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While ghosts and ghostly stories remain the top of my preferred horror sub-genre listing there have been a few Zombie and Vampires entries that I enjoyed.

When you speak of zombies the mind nearly always flies to the modern incarnation of that revenant created by George A Romero for his film Night of the Living Dead. Few people think of the interpretation taken from a bastardized understanding of voodoo. However, both species of zombies have given us interesting and compelling films. Of the mindless hordes out to consume living flesh I think the best film is Train to Busan and of the voodoo variety I’ll admit a real liking of Sugar Hillwhere a woman takes vengeance of the mob with zombies.

Vampires feel related to the modern zombie. Corpses revivified by some means now feasting on the living. While the zombie seems to symbolize massed humanity and the fear we harbor of being in its crosshairs the vampire, particularly since Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire has come to be a stand in for unique individuality. The persistence of personality over death and time. So much so that the idea of the terrifying vampire seems to be as lost as the voodoo inspired undead slave.

I think the domestication of the vampire from terrifying monster stalking you for your precious blood into hot (even if they are actually room temperature) and engaging lovers has a lot to do with the stripping away of the mystic and magic of these creatures.

Take blood. A vampire requires blood for its continued existence. In folklore when the vampire is discovered in its lair it is not pristine and lovely but rather fat and gorged on blood like a tick. Today however the movies and stories and books are likely to have heroic vampires that live off the blood stolen from banks or cast off from slaughtered cattle. The blood has been stripped of its magical nature as the life force coursing in your veins to simply being a nutrient, as though the vampire metabolizes it into energy like we do with sugars and carbs. This mundane reinvention stripped away the supernatural and with it the horror.

I have hope that this Christmas we might get a proper vampire and not a rock and roll one with Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu.