http://www.avclub.com/content/feature/i_vant_to_suck_your_broccoli_23
I thought this might be useful to someone. I haven't read the entire article, so I take no responsibility for the content.
I just finished reading "Carpe Jugulum", one of the Discworld novels by Pratchett. The Kingdom of Lancre is being menaced by "modern vampyres" who are acclimating to the Century of the Fruitbat by learning to drink wine and developing immunity to sunlight, garlic and holy symbols. But when they run up against Granny Weatherwax, the local Witch...
Of course my favorite vampire scene is from "Love at First Bite" when van Helsing (Richard Benjamin) confronts the Count (George Hamilton) in a restaurant with a silver Star of David -- "Oh yeah! What do you say to *this*" (Dracula recoils reflexively, then relaxes) "I think you should find a nice Jewish girl and settle down..."
Asprin does a vampire world in one of his Mythadventures books. His take is that vampires are Demon-shunal Travelers like all the other "demons" out there, and like with humans most of them never leave their own dimension--but the really wealthy flamboyant ones do, and they give the place a bad reputation with all their antics abroad.
So vampires have a bad rep for the same reason that most people don't like foreigners: we usually meet the arrogant tourists, not the run-of-the-mill residents.
--M. J. Young
So vampires have a bad rep for the same reason that most people don't like foreigners: we usually meet the arrogant tourists, not the run-of-the-mill residents.
Heh. I like that.
My current favorite take on vampires is Kim Harrison's Hollows series. A vampire is a person who's infected with a virus that keeps the body and mind alive after death. The soul, however, dissipates into nothingness without the mind to keep it together. So something resembling immortality, but no shot at an afterlife. Living vampires are often a little messed up, but are essentially people. They can walk in the sunlight and holy symbols don't bother them. (One takes up residence in a church, partly to keep her undead mother from visiting.) The undead vamps--the soulless ones--they remember things like love and kindness, but they no longer really have them.
There's also an interesting distinction between living and dead vampires. Living vamps don't need to drink blood to survive, but it's more an emotional/physical high. The undead vampires, on the other hand, have to drink blood to survive. Because this is a modern-day setting, there's actually paperwork required for a vampire to be allowed to bite a human--waivers to be signed and the like.
The book also has a social hierarchy between high-blood living vamps, those who were born to living vampire parents (and therefore infected with the virus in utero) and low-blood living vamps, who were born human and turned.
(For anyone wanting to check it out, it's a very good series, though I'll note that the content can be....um...intense, for anyone that would bother. It's not as smutty as Laurell K. Hamilton by any means, but would definitely get an R rating as a movie.)