Talkative vampires

Just some loose thoughts prompted by an article in Slate about how vampire movies always try to reinvent the myth. While the 'our monster are different' trope is far from unusual in the horror/fantasy genre, in vampire fiction it tends to involve a vampire who tells us all about it. Compare this to, say, zombies. There are also many kinds of zombies, but the protagonists find out about their characteristics the hard way. To my knowledge, you don't have an articulate zombie spelling out zombie lore. Vampires, on the contrary, are the most talkative of monsters (I'm looking at you, Anne Rice)

Which led me to consider another favourite of vampire fiction: that you somehow have to learn to be a proper vampire. There are all sorts of rules and traditions you have to master, preferably under the guidance of a mentor. Again, compare to zombies: you get infected, you die and you start chomping people. Much simpler.

Well, of course...Zombies aren't exactly in their right mind. If they had the intellectual capacy of a vampire, werewolf or even Frankenstein's monster they wouldn't be aimlessly wandering around while being shot and killed by the living.

Even books with werewolves have the human versions do quite a bit of talking (until they make that change...unless of course they're the type that have no idea what happened when they were in wolf form.)

I may be talkative as well if I'd lived that long and gained the wisdom that vampires have.

You shouldn't underestimate Frankenstein's monster, at least not in the original version. It/he is surprisingly well read and goes in for long philosophical discourse.

But am I right in thinking that Anne Rice set the tone for vampires doing their own explaining, instead of having the exposition being done by an expert/vampire hunter character?

Well, Buffy the Vampire Slayer has Mr. Giles the Librarian "Watcher" Dude as its exposition fairy, but that's really the only exception I can think of.

It probably is Anne Rice's fault, a lot of things are. :P