There’s nothing quite like sitting in a darkened theater, letting your feet adhere to the soda-stickied floor and inhaling the aroma of artificial popcorn butter as you wait for a horde of vaguely human monsters to scare the living crap out of you. It’s a rite of passage in America to go to your first monster movie and while we hate being scared in our everyday lives, we’re happy to drop a Hamilton for vampires, werewolves and zombies to terrify us in the confines of our neighborhood multiplex.  All three of these creatures hold a special place in the hallowed halls of popular culture, but which is the most popular?  Which would be the prom queen of Horror High School and has that changed over time?  Let’s take a look.

Using Google Trends we can be huge nerds and plot on a graph how many people search “vampires,” “werewolves” and “zombies” (please note the use alphabetical order to avoid any personal bias) relative to each other for every week from 2004 to the present.  Here’s the chart.

So, vampires.  They’re the general winners of our popularity of contest.  And why’s that?  I’d posit the guess that it’s because sex sells.  While vampires are vile, bloodsucking fiends, they’re also kind of hot – [insert bitchy cheerleader joke here].  They’ve got that whole sexy, seducing thing going on and while you might consider getting busy with one of the brides of Dracula, you probably have no interest in doing a werewolf or a zombie unless you’ve got some serious issues.

Werewolves?  Not that popular anymore.  And why’s that?  Not sexy and no longer relevant (think Margot Kidder from the Superman movies).  In a fast-paced world full of Facebook updates and Tweats, someone who turns into a monster for only a couple hours once a month just seems boring.

Zombies?  In my opinion, this is the most interesting group of the three.  For years, zombies were the middle of the pack monster – they were popular, but they weren’t vampires.  Zombies were like the cute girl in your AP Biology class that everyone liked, but she really didn’t have the political clout of the upper echelon of the Mean Girls.  But all of a sudden, during the last part of 2008 zombies started getting really popular and in 2009 they were crowned prom queen for the first time.  What happened?  My bet – the economy.  Suddenly our very way of life seems threatened and it looks like it’s actually conceivable that our entire society could fall apart.  That sounds a lot like a zombie apocalypse in my book.  The normal, everyday people around us could spell our very doom, either by becoming undead cannibals that want to feast on our flesh or by defaulting on their mortgages.  So, while some people might look at stock market prices to try to guess when the economy is going to turn around, I’ll keep my eye on the popularity of zombies.  When zombies lose their prom crown, I’ll start buying stocks.