Well my thought on the subject is that Vampires have been the victim of too many popular tropes. In a lot of cases the issue is simply that people are looking at it for the sex/power fantasy, or simple and straightforward action. This leads to the superhuman, misunderstood romantic vampires, or the bestial ones that are over the top ugly monsters.
Making Vampires scary really isn't that difficult, but it winds up going into territory a lot of people won't like, and aren't comfortable with. True horror isn't well travelled much anymore because only a few people really enjoy the negative emotions it brings.
Simply put, the best way to restore the fear to Vampires is simply to focus on the elitism. Your typical paranormal romance stuff tends to work the way it does because the protaganist is in some way special, or dreadfully attractive and picked out by these super beings to be one of them (or with them). This leads to a perspective from which the Vampire hunters and such (when they show up) are a bunch of bigots. This works because the reader is lead to associate themselves with the protaganists who is more or less an "insider" (or on the fringes in a way that they are respected and brought into things), and it plays to the power fantasy of being both powerful and loved.
On the other hand take most of those scenarios, make the protaganist a fat lardball, or skinny reject, like the reader probably is, and he situation changes. You've basically got this group of super-powerful elitists who hand pick the best people they can find to lord over you. They wind up controlling massive money and resources due to immortality, and more or less make you inferior and remove the control of your own destiny simply by existing. Even if they don't need to kill anyone, we're basically dealing with something akin to Hitler's whole "Aryan Master Race" thing, except with superpowered undead.
Beyond jealousy, your looking at a very clear system of inherant superiority and rulership, along with a group of beings that aren't shy about exploiting it. What's more even the "nice" vampires in novels step over the lines quite frequently to show their superiority by engaging in things like mind alteration, recreational torture, and similar things. In "True Blood" you'll notice the Vampires maintain their own system of justice and don't follow the same rules everyone else does, looking down on the mortals to a massive degree.
To put it bluntly, as a regular "Joe Slob" I'm liable to have a problem with a lot of this, and it isn't going to be a matter of projected bigotry. Get into some of the scenes where they say have some loser strapped to a table with a spigot stuck into his veins or whatever as a piece of backround material, and yeah I might have an issue, and that Anita Blake/Sookie Stackhouse/whomever character is actually part of the problem.
The issue of course is a matter of adjusting the perspective, of course the people who enjoy reading about these power fantasies, don't want to hear abount how it's wrong, or about how this "aristocricy of the night" winds up getting dragged down for simple elitism.
The "monster mash" approach of having supernatural creatures fight each other, comes down to the "insider perspective". If they are attentionally sidestepping the issue of how humanity views this kind of thing, or wants to dismiss it as "bigotry" as opposed to standing against bigotry, then you need something for dramatic tension and that either comes down to the vampires fighting each other, or facing some other kind of force that can present a threat.
The problem isn't the vampires, it's the writers, and how you see pretty much the entirety of vampire fiction focused on retreading what sells.
I'll also say Zombies are in the same vote because as time goes on people seem to be playing increasing numbers of games with that genere as well, there are plenty of movies using Zombies as increasingly obtuse metaphors, or focusing on the rights of the infected or whatever. When you don't see that, your pretty much looking the other seven or eight tropes being constantly recycled. The genere becoming so formulaistic, that even the exceptions to the general foruma are becoming a painful stereotype. It's falling into exactly the same pit as Vampire fiction just from another direction.
Making Vampires scary really isn't that difficult, but it winds up going into territory a lot of people won't like, and aren't comfortable with. True horror isn't well travelled much anymore because only a few people really enjoy the negative emotions it brings.
Simply put, the best way to restore the fear to Vampires is simply to focus on the elitism. Your typical paranormal romance stuff tends to work the way it does because the protaganist is in some way special, or dreadfully attractive and picked out by these super beings to be one of them (or with them). This leads to a perspective from which the Vampire hunters and such (when they show up) are a bunch of bigots. This works because the reader is lead to associate themselves with the protaganists who is more or less an "insider" (or on the fringes in a way that they are respected and brought into things), and it plays to the power fantasy of being both powerful and loved.
On the other hand take most of those scenarios, make the protaganist a fat lardball, or skinny reject, like the reader probably is, and he situation changes. You've basically got this group of super-powerful elitists who hand pick the best people they can find to lord over you. They wind up controlling massive money and resources due to immortality, and more or less make you inferior and remove the control of your own destiny simply by existing. Even if they don't need to kill anyone, we're basically dealing with something akin to Hitler's whole "Aryan Master Race" thing, except with superpowered undead.
Beyond jealousy, your looking at a very clear system of inherant superiority and rulership, along with a group of beings that aren't shy about exploiting it. What's more even the "nice" vampires in novels step over the lines quite frequently to show their superiority by engaging in things like mind alteration, recreational torture, and similar things. In "True Blood" you'll notice the Vampires maintain their own system of justice and don't follow the same rules everyone else does, looking down on the mortals to a massive degree.
To put it bluntly, as a regular "Joe Slob" I'm liable to have a problem with a lot of this, and it isn't going to be a matter of projected bigotry. Get into some of the scenes where they say have some loser strapped to a table with a spigot stuck into his veins or whatever as a piece of backround material, and yeah I might have an issue, and that Anita Blake/Sookie Stackhouse/whomever character is actually part of the problem.
The issue of course is a matter of adjusting the perspective, of course the people who enjoy reading about these power fantasies, don't want to hear abount how it's wrong, or about how this "aristocricy of the night" winds up getting dragged down for simple elitism.
The "monster mash" approach of having supernatural creatures fight each other, comes down to the "insider perspective". If they are attentionally sidestepping the issue of how humanity views this kind of thing, or wants to dismiss it as "bigotry" as opposed to standing against bigotry, then you need something for dramatic tension and that either comes down to the vampires fighting each other, or facing some other kind of force that can present a threat.
The problem isn't the vampires, it's the writers, and how you see pretty much the entirety of vampire fiction focused on retreading what sells.
I'll also say Zombies are in the same vote because as time goes on people seem to be playing increasing numbers of games with that genere as well, there are plenty of movies using Zombies as increasingly obtuse metaphors, or focusing on the rights of the infected or whatever. When you don't see that, your pretty much looking the other seven or eight tropes being constantly recycled. The genere becoming so formulaistic, that even the exceptions to the general foruma are becoming a painful stereotype. It's falling into exactly the same pit as Vampire fiction just from another direction.
