I tend to agree. As much as I liked the movie I'm not particularly fond of the romantic type of vampire as depicted in "Interview With a Vampire." The movie had examples of both types you're referring to.

Other than that I generally dislike the whole "stake them and they explode unless it's inconvenient for the plot" like in the Buffy TV show, and the Blade movies. It's too clean and really doesn't make much sense. I liked the Vampires in "John Carpenter's Vampires" (not a great movie, but fun) it took a while for them to die. They had to be staked and then dragged into the sunlight before they would be incinerated.

That brings me to another theme I'm not fond of: Sunlight killing Vampires. It makes no sense (yes, yes, I know, suspension of disbelief blah blah blah). I much prefered how the whole day and night issue worked in Stoker's novel (and in the Coppola version of the movie I think) Dracula didn't die in the sunlight, but he was weaker during the day, able to change at dawn, noon, or dusk, stronger at night and strongest at midnight. Yeah it also doesn't make tons of sense, but it's a little more reasonable than exploding into flames when trying to get a tan.

"My Best Friend is a Vampire" is great.

OK, and I might be in the minority here, but I usually hate when a vampire's bit will instantly transform a person into a super-sexy suave bloodsucker. I know there's a school of thought that a vampire needs to seduce it's prey, but it seems like it's just lazy writing most of the time in thathe writer can't make the vampire interesting enough on his/her own.

I also hate in films when the effects of a bite are inconsistent, such as when in the same film some people are killed and others are turned into vampires but there's no rhyme or reason to it (would a vampire REALLY want to turn a bunch of other people into vampires and not only create competition but lessen the blood supply?). Or when some people are turned into snarling mindless bloodsuckers and others are the above-mentioned seducers.

-Frank

One of the things I hate most about the vampire genre is that those who write it seldom do any research beyond seeing a few vampire horror movies or maybe reading a few fictional works. Perhaps I'm just a purist, but there is a wealth of folklore which has been completely excluded from vampire fiction. That's not to say that some of the fiction isn't good, but I'd like to see more historical/folkloric research put into vampire stories.

For instance... very few vampires in folklore have an "allergy" to the sun. And the not crossing running water phobia applies entirely to Chinese vampires. No other vampire species has that problem... though werewolves do.

In the movies and some books, the vampire doesn't have a reflection. Why? They rarely say.
...It's because the vampire is said not to have a soul, and one's reflection in any surface is the image of the soul, not the person's physical body. Incidently, this is why vampires in folklore often don't have shadows, but conversely those that do have shadows can use them to afflict anyone the shadow falls upon.

There's just so much that they don't use in the books. It's unreal. The vampires in fiction just aren't "real" vampires.