at no point in the novel does Jonathan Harker say "whoa!"

I haven't finished the novel yet, but I suspect that he'd only say that if he were talking to a horse.

Superman is different, I think, because he belongs to Siegel and Shuster. I just did a little searching and found that, prior to Stoker, most vampires were described as bloated and ruddy. I think if your creature goes back before written history, you've got free rein.

Again, I disagree. What happens with the great narratives is that they're retold, again and again, with a certain degree of interpretation and change over time -- Charles Perrault had Little Red Riding Hood eaten by the wolf; the Grimm Brothers had her survive. But at the root is the same story.

But what happens is that a version of the stopry becomes dominant -- Grimm for Little Red Riding Hood, Stoker for vampires, the mainstream comic book continuity for Superman -- and every iteration after that is both beholden and in competition with it. If it degenerates too far from the "master" narrative, and fails to transform into its own mythology, then it begins to ring untrue, and degenerate.

at no point in the novel does Jonathan Harker say "whoa!"

I haven't finished the novel yet, but I suspect that he'd only say that if he were talking to a horse.

In another universe, there is movie version of Dracula, in which Keanu Reeves plays Jonathan Harker, and they had to edit a lot of "whoa"s out.

Again, I disagree. [...] But at the root is the same story.

While I'm probably more of a hardliner than Laga is, she just has a different definition of what constitutes the same story. Your vampires need darkness (but Bram Stoker's didn't). Hers need bloodlust. Mine need evil, or a damned good excuse not to be. I know people think the souls and the chip were pussyfying, but they worked for me.

she just has a different definition of what constitutes the same story.

Oh, given. And apologies if I've seemed overly agressive. It's just a subject I've been putting a lot of thought into, recently, vis a vis my own writingm these sort of central mythologies to our culture, from the folkloric to the the contemporary, and how they spread, grow and take life of their own.

I know people think the souls and the chip were pussyfying, but they worked for me.

Honestly? They did for me, too, mostly because Angel and Spike were clearly the exceptions, not the rule. Whereas "Twilight" baffles me, it's so far afield.

I believe wholeheartedly that their are underlying mythologies that hold immense cultural sway with these things, and that a writer doesn't need to be enslaved to them, but needs to at least be mindful of them. Otherwise, the symbols in use lose their power.

Take, for example, this, fromt the AP's review of the movie "Daybreakers."

At least vampire tales such as TV’s “True Blood” or the movie thriller “Thirst” are playful and sexy, and stuff such as “Twilight” is fun to make fun of. But “Daybreakers” plays like a dirge, striking one long, monotonous note of gloom, a dramatic flatline that barely budges even during the movie’s uninspired action-and-gore sequences.

It seems to me that not just overexposure, but overexposure combined with degeneration from the underlying mythology, have begun to have a teetering effect, robbing any vampire story of its power. At least for a little while. These things always come back.

Daybreakers seems to me to be doing to the vampire mythos what recent zombies have become--taking out the magic and putting in inexplicable science. But I've only seen a couple trailers and brief reviews. I don't know what it sticks to and what it doesn't in terms of strengths and weaknesses.

What were the vampire weaknesses in the movie and also in the TV show Ultraviolet? It was a disease in the movie too, right?

For me, I generally prefer it when vampires come with a world of magic, and when they come with more limitations. Vampire Diaries throws out much of the limitations, but keeps magic (the rings, witches, amulets) and that bothers me more than a wholesale rejection of the magic and a translation to infection.

Do you think zombie stories suffer from their distance from the original?

What were the vampire weaknesses in the movie and also in the TV show Ultraviolet? It was a disease in the movie too, right?

The TV show and movie were unrelated. In the TV show, the weaknesses were your usual suspects: sunlight, garlic, silver and wood (if I recall). They used garlic bullets.

The TV show and movie were unrelated

I never meant to imply they were. It was just shorter to use one sentence.

Is wood a weakness or is a wooden stake to the heart a weakness?

How popular is silver as a weakness? Blade uses it too, right?

Vampirism as or being a werewolf (or even zombie) as a disease are not new, and not really more scientific than just seeing it as magic. But the role it plays is especially interesting (to me anyway) when it comes to zombies. Vamires and werewolves have (at least since the 19th century) taken much of their power from their attractiveness. Most people can see the seductiveness and sexiness of being a vampire. Dracula and Carmilla were canonically seducers and I think most people can see the attractions, and a large minority really really see the attaction. Similarly with werewolves, we can see the benefits of being wild and free and untamed and fierce and mad. We fear being attacked by them some dark part of our selves wants to be them. (Not everyone maybe but a lot of people.)

OK, but if you want to be a zombie you have very rare tastes indeed. We not only fear zombies, the idea of being one is terrifying, and without any dark attraction behind the fear. What was terrifying about the "zombie as cheap labor" trope is that there is really no limit to the demand. If it were possible to make zombies and especially if it did not require much skill or magical power, the same people who make meth or sell crack would dig up graveyards and sell zombies to a virtually unlimited demand. I mean no big corp would turn down zombie labor if it cut a dime an hour off their labor costs. And a lot of small businesses would feel rightous and justified that they finally had found workers with the right attitude. But like any troope it wears out, so you end up with the EC comics model where they usually are working for an evil magician out to take over the world or something. And it is not as frightening because it does not appeal to the fundamental fear behind the zombie myth: at one level the fear that zombification could become common enough that we could become one, and at the deeper level that given the mindlessness of a much or our lives that we already our.

And Romero's genius was that he found a way to make that fear bigger than ever. Instead of having a clear cause behind zombification, he posited waking up one day to find out that every corpse on earth was rising on attacking you. So now everyone becomes a zombie when they die, and given the balance of forces that day is not as far off as you might wish. And the refinements (its an engineered virus gone wrong! No a comet!) get there power from changing from the "you might end up a zombie" to "you are almost certainly going to end up zombie. you are fighting mainly to delay it."

And that is powerful stuff when it comes to tapping our fears.

Vampirism as or being a werewolf (or even zombie) as a disease are not new

The traditional view of vampirism in mythology has been something transmissible, sure, but it's also often walked hand in hand with magic and other weird beasties. Hemophages? That seems a more recent angle.

Zombies, if my facts are stable, have their roots in voudoun, which is all mystical/religion. It's something that's done to you. Zombies transmitting their zombification to you, and being started from some mysterious other source came after that as far as I can tell.