Over the past week I've been revisiting some of my older work, doing revisions and looking at finishing it out as a novel, perhaps as the first in a series.
As part of that, I started re-watching some movies about vampires, werewolves and the like. It's interesting to see how the same sort of critters are interpreted in modern culture.
Basically there's two approaches to how these things would exist.
One is the traditional religious/magic concept, where Vampires are damned or cursed. They are repelled by crosses, burned by holy water, and so on. Werewolves fall into a similar category, but of course their great weakness is silver.
Opposing this is the biological explanation, which seems to be becoming ascendant (not surprising in a our secular age). In this reading, these are genetic traits, perhaps from a rare and potent virus.
The advantage of the latter approach is that it allows one to have more story flexibility since you can have moral vampires and werewolves. The disadvantage is of course less of the "timeless evil" that you get with (for example) Dracula.
I'm very much looking at the secular approach, but that doesn't mean religion will be absent. One thing I've learned is that all people have some sort of faith, even if they don't think of it as such. By allowing supernatural creatures to be functions of mutation rather than a curse or divine sanction, one can have a wider spectrum of characters.
Chateau Lloyd 
Leave a comment