It seems pretty clear that one reason vampires are so popular in our culture is that they represent a fantasy that you can be young and beautiful and live forever.
It’s interesting how this acts as a sort of counter-weight to religion. Many organized religions tell us that yes, you need to grow old and die, but it’s ok, because afterward, you are going to move on to a better life in a realm beyond.
Religions also put a lot of effort into helping bind families together, through shared rituals, traditions and beliefs. This promotes another kind of immortality: I might die, but I will pass on a piece of my identity to my children, which they will pass on in turn to theirs.
But the vampire fantasy goes for the whole enchilada: I will literally be here forever, and I’m going to look great and have a fabulous time.
Of course there is a down side, and you can see this down side as a tension between the lure of the vampire and the dictates of prevailing religion. For one thing, they are, in a way, dead. They are also evil, selfish, and an abomination before God (as Catholic priests in vampire movies so often put it). And they don’t tan well.
It’s interesting to me that there are far fewer examples in popular culture of the immortal who is not dead.
So we have examples, but they are few and far between, and the gender balance is atrocious. There’s Gregory Widen’s Connor MacLead, Robert Heinlein’s Lazarus Long, Jerome Bixby’s John Oldman, a handful of characters by Roger Zelazny, and not all that much more.
Well, not that much when compared with vampires. Our culture is lousy with vampires.
Why is this so? I suspect one reason might be that the living immortal does not provide a compelling counterpoint to prevailing religion, no built in pretext for a battle between good and evil. There is no cost exacted for cheating death, and no ticket to eternal damnation included in the price tag of immortality.
And the non-vampire immortals can still frolic at the beach like kids. Of course, there is still some dramatic tension possible in, e.g., having to watch everyone you love age and die. But I guess that pales (so to speak) next to eternal damnation.
I think the balance of vampires being nearly always male (even though, weirdly, Vampire victims are nearly always female and yet, even though they’re supposed to become vampires, we never hear about them after the bite. I digress.) has to do with something about virginity, too. Don’t vampires get extra happy about virgin blood? I think vampires are some sort of symbol of sin, sex, the usual things that religions warn against — and mostly if you go that way, it’s written into the vampire stories, you can’t go back.
All of this points to vampire lore as being religious propaganda.
The only other immortal who isn’t dead is the Zombie, who might as well be.