Zombies, vampires permeate Halloween

Let me tell you why I don’t like Halloween very much.

Christmas and Independence Day? These holidays are eternal: one has presents and Jesus, and one has America and awesomeness. You get the same warm feeling inside each year.

Halloween, however, is very much subject to fads — it’s arguably the most fad-influenced holiday of them all. Without a religious or political purpose (spare me the lecture about what Halloween “historically represents,” blah blah blah), Halloween’s purpose lies solely within the celebration of all things scary, slutty and toothachingly sweet. And each year we roll out a new obsession that dominates the holiday’s trifecta of trash.

This year, we’ve lovingly named dead celebrities the costume du jour, and the horror trend of the moment is definitely the zombie fad. If I hear one more person ask me what I’m going to do at the dawn of the Zombie Apocalypse (”It’s ‘Zompocalypse,’ thank you very much!”), I’m going take off one of my heels and throw it at them, and hopefully the spike will slit their zombie-loving throats. And after they die, I can promise you, their body will not be resurrected as a zombie. It will just be dead.

I don’t know how this joke, once mildly amusing, got so out of hand, to the point where every 19-year-old man thinks it’s seriously cool to keep a “What To Do When Zombies Attack” instruction manual and a hatchet in his closet, right next to his Jenna Jameson DVDs. Here’s the cold truth: zombie hipsters: It’s not funny if everybody’s making the same joke. And it’s worse if everybody’s been making said joke for the past two years.

If it’s boys that are stuck on zombies, then we don’t even need to think twice about what the girls are stuck on this year.

These girls and this vampire thing. I have a serious problem with it.

To understand the average fan of the vampire pandemic, of course, you first have to understand the average fan of “Harry Potter” (which has nothing to do with vampires, oddly enough). Or at least, that is the way I have come to understand it, as I like Potter quite a bit and am embarrassed at how this little trend has besmirched its good name.

Let me explain. Serious “Harry Potter” fans can be divided into two categories: those who like to discuss the books and the characters rationally and Fat Girls.

The term Fat Girls has nothing to do with physical size of course. There are Fat Girls who weigh 110 pounds. There are Fat Girls who are men. Fat Girl is a state of mind — un-confident, lonely and delusional. In about 2007, the Fat Girl group of “Harry Potter” fans, who at the time were busy writing some steamy Harry and Malfoy romance fanfiction (”His name is Draco, thank you very much!”), were introduced to “Twilight.”

And they became enraptured by it. It even awoke the Fat Girl waiting inside seemingly confident women. The book served every single one of the Fat Girl’s innermost desires — an average, boring female lead which they could mentally replace with themselves and a whole host of sexy men, desperate for her and only her, even if she was lacking a single interesting characteristic (or even a smoking hot body to make up for it). It’s what a Fat Girl always dreams of — attracting others, for friendship or romantic purposes, without actually having to try to be interesting.

This year, every Fat Girl in America has spoken, and they want more vampires. So now we have Charlaine Harris and The CW’s “The Vampire Diaries,” and a whole host of other knock-offs of these franchises. And it has already gotten very, very old. And terribly annoying. I haven’t been alive for all that long, and I even remember when vampires had their last big surge in popularity, and that’s because it only happened less than a decade ago. But at least back in the ‘90s, we had good citizens like Buffy and Blade to kill them, because vampires weren’t sad, tortured souls back then. They were bad guys who would eat you if you didn’t properly stake them through the heart. Today’s vampires smoulder and pose, with about as much of a threatening presence as Fabio on a unicorn.

So guys, let’s put zombies back on the shelf for a few years. And Fat Girls, stay away from “Harry Potter” and other good stuff. You can latch onto vampires all you want, but boys with that sort of undying devotion for girls with nothing special about them don’t just fall from trees. In fact, they don’t exist. If you want someone to like you, you have to work toward being a friendly, interesting person and not be as self-centered as “Twilight”’s damsel-in-distress, Bella Swan. Sparkly demons will not come and save you if you don’t give them a reason to want to.