One thing I’ve always loved about vampire stories is that there are no hard rules. Vampires can be whatever the author wants them to be as long as they’re internally consistent within the story. This makes them extremely versatile monsters that can be constantly re-invented and none of them are “wrong”.
For example, sometimes all it takes to turn into a vampire is to be bitten by one. And sometimes you have to drink the vampire’s blood to turn. Or, sometimes a vampire can just drain your energy without transferring any blood at all.
Of course, the rules can also get a bit ridiculous. Maybe the vampire is required to obsessively count grains of rice first. Or maybe they’re required to hop around with their arms out (the chinese Jiangshi). Maybe they can turn into a wolf, a bat, or… fog.
So what’s the most ridiculous rule or type of vampire you’ve come across?
(For the image on this post I wanted the most ridiculous picture of a Jiangshi I could find. I went with a shot from Robo Vampire which has a really fun RiffTrax. The only other Jiangshi I’m aware of is in the NES game Phantom Fighter… because I’ve never watched any of the Mr. Vampire movies)
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Vampires don’t necessarily live in castles. Count Dracula only did because he was a count.
Also, vampires can see themselves in most mirrors as long as no silver is used as the reflecting surface.
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Solvable if conversion success rate is tiny
Wait a minute, jou just made me think about something. Vampires cabt see themselves in mirrors, but what about make up? Do they just see floating foundation? Whats the average makeup routine for vampires?
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There is lots of story where vampires have mitigate or eliminate their affliction for day light, either with evolution, magic, science or something else. We may say they don’t have a reflection as a general rule but there are some tricks.
True, no matter how often they’re required to feed, you really can’t have vampires living for centuries eating that consistently. And with each new vampire also eating that often, you’re burning through humans exponentially.
Best exploration of that was the film Daybreakers, where the bulk of humanity had been converted and the remaining humans were a dwindling natural resource. Great flick!
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The whole “they need to be invited in before they can enter your home” always struck me as a weird one. What would happen if a vampire just ignored that and entered anyways? What if someone considered a forest their home? What if squatters moved in to the vampire’s home? Or some official declared it belonged to someone else? What if they are invited by someone who doesn’t live there?
In the Scandinavian vampire movie Let The Right One In, a vampire that enters uninvited starts leaking blood from every pore.
In the Artemis Fowl books magical beings like elves, fairies, dwarves and pixies lose their magic if they enter a home without invitation. And in one book it’s more or less said that a home is a building enclosed by walls and a roof.
In “being human” US there is a hilarous scene (intended as very brutal) in which a vampire lure a bunch of ennemi in a mortal house as neutral ground, all the exit are blocked and they are uninvited, burning them to death.
Use them for proof of home ownership for disputes.
if the squaters claim it’s their house, they can invite a vampire, if he comes in, it’s they’re house. the landlord can try to invite the vampire too, and if he can’t come in, the landlord loses their claim.
A lot of vampire behavior may have arisen from neurodivergent behavior as witnessed by ignorant peasants.
The one that never made sense to me was the whole “Unable to cross running water.”
So you could trap Dracula with a garden hose?
Also doesn’t several Dracula stories have him taking a boat? Hell, a lot of vampire stories in general involve taking a boat
Last Voyage of the Demeter, yeah…
Didn’t he bring boxes of dirt from his home to work around the water limitation?
Exactly.
The plot of that is taken directly from Stoker’s Dracula.
Yup, and used in Nosferatu too!
Oh that’s a good one! How fast does the water need to move to be considered “running”? How wide does it need to be for it to be considered “crossing”? This is like the Gremlins thing about not feeding “after midnight”.
The answer is probably “whatever running water I am trying to scare my children from crossing, that’s the level of water needed to keep the vampires on the other side.”
So you could trap children with a garden hose?
i believed is blessed water, by a priest so the river is sanctified and will instantly purify a vampire, demon or undead. dracula seems to possess abilities far beyond any vampire, like flying casting powerful magic, turn to mist amongst other things. also purified salt works against them too.
That’s funny! Those were used as enemies in Super Mario Land. I never knew what they were based on. They have little hats and hop at you. They also come back to life after being stomped on. It all makes sense now!
Wow, that is impressive! I can’t believe you actually remembered a random enemy from Super Mario Land! I watched that video clip and you’re totally right, those have to be Jiangshi. Crazy!
Oh, I played that game for hundreds of hours as a kid, and I still do a playthrough every couple of years.
I mean, if we’re going to avoid the sparkling fucking vampires, then it’s gotta be mirrors. Makes no sense within the mythologies surrounding vampires imo.
Running water is about the purifying nature of it supposedly, as other “evil” entities are also unable to.
Wooden stakes being needed to pin them down or be a death blow, there’s links between wood and life that make sense within that framework. It wasn’t originally just any wood, it was (iirc) dogwood and ironwood. Something like that.
Garlic, also a purifier.
You gotta realize, most of the early written vampire stories did come from existing legends, and those legends did usually have an internal consistency to some degree or another. But not mirrors. Stoker pulled that out of his ass due to not understanding his sources, so it doesn’t really match with much.
The idea is that vampires lack souls, and thus fear mirrors, depending on what set of myths you’re working in. But there’s also supposedly a tie back to real people with rabies being easily startled, with mirrors apparently being something that would do so even easier, but I’m not sure it holds up to scrutiny since the tie to rabies is weak as fuck to begin with, and there’s no record of that being a specific thing. It seems more like a hypothesis being projected rather than something with provenance.
But we got being invisible in mirrors.
Now, some people have decided that the mirror thing is because of the silver in mirrors, and add silver being potent against vampires in some cases, but neither is based in any of the known vampire mythology as it existed pre-stoker. And there’s arguments there that kinda make sense if you buy into some of the supposed mystical and magical properties of silver. It’s tie to the moon in some beliefs would maybe give it sovereignty over most creatures of the night, and is supposedly why it’s werewolf killing.
I can’t even remember exactly when silver started being common against vampires in books. I know that the Blade trilogy made it seep into pop culture, but it did exist before that.
Most of the stuff around the older books does make a kind of sense, but not that one
Mirrors used to and sometimes still are made with silver nitrite, silver is a purifying metal
Cool rather than ridiculous. Trinity blood (anime). Basically, it introduces a new type of creature that feeds on a vampires’ blood (and doesn’t hurt humans), a vampire level 2 of sorts. Light novel and manga (which I haven’t read) go into further details, and it involves alien bacteria and an apocalypse.
one of the wierd ones is the vampire feeds on said humans, but have to feed its blood to turn them. and in SPN they have a magical cure for vampirism, if the infected hasnt fed yet. castlevania also does it this way. Also in the same show, apparently you can absorb magic powers through biting the victims, in this a "god’s power spirit energy. also the wierd part of vampire evolution is in various genre, they can be made immune to sunlight, mostly through magical rituals or given magical power by a more powerful vampire. akasha giving sunlight immunity, or the short lived blade series on spike, or
the vampire feeds on said humans, but have to feed its blood to turn them
Unless I’m misunderstanding you, that’s not especially weird. In fact it’s very, very standard, and has been since Dracula did it that way in 1897.
Not ridiculous but unexpected is the story of the TV show “Caro Nostra”.
This story is about ogres, not vampires but at the same time it is definitly a vampire story. The vampire who want to be close to the human world, the girl that is somehow special, the forbiden love story that cause a broken balance in the equilibrum of the vampire world, the police looking at a weird murder spray that seems to go back to 50 years ago, the old acquintaince that actually grow old… This is definitly a vampire story.But at the same time, since it is not vampires, the mythology behind the monster feels totally new and that’s very catching.
Hehehe, “murder spray”.
I have no idea how this is wrong, sorry (T_T) How do you write this?
Murder spree. I like your version, though! 😄
Thanks!
Don’t forget crucefix ( silver or wood )bad for there healt or not. Sil
In buffy / vamp diaries they could not enter a home uninvitef. Other movies it is no problem.
Garlic is dangerous for them or not.
Sun is bad. Sun makes you sparkle / sun is just sun
Or in vamp d there was a herb that could weaken them. And make you abel to resist there hypno ( also not in every movie ) powers.
