Underworld and thoughts about disease

We watched the vampire/werewolf flick Underworld yesterday. I have to say I quite enjoyed it - looking extremely cool, decent action scenes and decent enough plot. I liked the Romeo and Juliet take of it too, but then again I am a romantic fool with a weak spot for vampires...

But the film got me thinking of modern takes on old stories about vampires, werewolves and zombies - these used to be supernatural, usually Christian stories. Most of the modern versions explain it trough science - typically with some kind of virus: Blade, Underworld, Resident Evil, 28 Days Later... I'm sure there are others.

In the start of Underworld when Selene's partner is killed with some mysterious bullets we immediately thought that it must have been some kind of holy water weapon. However, the religion is typically left out of the modern versions - holy water is not mentioned (at any point), and the cause turns out to be ultraviolet light (sunlight).

What do these things tell about the modern society then? Priests are certainly not the heroes anymore, and devil or the supernatural is not the adversary. Instead, science is the enemy and problems are solved with weapons. So have the modern guns and their easy availability changed the mental landscape so much that monsters are not scary anymore - after all, you can always get big enough gun and shoot it down - that enemy needs to be something that you don't see by the naked eye and can be anywhere. Or is there some inherent fear of something new that makes people afraid of progress and therefore science that makes disease so scary? Or has disease itself become the last threat - soldiers used to be able to defend us, but biological warfare makes them useless.

These are really half-baked thoughts at this stage, but I find the idea very interesting.