Alas Poor Bloodsucker

The vampirism-as-minority trope sees a lot of use, a particularly egregious example of what those keeners over at TVTropes like to call "Fantastic racism". The problem with treating the vampire as a minority, of course, is that they pose a legitimate threat to the society in which they exist, unlike actual persecuted minorities. I reject the notion that a story can be told on the basis that it's from the point of view of the bigots and yet disproves their bigotry by embracing the very logic of said bigotry. If homosexuals actually did prolong their lives by hunting down our citizens and draining their very life force, we would be completely justified in hating them and denying them rights. Johnny Nexus pretty much nailed it in this old article (caution: copious filth surrounding salient point) in which he talks about the difference between race and species. Hating blacks because you believe they're violent and unreliable is absurd; Hating orcs because they're genetically proven to be violent and unreliable, not so much. And vampires are all the moreso: Not merely another species (which would be enough of a wrench away from our normal understanding of thought) but another order of existence entirely, something which in our understanding of the world simply should not exist. An undead creature isn't even in our taxonomic classifications - A frigging archaea is closer to us than a vampire. This, to my mind, fundamentally undermines the relatability of the bloodsucker and its role as a stand-in for the persecuted minority.

It's easy to argue that this is setting the standard too high, that having elves or vampires behave more or less like humans in costumes is the inevitable result of the limits of our cognition. They all act more or less like us because, outside of perhaps a few sci-fi authors with more degrees than devoted fans, nobody has any idea of how not to act like a human. Vampires in particular may no longer be human, but they're trying to act human, trying to regain their lost humanity. This is actually a key element of vampire horror (and zombie horror, and indeed the horror of any of the monsters that lead the hapless victim's friends shouting "That's not Rodney any more!") but the crux is the irreversibility of the condition. The vampire may look like us, appeal to us, but it is not and can never be us. As far as ways to depict another human group (or indeed, even one's own) go, that's pretty fucked up.