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In the first place, it simply humanizes them too much. I'm firmly of the opinion that anyone coming back from the grave should be marked as uncanny and horribly Other:
When I was young, Ambrose Bierce's story "Chickamauga" seared into my mind the eerie scene of a deaf child's encounter with many soldiers after a battle--maimed, bleeding, clearly in great agony. The most memorable detail for me was that their faces were so pale, the boy first thought they were clowns. Their weird movements, caused by pain, injury, and weariness, struck him as funny at first. . . .
Ever since, there's a certain quality of suffering, of having suffered, of having gone through something horrible, of being reduced or having been reduced to one of these haunting, pale-faced figures, that holds a tremendous morbid fascination for me when I encounter it in horror.
I've mentioned before that the visceral punch of "Chickamauga" has influenced my conception of vampires; their paleness and everything else about them that indicates their unliving state should be a reminder that they've died and blasphemously risen from the grave, and that these have been horrible, eternally traumatizing experiences for them. A vampire, to my mind, should essentially be like one of those Chickamauga soldiers who stands back up and goes on functioning, but who remains a pale, twisted wreck of a man despite all the occult power, strength, and invulnerability conferred by his unholy resurrection. No vampire should ever quite shake off the "victim experience" of having died.
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