On Film: Vampire Settings You Can Sink Your Teeth Into

The fundamental problem with modern vampire movies is they're made by 12-year-olds. I exaggerate, but you know what I mean. Young people's notions of a vampire lifestyle don't stretch much beyond wearing tight leather trousers, leaping around to bad techno music and bragging that humans are your bitches. Let's face it, anyone over 30 would have grown out of this sort of behaviour years ago.

All the more reason, then, to welcome Let the Right One In, which rescues vampires from the lame goth posing of the Blade or Underworld films, and touches on the nuts-and-bolts practicalities of unfeasibly long life and needing to drink blood in the modern age.

There are two schools of thought here. One is the notion that eternal life bestows on you large castles and limitless resources that are only interrupted when Van Helsing comes a-calling with stakes and holy water. Dracula and his ilk sometimes dabble in real estate and, in The Satanic Rites of Dracula, property development, but by and large, these vampire plutocrats never have to worry about income or housing.

Likewise, in The Hunger, centuries-old Catherine Deneuve leads a life of elegant luxury in a Manhattan brownstone, worth between $2.2m and $3.5m in today's market. Though she goes to the disco to pick up victims, it's clear she prefers Delibes or Schumann to goth-rock; while in Twilight, Edward Cullen's cultural tastes don't seem to have evolved beyond an adolescent predeliction for Clair de Lune. His "family", meanwhile, prefers Frank Lloyd Wright-style airiness to the traditional cobwebbed castle. It's just as well that sunlight doesn't kill the Cullens, since their crib has a lot of picture windows, but it's still a devilishly stylish slice of real estate, reportedly owned in real life by a Nike executive.

Let the Right One In's Eli, on the other hand, contents herself with a bog-standard flat on a Swedish housing estate, where her interest in decor stops at customizing the bathroom so it's light-tight. Since she has a Fabergé nest-egg at her disposal, it would seem this is not so much a lifestyle decision based on financial expediency, more a consequence of having lived so long. It's logical that, after a couple of centuries, bourgeois trappings would lose their appeal, and surprising we don't see more vampires afflicted by the sort of been-there-done-that Weltschmerz endured by the 327-year-old heroine of Janác...#728;ek's The Makropulos Affair, who has learnt there is "no pleasure in being good, no pleasure in being bad".

We all like to think that, as vampires, we'd use that extra time allotted to learn languages, practice the cello and live in grand style. But in truth, we'd probably just end up frittering it away on the vampire version of Facebook. Or we'd end up rootless nomads, like the bloodsuckers in Near Dark, who cover the windows of their RV with cooking foil to keep out the light, bunk down in seedy motels and stay only a few steps ahead of the law as they chow down on the clientele of redneck bars. Or we'd find ourselves trapped in a decaying suburb of Pittsburgh, where George Romero's Martin gets a job as a delivery boy and preys on the depressed housewives on his round.

The best vampire story never filmed is Marc Behm's The Ice Maiden. Jean-Jacques Beineix has been talking about adapting it for years, though given his latterday track record, one can only hope he doesn't. John Landis came close to Behm's breezy comic-horror tone in Innocent Blood, where Anne Parillaud deals with the ethical implications of her thirst by drinking the blood of gangsters. But Behm's story is even better: the primary concerns of his vampire heroine, Cora, are staying solvent and finding suitable digs, just like the rest of us. Cora decides to rob the casino where she works as a croupier so she can raise enough money to buy her dream house. It's classic caper movie material, with a twist - in order to pull off the heist, Cora and her partners-in-crime have to transform themselves into bats.