Fiat Lux

First, imagine if you will that there's this woman who has always admired vampires and sought to meet them. She receives a message from someone on a social networking site who claims to be a vampire enthusiast. She meets this person in a cemetery where both agreed to meet. There is a vile smell which exudes from him and he drops his hat and takes off his cloak. Instead of Edward or Lestat, you get a horror which is an animated corpse where the flesh has holes in the cheek with maggots and black blood oozing from it and dripping off the fangs. The hair is made of maggots and the eye sockets are empty blackness. The creature extends a hand that is skeletal, then it says "Food for the stomach and the stomach for food" and then the woman finds herself compelled to come to the vampire which feasts off of her and leaves her an empty dead shell, as if even one vampire existed we'd all be vampires by now.

Then the walking corpse flies up into the air and proceeds to its next victim.

That's a vampire. Not Edward, not Lestat, and for God's sakes definitely not Alucard.

Next installment is werewolves. ^.^
 

In my stories, which again are all in a single multiverse, the phenomenon of the werecreature comes from Palaeolithic Shamans who delved into forbidden arts. They became the great predators of their areas, and due to the constant cellular regeneration of shifting (biology may not work  this way, but this is magic, so A Wizard Did It, literally) they are immortal. This also means that shifter Cave Bears and Marsupial Lions endure into the present day, though later generations take increasingly smaller forms as the large predators die off. Where vampire glamours hit the Uncanny Valley, appearing like Mr. Hyde to give off deformity without its actual appearance, shifters are ordinary people, albeit the oldest ones, from the age prior to the evolution of white skin do stand out, but manage to come out of hiding especially post-colonialism.

And their forms enable them to hide in two ways, first the modern ones take advantage of the inability to tell what is and isn't right for an animal on the part of modernity, while the older ones use cryptozoology to their benefit, becoming the cryptids of land and sea. The vampire as a monstrous horror exudes its evil, where the evil of the werebeasts lets them fit in with man and beast alike and prey on them both alike. And even worse, some shifters are Neanderthals, the first species to have religion, and over the passage of tens of thousands of years have become extremely brutal engines of death, in transformed and untransformed forms.

So to get the snippet of this, imagine a sociopathic serial killer in the making who's begun to torture animals near the home of a shifter who happens to be a Smilodon-shifter (remember these shifters date back into Palaeolithic times). The shifter becomes disgusted and waits until the young man has attacked his house at night with a rock. After he attempts to get into the house, he is greeted by eyes which in the light are a pale green, and a deep-sounding gurgle as the house is lived in by a Smilodon. Attempting to run, he is pounced on and dragged into the basement by the smilodon, there to be feasted on to its content. And for years the young man's parents seek to find him, only after the shifter moves a collection of gnawed-on human bones are found in his basement by the next couple which moved in, but Mr. Theodore Watkins has long-since left and is nowhere to be found, yet there are reports of a long-dead animal inexplicably present again in the next state....

But what the Hell.

The next time I hear some idiot talking about capital punishment but favoring some sissy method like lethal injection or the electric chair, I'm going to be thinking that real men crucify the nasty criminals and impale the nastiest ones. Until we resurrect these two hoary old classical methods of capital punishment, even our manliest manly idiots will fail to be truly manly.

Meanwhile we decadent fops of civilized societies will enjoy the chance to live in a society that isn't rife with scum and that doesn't enjoy the kind of savage amusements places like Ye Olde Rome and Merry Olde England did.

La dee da....