NEWS: Warped Werewolves, Venal Vampires, And The Top 5 Myth Bastardizations

Yep, but even more than that: the article was poorly researched, poorly written, and poorly edited.

I know I'm being hard on the OP in that evaluation, but that's the score.

The American Heart Association begs to differ Waiting for plaque to build up and cause a heart attack is not as effective as the quick kill.

Your preaching to the choir everywhere I look in ant modern fantasy story they portray all the mythological creatures incorectly

Who ever wrote this needs to be punched in the head..

I concur.

Hey Romero pretty much wrote the book on modern zombies and his zombies are getting smarter with every movie. It's actually part of his mythos.

Popular myth tends to be cultural, which is something the OP needs to have addressed. There are many legends about the creatures written about in this article. If memory serves (that means I haven't looked it up) wasn't Stoker's Dracula a daywalker, albeit one whose powers were severely diminished in the sunlight?

Legends have Chinese vampires hopping like kangaroos! Good job Mrs Twilight didn't pick up on that for her smoulderingly good looking sparklepires.

The Voodoo/Hodun references regards Zombies from Haiti are true enough, the movie Serpant and the Rainbow was a very good rendition of that, and witchcraft in genereal.

I could ramble on...

edit: THe OP also reglected to mention the other Teen dream... The Vampire Diaries. Happily, unlike Twilight it seems, this book/TV series actually has characters that are evil. Plus it has the obligatory werewolves, witches, and now Dopplegangers. I like the show, I admit. Then again I loved Buffy the Vamp slayer too so my opnion cannot count for much

Many of the vampirelike creatures of folklore are not damaged by sunlight they just do not come out in the day because night is scary, or they are something else during the day, and remember Stoker's Dracula which is the archetype everyone thinks they are talking about when they discuss vampires was not harmed by daylight. Vampires and daylight is a movie convention that came later and weakened the monster. Because "night time is scary"

Also, remember that the majority of things that we think of as zombies would have been "vampires" in the original folk lore. Zombies are souless bodies controlled by a voodoo priest, not mindless shambling undead that are contagious.

Oh, and Romero never, never, never referred to them as zombies. He called them flesheaters. The title of the script was originally "Night of the Flesheaters" and he has always wondered why people started calling them zombies when zombies were a part of Caribbean voodoo belief systems and not plagues of the walking dead.

Whoever wrote the original article seems not to be familiar with the original folklore, just what he or she watched in film as a child and is now irritated that authors and filmakers are changing the rules he or she is familiar with.

Ok, so far, this is all hollywood revisionism. meh. I don't mean to sound so cynical, but, what do you expect?

Literary canon is one thing. Movie canon is another. I can accept non-traditional archetypes if the author has done a good job of providing a well thought out foundation. Otherwise, if an author is making it up as they go along, then never mind. With Hollywood, it's kind of expected these days for movies to bend the rules/walk over the grave of literary canon for sensational attention. When you run across a director or screenwriter who takes an original literary concept and adapts it with a thorough understanding of the mythos or created canon, then you have something I'll watch.

Roethke is right about monsters/myth critical analysis. There are so many movies and some books that are lacking because historical, cultural and societal context is missing from the foundation. Sometimes, that little bit of research can make what was a mediocre story into something worth reading or watching.