Reginald Andres is not like other vampires. Sure, he has fangs, subsists on blood, and sizzles in the sun. Yet the hero of Syfy horror comedy Reginald the Vampire, played by Jacob Batalon, is also timid and self-conscious about his round belly. It doesn’t help that the vampire community is more superficial than a nest of high school mean girls.
Listen, not every bloodsucker is a supermodel—just ask cinema’s ur-vampire, Nosferatu. But if the past century of film and TV is any indication, they’ve yet to receive the body-positivity memo. Adapted from Johnny B. Truant’s comic the silly but sweet plays with the trope of the impossibly attractive vampire. Instead of sinking his teeth into swooning humans, Reginald nurses a crush on a co-worker. Instead of lying around some mansion decorated in
