The vampire is an aristocratic undead that sustains a deathless body by drinking the blood of the living, rooted in Eastern European folklore and hardened through nineteenth-century Gothic fiction. Its list of weaknesses — sunlight, the stake, garlic, running water, the inability to enter uninvited — is richer than any other monster’s, making it an enemy whose undoing is itself a pleasure to work out.
In refusing death and prolonging its own existence by draining another’s life, it touches our world’s motif of debt — the cost shifted onto someone else.