By contrast, the existence of western vampires was the results that human beings were cursed. It was a punishment to turn into vampires according to the records in the Bible. Vampires were punished so that only by sucking human blood could they survive under the darkness forever.
There are incomputable differences between cultures but the reasons for the differences are countable. As following, three aspects are listed.
2.1.1 Different Social and Economic Formations
From the view of the historical materialism, the emergence of any social consciousness phenomenon is all rooted in the social and economic formations from which can find out foundations, so is the ghost culture (Jin, 1995).

In the original meaning, eastern ghost culture took shape with the generation of human beings. When primitives still lived in a way as animals did, they couldn’t depart themselves from surroundings in their own ideology, thus the images as ghosts or goblins wouldn’t come into their mind. Only when human beings began to fight against nature for the sake of their survival, separated themselves from surroundings, had their own ideology and made a clear sense of natural phenomena could they find out the relation among natural phenomena. In the process of such searching, some natural phenomena brought unexpected pleasure to them; however, some brought disasters, even death. With the lapse of time, two different understandings have been formed towards natural phenomena. One is the ability to take control of the nature, such as frictional ignitions, fire for burning or warmth (Jin, 1995). Another is the wrong or illusive concept on intangible natural power, such as ghosts or evils (Jin, 1995). Primitives took the natural phenomena or creatures which would be beneficial to human beings as kind ghosts. This has reflected the insecurity of material life at that time, contrarily, being prejudicious as evils has reflected lower productivity in the society and people’s fearful emotions in front of the natural phenomena.

The eastern ghost culture starting to come into being is not only for the reason as social and economic formations mentioned above, but also other roots of epistemology (Jin, 1995). Long time ago, people had no cognition about their own body structures and were doubtful about dream making so that led directly to the emergence of ghost concepts. For example, people would make dreams doing all sorts of things with dead people or others, however, when they woke up, they realized that was only a dream which pushed primitives to believe that the soul was an entity separated from the body and also had the conclusion of immortal soul. What’s more, they also believed that human soul separated from human body was more capable than that attached to human body. In a word, primitives couldn’t tell the feelings they were awake from the illusion they were in the dreams so that they distinguished human soul from human body and considered the soul was a separated entity. Therefore, ghost concepts came into being and then ghost culture started up.

Compared with eastern ghost culture, western culture widely holds that human soul is an exact reproduction of human body in every feature. The most impressive ghost images must be the vampires in the western.

Vampire culture began as ghost legends in the middle century of Europe. The origin of vampire legends started with human’s admiration and fear towards blood. On the one hand, blood is the symbol of human soul and life; on the other hand, blood is considered as the sign of misfortune and disasters. Especially with the fact that in the 13th and 14th century, Black Death prevailed in the Europe and numbers of clergy suffered the same affair which led to unexpected fear towards people. “It follows that the prevalence of vampire legend is due to the plague and some illness in history.”(Yuan, 2006:22) Some populace lacking in medical knowledge thought that was all done by Death, so the image of bloodthirsty vampires began to sink deep into the hearts of people. 从《画皮》及《暮色》比较分析中西人鬼文化(3):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_5430.html