For those of you still wondering what wooden stake or silver cross might finally send all the vampires scurrying from our entertainment landscape, it appears the answer is gurgling up from the deep. If the rumors and messages in floating bottles are true, mermaids will soon be the next big thing.
Starting with this week’s new Pirates of the Caribbean flick, there’s a whole slew of half girl/half fish flotsam set to beguile our collective senses like Odysseus’ sirens. In Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Captain Jack Sparrow gets involved with the fountain of youth and some deep-sea beauties. As the summer unfolds, publishers are reportedly releasing a boatload of mermaid novels. (Even Twilight scribe Stephenie Meyer is stirring up a new fish tale.) There are websites dedicated to buying, creating or chatting about your own mermaid tail such as mer.yuku.com. Mermaid videos are flooding into YouTube. And the very first mermaid convention, MerCon 2011, will be held at the Las Vegas Mirage Resort and Casino later this year.
Mandy Hubbard, the author of soon-to-be-released Ripple—a highly anticipated young-adult novel about a seemingly normal teen who has to hide that she’s really a mermaid—told USA Today that the mermaid tide is on the rise. “Publishers and readers are looking for the next big thing in the paranormal genre,” Hubbard said. “We’ve already done vampires and werewolves and angels. Mermaids feel a little more fresh and interesting.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean that we should be expecting a whole school of Little Mermaid-style Ariels to be sweetly singing their way into our theaters, living rooms and bookshelves with flowing hair and demurely placed clam shells. If magical half-naked women creatures are indeed the next big splash, you can bet there’s going to be a darker undercurrent that popular culture won’t be able to resist dipping its big toe into.
Sorry if that makes me sound a little … crabby.
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