Vampires Aren't Scary Anymore and That's a Problem

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Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com

When Bram Stoker’s Dracula was first published, it featured themes of death, seduction, temptation, and eternal life, and something about the arrangement of those themes, produced a story that was horrifying to its Victorian audience.

But vampire stories, mostly in movie form today, don’t have the same effect. When people today think of the scariest movies they can, very rarely will a vampire movie feature among them. Vampires of contemporary story telling are just as often portrayed as our friends as they are our adversaries and the worst thing they can do to you is kill you which is no worse than any other human adversary.

They’re no worse than serial killers, which is bad enough, but it doesn’t produce the kind of uncanny terror that other concepts can in us.
So why is it that vampire stories, especially the original vampire story, have lost their ability to terrify us the way they once did? What about us has changed so dramatically that this story no longer produces the terror and dread it once did?