The big love for Let the Right One In and high expectations over the impending release of Twilight has sparked some chatter about vampires as a symbolic narrative construct — or, as Jeff Wells puts it in a post condescendingly titled “Girls Vampire Club,” “the romantic whatchamacallit vampire metaphor.” At this point, it’s not even much of a metaphor: in the fifteen years between the birth of the Buffy franchise and the release of the two teen vampire films named above, the plight of the brooding but well-meaning undead has become so synonymous with teenage alienation that fiction about the convergance of the two “outsider” groups has just about run out of points to make. It’s become refreshing to see vampires function as unambiguous villians, an evil to be dealt with sans angst.

And so you’ve got to give it up for Barackula, just a little bit, just for refusing to engage in the “vampires are romantic subjects too!” cliche. This short, online-only musical (which we first learned of months ago, before it went online, but only got around to watching after last week’s election) re-imagines a young Obama’s circa-1990 induction as president of the Harvard Law Review as song-and-dance-off between our hero and a clan of literally bloodsucking would-be lawyers. Its not exactly a game-changer as far as musicals go, but it’s exceptionally narratively tight and polished for what amounts to a dramatic user-generated campaign ad, and its anticipation of what would become the major themes of the campaign all the way up to Election Day is truly remarkable.

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