Unlocking The Vampire Diaries: Genre, authorship, and quality in the teen vampire series

Like recent successful vampire text True Blood, The Vampire Diaries began life as a series of novels before being adapted into a television series which is screened on The CW channel in the US and ITV3 in the UK. This paper explores how The Vampire Diaries works within the context of debates over genre and authorship within television studies and how this links to representations of television horror. Whilst The Vampire Diaries is resolutely a vampire text, it can also be read within the context of a teen drama such as Buffy which draws on tropes from the horror genre and combines them with traits such as an emphasis on young adult issues such as relationships and friendships. The Vampire Diaries is further placed within this teen genre by its association with Dawson’s Creek – an intertextual link brought about by the involvement of Kevin Williamson with both shows. However, given my interest in exploring how this particular teen vampire show might represent horror on the small screen I want to also consider whether Williamson’s status as the creator of the successful Scream movie franchise might impact upon how we read the television version of The Vampire Diaries as both a teen drama and a potential TV vampire/horror text.