More 300 than Twilight, an effects-heavy revision of vampire lore, triggered by a medieval lord's unholy defence strategy.
The causes, they say, have more to do with superstitions in a land known on maps as Demon's Valley, a veritable cradle of vampire lore.
The series also gets a lot of mileage out of playing with vampire lore itself.
Pumping up the pangs of puberty with vampire lore and family trauma, the director, Mary Harron (adapting Rachel Klein's 2002 novel), produces a Gothic stew of satisfying kinkiness if unsatisfying resolution.
In resurrecting Jason from the dead, McLoughlin also gave him the weakness of being rendered helpless if trapped beneath the waters of Crystal Lake; inspired by vampire lore, McLoughlin decided that Jason had in fact drowned as a child, and that returning him to his original resting place would immobilize him.
Westerners, obsessed with vampire lore, may conjure up images of smirking, evil-eyed Bela Lugosi from the 1931 film version of "Dracula," or the campy depiction of blood lust released two years ago by Francis Ford Coppola.
His favourite among his own movies was Martin (1978), a strangely tender horror film which thrived on an intriguing central ambiguity: despite plentiful references to vampire lore, the lonely title character appears to be a serial killer with delusions of vampirism.
"Periods of war, economic downturns and cultural turmoil all give rise to the production of vampire and fantasy fiction," said Thomas Garza, chair of the department of Slavic and Eurasian studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and a specialist in vampire lore.
"And in vampire lore, a good way to protect your house is to sprinkle grains of rice around it, because vampires love to count, so they wouldn't be able to come in until they'd counted them".
And by not being bound to the many rules dictated by vampire lore, the mermaid genre is much more flexible.
ART-HOUSE film-makers have never paid much attention to zombies, but they can't seem to resist giving us their spin on vampire lore.
