This chapter focuses on vampire narratives in children’s films, identifies recurrent themes and critically examines what they tell us about constructions of childhood in the 21st century. It argues that it is possible to identify continuities and discontinuities with earlier children’s stories and traditional fairy tales. On the one hand, as the vast majority of children’s literature is written by adults for children it continues to reflect adult perceptions of who children are and who they should become. In this sense, contemporary vampire narratives perpetuate constructions of childhood predicated on futurity and represent the norms and moral values adults want children to develop in order to become responsible adult citizens of the future. On the other hand, the vampires in these narratives or the child protagonists’ relationships with them open up space in which children can resist adult demands and exercise agency and choice. Rather than being passively moulded and shaped into the adults of the future, these vampire narratives in children’s films allow us to view children, not as ‘members-in-the-making’ but as social actors who co-construct their social worlds.
