PASADENA, Calif. -- Who would've thought that yesterday's Pet Rock, bell-bottom jeans and "Batman" parodies would turn into the undead?

But if anything has snagged the spotlight these days it's the eternally stalking vampire. There's nothing as hot as that cold embrace.

From Nosferatu to "Twilight," vampires have always been good for a dramatic shiver. And television has been kind to the teeth that fed it from "The Night Stalker," to "Moonlight" to "True Blood," to the newest resurrection, "Vampire Diaries," premiering Sept. 10 on the CW.

This series is etched by writer Kevin Williamson (best known for his pace-setting "Dawson's Creek") and his sometime co-writer Julie Plec. Based on the books by L.J. Smith, "Vampire Diaries" not only owes its heritage to the vampire mythology, but goes back even further to the Cain and Able conflict.

Here you have the "good" vampire (Paul Wesley) and his older brother, the "bad" vampire (Ian Somerhalder).

"The premise is the same," says Williamson, "girl meets vampire ... When I read the first book, I was like, 'No way. This is "Twilight."' But when I got to the second book, you start to realize, 'Oh, my God, boy, this is a fork in the road. It really does separate.' So we're getting to that fork in the road really quick. And we're really sort of telling the story about a small town and all the sort of evil ... this darkness that sort of lies underneath this town and how this vampire comes to town and sort of stirs it all up."

At first Williamson was reluctant to follow the fad. But he and Plec had worked together on "Scream" and wanted to join forces again. "We were like, 'Well, OK, all right. We'll see what we can do.' And once we got into it, it's sort of a challenge. It's like, 'What can we do differently? What can we add to it?'" says Williamson.The pilot was particularly difficult to write, he says. "Because it does have a lot of similarities to 'Twilight,' and there's no way around it.

"We had the story as he comes to town, the first day of school. That is the book. So we are telling it in sort of that fashion, but we're switching things around. Once we get into it and we can establish all the characters ... the pilot, we had 10 characters to get out in 42 minutes. It's tough. And so now we can sort of sit back and start telling stories on a weekly basis. Then it all changes. That's when you'll see the differences, because you're watching a weekly show. We're not a movie with a beginning, middle and end. We're actually evolving, and we get to evolve and just tell the stories, and it just sort of unrolls."

Wesley plays the good vampire, who has not fed on human blood for many years. He's the new kid at Mystic Falls High School, who may have fought in the Civil War, but has to be a teenager like the others. Wesley says he read dozens of other pilots before he happened on this one.

"A vampire who is born in the 1860s, and then has to mask himself as a high schooler -- there was nothing like that. I was so, so obsessed with this character. I love this character so much," says Wesley.

"And what we love about the character is he may be 150 years old, but he's a teenager, and he still can't get it right," adds Williamson.

Nina Dobrev ("DeGrassi: The Next Generation") plays the small-town girl that both siblings lust after. "Stefan (Wesley) is the man who tries to reach out to her soul, and he cares about her, and he takes care of her," says Dobrev, "whereas Damon (Somerhalder) has that bad-boy quality, and every girl likes a bad boy, at the end of the day ... There is something about a man who lurks in the dark."

Plec agrees and says she owes her fascination with bad boys to the television of her youth. "Me in my head, if Jordan Catalano (the aloof teen of "My So-Called Life") was a vampire or Dylan McKay (of "Beverly Hills, 90210"), that naughty-bad boy that just ... You want to believe, like in reference to Jordan, you want to believe there is so much going on behind those eyes. You want to believe that they have epic amounts of knowledge and soul and spirituality and intelligence lurking behind those eyes. And in the real men, you often don't get that."

Bloodsuckers they may be, but vampires obey certain rules in the mythology. Williamson says he's skewed those a bit. "I know we can go out in the sun. Sunlight kills vampires but they have this talisman ring that they wear, with this blue lapis stone -- this is from the book -- that protects them. It has been spelled, so it is a special ring. They can wear it and go out into the sun. But if that ring comes off, they are in trouble."

"The rules of killing are pretty consistent across multiple mythologies," says Plec. "But the rest of the folklore doesn't really apply. We don't have silver, garlic, crucifixes. They can be seen in mirrors. All the basic, throughout time and fiction, rules of vampires (don't apply)."