Timor mortis. It’s the fear of being dead, of death itself, and by extension, what was currently the cause of lots of it. I’m thinking cholera, plague, all the rest, sometimes so virulent that “a victim could have breakfast with their family and supper with their ancestors.”
Consider the pallid complexion, sunken eyes, more prominent teeth (this last a result of slackened facial muscles which let the mouth hang open - remember the bandage Marley wears in “A Christmas Carol”? It’s there to hold his mouth shut until rigor sets in.) This muscle slackness also caused elongated faces.
All these feature on more-or-less-fresh corpses, and making new deliveries to a mass grave like a plague pit would give plenty of exposure to the sight of considerably-less-fresh ones. Accidental or deliberate, those grey streaks on the original post make-up is very reminiscent of post-mortem marbling as decomposition becomes visible through the skin.
“Sharp” teeth rather than the more accurate “apparently-protruding” teeth is an imaginative embellishment (h. sapiens is an imaginative species, especially when it comes to scaring ourselves witless).
IMO the “dark” sunken eyes - pupil and iris all black, often as the first stage of transformation or a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t suggestion of otherness - is a modern twist. Bryan Froud’s illustrations in “Faeries” (1978) are the first example of this creepy all-black eye that I can think of, but it’s been popularised by any number of movies and TV shows
Earlier spooky eyes tended to have animal descriptions, usually cat, wolf or just ‘predatory beast", though in one memorable instance (“Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood”, an 1845 penny-dreadful serial that beat “Dracula” to print by a full 50 years) the vampire’s eyes are “like polished tin…”
The author (James Malcolm Rymer or Thomas Preskett Prest, nobody’s quite sure) was just writing a scary image, but the modern impression is of supernatural mirror shades, worn for the same reason as any Scary Shiny Glasses: so you can’t see in. Wherever “in” might be. The rest of the description is as expected: pale face, projecting teeth, gaunt hands with long nails…
In other words, a corpse.
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