no, your memory serves you well. Wells was extrapolating to the Far Future, where the Idle Rich had evolved into the simple, beautiful, brainlesws Eloi, who were fed and takren care of by the subterranean-dwelling, working, service-providing Morlocks. In the film, your sympathy was with the cute, hippie-like * Eloi, and that’s the way the movie played them.
But Wells was clearly suggesting that this was the future of the Upper Class and the Working Class, where the joy-deprived, slogging workers finally did get to do what many have urged and Eat the Rich, who clearly serve no other conceivable useful function. They don’t even perpetuate culture. Wells, I think, meant for us to have sympathy with those downtrodden Morlocks, but most people don’t appreciate the full logic of the situation, and simply see the Morlocks as monsters. You can certainly make the case that they aren’t. Those freeloading Eloi are. So in that interpretation, I disagree that the Morlocks are ghouls.
I’ve argued that the Teletubbies make a lot more sense if you view them as Elsoi. They’re simple, pretty, and brainless. they don’t perpetuate culture, and are cared for by things underground, which also delivers their food. Tinky Winky is made more palatable by considering that he is – well – palatable.
*The 1960s paperback edition I had from Bantam Pathfinder Editions had a cover that caled the Eloi the “original flower children”, which gives a misleading idea of them ad the story. Unless you’re of a particular social and political bent.
That is, the previous conception of Zombie is now called Robot, the previous conception of Vampire is now called Zombie, and something entirely new to folklore (as far as I can tell) is called Vampire.
Zombies were humans turned into mindless slaves by a combination of drugs and magic. Feeding them salt, a traditional purifier, would awaken them to their horrible state, and they would either start digging their own graves or kill their masters. The master-killing part is the standard Robot Rampage, right down to the fact ‘robot’ comes from the Czech word for ‘worker’.
Vampires, as has been said above, were corpses that got up, moved around on their own, and ate people at night before returning to their coffins before dawn. Not quite the same as modern Zombies, but definitely mindless animals closer to Romero Zombies than Count Dracula or even Count Orlok or Varney the Vampire.
Modern Vampires, even pre-Twilight, were ways for a repressed sexuality to come to the fore. Both Dracula and its lesbian predecessor Carmilla focused as closely as their authors dared on homosexual relationships. The forms these new monsters took are down to the particularly sexually repressed environments that their authors lived in, although sexualized monsters have existed, in the form of sirens and the like, back into the dim and misty past. Believe me, the fact a Twilight fanfic could be transformed so effortlessly into an S&M fantasy (Fifty Shades of Grey) is not surprising.
Possibly Thulsa Doom, from Robert E. Howard’s story “Delcardes’ Cat”? The prototype for the “lich” in Dungeons & Dragons. Did any of the D&D-inspired paperbacks ever deal with Acererak or Vecna?