Tales from the Vardo Theme

Mankind has always feared the dark - and more to the point, we have feared what waits for us in the dead of night when our vaunted senses are dulled and danger lurks behind every shadow. Despite our better knowledge, we worry ourselves with the most frightening things, real and imagined, biding the moments until that awful, unseen thing makes it's move and begins devouring us alive.

From the moment we first crawled out of the caves, man has turned to light and hidden ourselves away during the evening hours. Technology and education did little more than add fuel to our proverbial fires - as beasts we'd never conceived came to life in books and fiction. Imagine the world before Shelley's Frankenstein and Stoker's Dracula - before our darkest modern mythology subsumed the ancient monsters of old. Now, move further through the time line and encounter all manner of zombies (from Romero to The Walking Dead), vampires (from The Lost Boys to The Vampire Lestat), and lycanthropes (Silver Bullet, Underworld). Ah yes, the world is getting more mortifying all the time!

And yet, there is a near-endless brigade of bold and daring heroes who will stop at nothing in their efforts to halt the march of evil into our world. Everyone from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Van Helsing to the boys over on Supernatural, there is no shortage of slayers on the front lines, keeping the rest of us mere mortals safe from the depredations of sinister forces most foul.

So it's time to step up, noble adventurer. Grab your stakes, your garlic, your holy water and symbols - and get out there and stop the spread of evil.

Hurry now, failure is not an option. Your very soul depends on it.