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Speculative fiction examines the leading edge of science and can be used to introduce ideas into the classroom. For example, most students are already familiar with the fictional infectious diseases responsible for vampire and zombie outbreaks. The disease dynamics of these imaginary ailments follow the same rules we see for real diseases and can be used to remind students that they already understand the basic rules of disease ecology and immunology. By engaging writers of this sort of fiction in an effort to solve problems in immunology we may be able to perform a directed evolution experiment where we follow the evolution of plots rather than genetic traits.

This article concerns the mythical dimension of vampires. Vampires have made an impressive comeback through literature (Anne Rice), cinema (Dracula, Interview With the Vampire, Blade, Vampires, Queen of the Damned, Underworld, Twilight…), role-playing games (Vampire: The Masquerade), music and fashion (the gothic style). The authors's works on the evolution of family models help understanding this contemporary fascination towards vampires. It is surprising to see how much the features lent to these legendary creatures echo the contemporary psychopathological characteristics that the authors have already described and related to the evolution of society as well as of family values: individualism and “auto-reference”, hedonism and symmetrical relations, narcissistic fragility, difficult relations with others, phantasms of all-power and “auto-begetting”, etc. According to the authors, the vampire has become a myth constituting a reservoir of symbolic representations and allowing teenagers to better elaborate their maturing stages. Contemporary society is not capable of proposing effective rites of passages on the symbolic plane anymore and teenagers have to find their own rites and references. The vampire then takes all its importance as it has several characteristics of adolescence: a body which changes and which it is necessary to learn how to master, a new rapport with the others, the dangers of relations, the impression of immortality, etc.). Narcissistic perversion, the clinical entity defined by Racamier, is also the object of a parallel with the vampire, showing the symbolic relevance of this myth both on the social and cultural planes, but also on the psychological and psychiatric ones.