It just isn’t a proper spooky season without vampires lurking about. Witches, zombies, werewolves; they’re all crucial for haunted October happenings but the vibe is nothing without the true kings and queens of the night. Whether they take the form of elegant, immortal terror or brutal blood-sucking horror, vampires are the perfect nocturnal nasty mascot for all spine-chilling celebrations.
Beginning as lore, and then brought into the popular culture through books and movies, vampires are now part of the societal fabric. They’ve been presented in different ways, from ferocious and feral to regal and restrained, but several core elements usually stay the same. They are the undead. They shun the sunlight and sleep during the day. They can be felled by stabs to the heart. And they can create other vampires. Past that, most vampiric traits are up for interpretation, and the imagination.
There is one more Nosfera-tic non-negotiable however and that’s… blood. Vampires not only need it, they crave it. They can smell it. It’s all that can satiate their incredible hunger. And yes, while some vampires can eat human food, it’s merely for show. Blood is their only source of sustenance. Let’s take a look at some very famous vampires and how they go about collecting crimson. Drac’s gotta eat!
You Can Count on Him
Irish author Bram Stoker changed the vampiric game with his 1897 horror novel, Dracula, in which he combined the European monster myth of undead, stalking vampires with historic Transylvanian ruler Vlad Dracula, creating the most enduring horror icon of all time.
Dracula has found his way into movies and TV shows more than any other mythic monster, starting with seminal 1922 silent “bootleg” Dracula film Nosferatu, which featured a more grotesque take on the Count Dracula character. A gaunt troll-looking man called Count Orlok who, despite his ghoulish appearance, could still mesmerize people into becoming his meals. Because with Dracula, it was all about the seduction before the feeding.
Dracula was a sly, reclusive monster, capable of getting into his victims’ minds in order to feed off their blood. Sometimes he’d make them his devoted servants who he could rely on for a drink while others just became the meal itself. Bela Lugosi would become the most impactful Dracula of all time, less than a decade later, in the 1931 Universal Pictures movie. As Count Dracula, Lugosi chewed up both scenery, and his unsuspecting prey, like a champion and his “I never drink…wine” line is a classic winking moment in cinema.
The Count feeds off the blood of his victims, which would become standard for all vampire lore that followed. He also had the ability to create other vampires, as noted by the three “brides” he kept in his lair. These touchstones would remain for future adaptations of Dracula, the most famous of which include 1958’s Horror of Dracula (starring Christopher Lee) and the Francis Ford Coppola directed Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1992 (starring Gary Oldman).
With Dracula’s lust for blood also came the idea that without it, he would wither and become frail. Vampiric power and potency would become directly tied to the blood they consume so that they could recover from injury and actively become stronger with the ingestion of blood.
Totally ‘80s Vamps
Moving away from more traditional Dracula-esque interpretations of vampires, the 1980s sought to modernize the monster, making them “more of the era,” and, in turn, a little more trendy and rockin’. 1985’s Fright Night portrayed the “vampire next door,” giving us a new type of bloodsucker: one who just seems like a normal suburban dude living among us. In this case, the vampire still utilized Vlad Drac methods of seduction and murder, to get the blood he needed, but he was in a Craftsman not a castle.
Vampires secretly among us would become a film trend as the protagonists in these movies have grown up with vampire lore. It would be something they believe in while everyone else thinks they’re crazy. And the vampires’ body count would get chalked up to rampant crime or the serial killer frenzy of the time period.
1987’s The Lost Boys continued this, but now with younger “rock n’ roll” vampires in a coastal California town. Kiefer Sutherland’s David led a leather jacket-clad crew of punks, all bloodsuckers, who were easily written off as mere delinquents, with no one suspecting they were creatures of the night. They also ate regular food, Chinese cuisine being their favorite, in order to further fit into society.
David also had a different method for siring new vampires, hiding his blood inside wine (or just passing it off as wine) so that whoever drank it would become part of his undead posse. These were brand new takes on vampire powers but ones that still kept blood at the heart of it all. That same year, Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark would give us a modern, gruesome neo-Western version of vampires as Lance Henriksen led a diabolical squad of drifters who roamed the Dust Bowl in search of victims in remote locations.
Vampires on TV
Movies haven’t been the only home for vampires, as these preening predators have also been a huge part of television, even now with a new Interview with a Vampire series debuting on AMC. But the most culturally impactful shows in the last few decades have been Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood, and The Vampire Diaries; all shows containing modern twists on old formulas, though True Blood would be filled with premium cable sex and gore.
Buffy, as the name suggests, would focus on the actual vampire hunter, taking the trope of the teenage girl usually killed off in horror movies and giving her exceptional powers and the ability to track and kill the monsters who would do her harm. The vampires on Buffy acted, for the most part, in accordance with vampire feeding rules, going after the life blood of innocent victims, though in one alternate reality episode, the Master (played by Marc Metcalf) had streamlined and automated the process in a rather horrifying way – by just loading humans into a blood-draining apparatus.
True Blood was a storm of carnage most of the time, with vampires more directly associating with fornication – which itself is an idea that traces back to Dracula as the urges that drive vampires to desire blood, and their victims to succumb to the draining, are practically one in the same with sexual wants and needs. True Blood vampires though, unlike Lost Boys’ villains, can’t consume any human food or drink at all. It makes them wretch. So beyond needing it to survive, it’s only blood they can consume. This is the same situation for the vampires in the comedy series What We Do in the Shadows, who simply can’t keep any human food down at all, as their systems reject it.
The CW’s The Vampire Diaries not only lasted eight seasons but it spawned two spinoffs that both had healthy runs in their own right. In fact, it’s quite possible that, sheer volume-wise, The Vampire Diaries-verse contains within it more vampire content than any other vampire story in live-action… ever. Like True Blood and the Twilight films, The Vampire Diaries is based on a series of books though it contains, of these three, the most traditional Bram Stoker-y version of the vampire, even as the main story takes place in modern times.
Amongst The Vampire Diaries’ many twists and turns and ever-changing allegiances and romances, blood is what these vampires need to survive, though the kinder among them may turn to blood stored at a local hospital in order to not hurt the living (…though one could argue they’re still hurting the people who could have used that blood, but hey, being a vampire is complicated!).
Ancient Meets Modern
Moving back to films, in 1996’s Quentin Tarantino-penned/Robert Rodriguez-directed From Dusk Till Dawn, an old sect of hideous vampires, still residing in their ancient Aztec temple, found that it was best to lay a trap for people in order to get their blood. So what did they do? They built up a remote roadside saloon/dance club to attract those traveling through Mexico. Once inside, and off the beaten path, guests would drink and dine and watch seductive acts…right before they’d get trapped and massacred by the vampire employees.
Vampires’ primary sustenance never seem to change, but their methods of eating do. These demons sometimes have to get a bit creative when it comes to tracking down their next bloodbath. Solo vamps can stalk at night and take their time. In the case of From Dusk Till Dawn, there was an entire thriving hive to feed so they couldn’t all just go out and roam in the dark. Some of the vampires may have even been too old to properly hunt. So it was easier to bring the food to them, with shiny lights and the promise of an all-night rager.
Hitting theaters a couple of years after From Dusk Till Dawn, the Marvel Comics-based Blade (and its sequels) center on Wesley Snipes as the title character, a half-vampire – AKA “daywalker,” as the sunlight does not affect him – who has become a vampire hunter. Blade stops himself from consuming human blood by instead being injected with a lab-concocted serum, which is used to suppress the innate thirst for blood he feels.
Twilight’s Alternate Diet
With the phenomenon of the Twilight books and movies came a larger focus on a group of vampires who have resisted feeding on human blood. Being able to survive off the blood of animals was a common idea in vampire pop culture, with the rule being that it would get the job done, but that the blood wasn’t as good and it was only to be done if there were no humans around to maul.
With Twilight, some vampires purposefully chose to only drain animals and not humans. Jokingly, in the Twilight-verse, they’re referred to as “vegetarians.”
In Twilight, the vampires who feed on human blood have deep red eyes while those who drink animal blood have gold eyes. These vamps are able to eat regular human food, to maintain the illusion of being human when out and about, but later on their body will reject it. So it’s a little of Column A, a little of Column B. And yes, animal blood does contain less “nutrients” and power for vampires, so that part remains intact. The true craving will always be for human blood as Robert Pattinson’s Edward Cullen discovers when he meets Kristen Stewart’s Bella Swan, a human teenager, and finds out his supernatural attraction to her also includes a desire to taste her blood.
Twilight shirked many of the agreed-upon rules for vampires, most notably the creatures’ aversion to sunlight, but bloodlust still remained a paramount fixture. You can meddle with Dracula details but the blood always remains.
