vampire porn, and there’s lots of it.

Vampires didn’t become our best friends overnight, though their redemption does seem somewhat abrupt. Blood-sucking fiends have been around since ancient times in folklore. They began appearing in literature in the 1720s. The German poem “The Vampire” was among the first, published in 1748 by Heinrich August Ossenfelder.

The Vampyre, written by John William Polidori in 1819, was a short story in New Monthly Magazine, and it was the first to take the folk-tale vampire and make him a suave operator who preyed on aristocrats.

Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, from 1847, had a reference. A housekeeper in the novel suspected Heathcliff of being a vampire. A century-plus of exploiting their neck-biting habits followed.

But Hollywood started hyping a new, sexier angle in the 1980s. The film The Lost Boys, with its slogan “Sleep all day. Party all night,” helped turn vampires into guys you’d want to hang out with.

This approach, with a twist, really took off with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a television series that ran from 1997 to 2003, featuring a California town crawling with vampires. Buffy, an attractive high-school student, spends her nights staking vampires but also falls in love with a few studs among them.

Buffy hatched a busy underworld of scholarship and even an academic journal, called Slayage. Buffy scholars explore femininity, sexuality, myth and gender equality, all through the template of a contemporary American town full of vampires and monsters.

Those neo-undead opened the door for the deeper sort of vampire that feeds on pop culture today. These vamps are out for more than having a gas. Their soap opera is the same as ours — thwarted desires, sordid entanglements — but for the fangs. Young boys identify with the leading-man vampires who are hormonally frustrated with their romantic pursuits. And they love the hot vampire girls. Twenty-something college students swoon over the sweet, stoic vampire dudes.

Vampires come in all shades of sexy — from Lugosi to Brad Pitt (or Johnny Depp, who just signed on for an upcoming big-screen remake of Dark Shadows) — but sex has always dwelled at the center of vampire stories, said Annalisa Castaldo, a professor at Widener University in Chester, Pa.

”It’s an incredibly flexible and powerful metaphor (for sex) that fits an era,“ she said. ”It always works. That’s why I think it won’t go away. There is very little that is sexy about ghosts.“