literature

Vampires in Fact, Fiction and Folklore

Deviation Actions

Viergacht's avatar
By
Published:
14.9K Views

Literature Text

Author's note: this is based heavily on Dr. Anton Vail's books "In the Presence of Vampires", "The Vampire Fallacies" and "The Vail Guide to Vampires", as well as his popular lecture series "Vampires in Myth, Media and Mass Consciousness - Everything you didn't know that you didn't know about the undead". Some of the science has been updated since these were published, but this essay retains Vail's preferred term 'vampire' instead of the more modern 'vyr'.

Any schoolchild can recite our culture's basic tenets of vampirism - that the bloodsucking undead sleep in coffins by day because sunlight destroys them, how they can turn into bats and hypnotize their victims, that only garlic or a cross wards them off and that the only sure method of destruction is hammering a wooden stake through their cold, unbeating heart. The recent revolution in the scientific understanding of vampirism has not proven enough to erase these fallacies, though anyone who expects vampires not to reflect in mirrors or burst into flames at the touch of a stray sunbeam is in for a nasty shock.

Most modern misconceptions about vampires can be traced directly to a single book, Bram Stoker's Dracula. Countless adaptations have ossified into popular knowledge not only Stoker's selections from the vast amount of folklore available, but his outright inventions, with variations and elaborations of the same fundamental themes. Bela Lugosi's portrayal became the new archetypical creature of the night. Pale make-up, plastic fangs, a cape and a Hungarian accent are all that's required for a Halloween costume to be identifiably a vampire. More recently, romantic fiction with supernatural trimmings created the vision of vampires as misunderstood monsters, similar to humans in their basic drives and desires but 'better' - eternally young, gifted, and heartbreakingly gorgeous.

Not all vampire folklore made it into movies. For example, sprinkling small seeds or grains around the grave so the obsessive-compulsive vampire must stop and count them and thus be caught by the rising sun, or the method of killing a Philippines penggalan (which detaches its head to fly around at night) by dunking the headless body in a vat of vinegar. And of course novels and movies make up their own legends, such as killing the first vampire acting as a cure for all the people he's turned into bloodsuckers. In the past vampire attributes were conflated with the ravages of diseases like rabies, porphyria and leprosy, not to mention lycanthropy. Literary and cinematic embellishments and supernatural explanations of vampirism (demon possession and so on) muddied the waters even further. As a consequence, many false assumptions sprung up and have proved particularly difficult to eradicate from popular understanding.

The utterly prosaic truth is that vampires are a gestalt organism of human and Infernalis sanguisuga, a parasitic colony of life forms that takes over and alters its host. All of a vampire's peculiarities, powers and weakness can be explained rationally, with no supernaturalism required. In this, we will examine these stereotypes one by one and see how they match up against the reality of vampire biology.

The Vampiric Appetite

FICTION
Vampires suck out their victim's blood

FACT
Vampires do not actually suck out blood like a kid slurping the last bit of milkshake out through a straw. Or, as the elderly vampire explains in The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, "Dracula doesn't suck! Dracula scrapes and licks."

A moment's thought should make this obvious. The sort of conical fang fictional vampires are equipped with is patterned after the canine teeth of wolves, tigers or other mammalian predators, but these teeth are designed to snag in flesh and tear it. A mammalian carnivore fang would plug any hole it made.

After subduing its victim with a cocktail of soporific pheromones, the vampire slits open the artery with its razor-edged incisors. The fangs are used to keep a grip on the victim, and to curve around behind the artery, giving a firm backing for the vampire's tongue to press against as it massages blood from the wound. The fangs have a slightly hollowed-out back surface, which also serves to direct blood flow over the tongue. This slow, gentle method of feeding is not viscerally satisfying enough for horror movies and novels, it seems.

FICTION
Vampires draw blood from the jugular vein

FACT
It's unclear how authors became fixated on the jugular, any one of four pairs of veins in the neck that drain blood from the head. When tapping a victim's neck, vampire prefer the external carotid, a large artery on the side of the neck which supplies blood to the head. Arterial blood is under higher pressure than venous blood, and will spurt through a rupture in the vessel wall, making it much easier to drink. In addition, arterial blood is fresh and oxygenated, whereas venous blood is exhausted of oxygen and full of metabolic poisons.

Other potential feeding sites include the inside of the wrist (radial arteries) or the upper arms (brachial arteries), on the temple directly in front of the ear (superficial temporal artery), on the chest near the heart (aortic arch), on the upper abdomen (abdominal aorta), the inside of the thigh (femoral artery), the back of the ankle joint (posterior tibial artery), the back of the knee (popliteal artery), and the top of the foot (dorsalis pedis artery) - in short, anywhere a large-bore artery passes close to the surface of the skin and where the pulse can be easily taken.

FICTION
A vampire's attack leaves two tiny puncture wounds in the victim's neck

FACT
The wound left by a feeding vampire is a bruise with four small holes (the upper and lower canine teeth) and a line of faint dashes between them (the incisors). The vampire's saliva contains antibiotic factors, and the wound heals quickly. The shallower wounds close up first, and the two deep puncture scabs are the last to remain, so this convention is actually not too far removed from reality.

FICTION
Vampires have retractable fangs

FACT
It may come as a surprise, but the most famous vampire of the silver screen, Bela Lugosi's Dracula, never bared a fang. Over the years special effects artists have let their imagination run wild when it comes to fabricating vampiric dentures, and one of the most stubborn new tropes are retractable fangs.

The appeal is obvious. Movie vampires require sharp eyeteeth to look suitably scary, but human actors tend to lisp and bite their tongues when trying to speak through them. In older films, a quick cutaway allowed the actor to switch from a normal appearance to saber-tooth. Newer films tend to rely on computer graphics to make fangs grow right before our eyes (often with an unintentionally hilarious phallic symbolism). This is justified by pointing out that many species of venomous snake have "retractable fangs". In point of fact, snake fangs don't retract, they fold back into the upper jaw like a switchblade.

Real vampires, of course, have fangs at all times. The tooth's minor backwards curvature makes it difficult for the vampire to perform the normal chewing motions of the human jaw, but they have no trouble speaking, although there is a slight lateral lisp - the "vampire accent". The idea of fangs that grow out at convenient times may, like shape shifting, have come from observing a male vampire assuming his cannibal morph.

FICTION
Feeding is fatal to victim

FACT
The source of a very silly mathematical "proof" that vampires cannot exist, because each night their victims would rise as more vampires and the population would increase exponentially. Unlike their cinematic counterparts, true vampires rarely feed more than once every three nights and then from several victims, taking only about eight ounces from each, the same amount the Red Cross does from a donor. This is enough to cause mild anemia but not enough to kill unless the victim has a preexisting medical condition.

FICTION
It takes several attacks (usually three) for a victim to become a vampire

FACT
The "rule of threes" owes more to the conventions of fiction writing than biological fact. When an event occurs three times, tension is created, built up and then released. In reality, a single bite is sufficient to contaminate a victim's blood with the Infernalis organism that causes vampirism. However, a healthy human immune system is quite capable of fighting off an invading Infernalis. Under normal circumstances, a vampire must visit several times in quick succession and draw off enough blood to substantially weaken the victim for the human to succumb to infestation.

FICTION
A victim must drink the vampire's blood to become a vampire themselves

FACT
While this conceit was the basis of a thrilling scene in Dracula and has inspired many of the more romantically-minded horror writers, there is only a thin connection to the truth. The Infernalis organism is indeed carried in the vampire's bloodstream, but drinking vampire blood would not do the aspiring undead much good.

The Infernalis larvae, the free-swimming organisms that infest the human host body, are not found in the blood of the vampire until they are ready to mate. When ready to mate, the Q-type Infernalis buds off microscopic, jellyfish-like medusae into the bloodstream. The K-type draws off some of the medusae-rich blood, swallowing it into a special reproductive sac where the Q-type's medusae fuse with the K-type's own, forming larva. When the K-type next feeds on a human, the larvae backwash into the victim's bloodstream and attempt colonization.

In order to try self-vampirization, a person would have to somehow draw the larvae-bearing fluid from the K-types's reproductive sac. Drinking the fluid would do little good, as the fragile larvae are easily destroyed by digestive fluids. If the imbiber had an open sore in his or her mouth, an unusually hardy larva might be able to enter the bloodstream, but then would face the gauntlet of the immune system. Injecting the fluid directly into one's blood stream might prove a more certain method, if it didn't trigger a massive allergic reaction.

Interestingly, K-type vampires are able to instantly kill off their own medusae by releasing a toxin into their blood. This is a precaution against accidentally ingesting another K-type's blood during a territorial fight. Infernalis organisms from unrelated specimens react strongly to one another, and so vampires are unable to safely drink one another's blood. A sample of blood or flesh taken from an unwilling K-type vampire would not only be contaminated by toxins, but any larvae or medusae would have been lysed into an unidentifiable mess. Q-type Infernalis, in contrast to the K-type, only produce medusae erratically, which would make their collection a matter of exquisite timing on the part of scientists attempting to study them. These are some of the reasons the identity of the vampire organism remained a mystery for so long.

With the exception of a few statistically improbable situations, the only guaranteed way to become a vampire is the old-fashioned method of letting a vampire drink your blood.

FICTION
Vampires can survive on animal blood

FACT
Attempting to soften their heroic vampiric protagonists, authors often depict them feeding on animal blood entirely, with human blood being a preferred taste or addictive, like a drug, but not required for sustenance. Nothing could be further from the truth. While vampires are able to extract some nutrition from the digestion of animal blood, human red blood cells are absolutely required to keep the human parts of the gestalt organism alive, as the human host is incapable of producing any of their own. A vampire deprived of blood will slowly but surely asphyxiate.

FICTION
"I do not drink . . . wine."

FACT
The famous line from Dracula is actually fairly close to the mark. Fictional vampires are usually shown as being able to drink nothing but blood, or to consume food like a normal human being. Actual vampires have a digestive system adapted to extracting every bit of nutrition from a liquid diet, constructed more like a series of filters and sponges than the human system of large-bore tubes with muscular walls. Although they can store a small amount of solid food in a crop-like organ, vampires are not able to process solid food, and will vomit up any shortly after ingesting it. Some vampires have been known to enjoy honey and human milk, including baby formula.


Vampire powers and weakness

FICTION
Vampires are immortal

FACT
Like all living creatures, vampires are born and eventually die. Some rare specimens have been documented as living up to four hundred years, although the average seems closer to two hundred, which might as well have been forever to humans who lived before the advent of modern medicine. By this time, though, most vampires have experienced severe loss of brain function. K-type vampires suffer from physical mutation and degradation due to repeated shapeshifting, leaving them unable to hunt effectively.

FICTION
Vampires are literally walking corpses

FACT
In a sense, vampires are dead - as the parasitic organism neuters the human host, they are dead from an evolutionary viewpoint. The human flesh is not in actuality necrotic, although the low temperature, gelid texture and pale coloration (when not having fed recently) can certainly give the vampire a cadaverous appearance, their usual masklike lack of expression contrasting sharply with the mobile, expressive face of a normal human. There is also the vampire's daylight torpor, a state of drastically decreased metabolic function which enables them to conserve energy, an important survival tactic as blood is not a caloric-rich food and feasting too often could alert human beings to the vampire's presence in their midst. And while modern vampires do not have to resort to living in graveyards, in the past crypts provided them with a habitat where they were unlikely to be disturbed by casual passers-by, contributing to this misunderstanding.

FICTION
Vampires have no reflection in mirrors

FACT
As vampires were supposed to have no soul, they did not show in mirrors. A particularly visual aspect of the myth, it has naturally been used in almost every vampire film made. Stoker also intended to include as a character an artist who tried fruitlessly to paint Dracula's portrait, only to find the painting always came out looking like someone else, no doubt inspired by Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Grey.  A more recent subset of this aspect of mythology is the vampire who cannot be photographed. In the television series Ultraviolet, vampire hunters checked that their target did not appear in live video; a hybrid vampire child could not be detected by ultrasound.

But of course mirrors and photographs involve photons, not souls. A vampire appears in the mirror just like any other object. A lucky thing for vampires, too. One wonders how many have been spared a staking when they appeared clearly reflected in a wannabe Van Helsing's mirror.

FICTION
Vampires must sleep in a coffin / on their native soil

FACT
The idea that a vampire must rest on a layer of his native soil has been taken by most writers who use it to mean the soil itself possesses some intrinsic value the vampire requires to function, and have their modern characters overcome the problem by, for instance, sewing the soil into the lining of their clothes. In truth, it is simply a poetic way of expressing a vampire's extreme territoriality.

Being a stealth predator which must visit several victims to have a full meal, a vampire has a detailed amount of area knowledge, a mental map of the best places to hide, to move about undetected, and to find victims. Away from its familiar stomping grounds, it would be crippled when hunting or attempting escape. Also, any one population of humans can only support a limited number of vampires. Strangers would be driven off not only because they negatively impact the food supply, but because the foolish mistakes they make as newcomers might bring down the wrath of the humans on any random vampire they could find.

As for sleeping in a coffin, that is merely a romantic embellishment. Until fairly recently, coffins were reserved for the rich, and the average vampire would have awoken in a pauper's grave. Some might have indeed slept in crypts or mausoleums, banking on the idea that a human's fear of death meant they'd be relatively undisturbed. However, since a cemetery would be the first place vampire hunters would look, surely only inexperienced or outcast vampires would be found there (and since hunters were only likely to snare inexperienced vampires, they assumed all vampires would be found in cemeteries).

FICTION
Vampires can control people with hypnotic or psychic powers

FACT
Vampires do control minds, but not by using a secret power, unless pheromones are considered a secret power. It is only recently that the importance of scent in human interactions has begun to be studied. Research shows that it influences mate selection, allows a mother to identify her own child, and even that homosexual males have scent-based preferences for other homosexual males.

With each exhalation, vampires breathe out a cloud of atomized pheromones that at close range act to relax and attract human beings. This is the same chemical that is delivered in a more potent form when the vampire bites. The victim's brain responds by releasing a rush of the hormone oxytocin in the brain. This chemical affects the victim by reducing their fear, causing sensations of trust, affection, generosity and sexual arousal. Although the vampire pheromone itself is not addictive, it is not uncommon for the victim to become addicted to the mental state associated with it.

Devious vampires have certainly used the temporary effect to try and bend a human's will to theirs. This is not mind control any more than any other kind of drug addiction is. It is very difficult for an addict to achieve satisfaction under normal conditions as vampires have an innate dislike of feeding several times in a row from the same person, and one vampire will not drink soon after another vampire, so even attempting to appeal to a different individual won't help. Most humans are able to shake off this addiction very speedily with no ill effect.

FICTION
Psychometry from blood of victim

FACT
Psychometry is the belief that the vampire and the victim have a psychic connection, and that after feeding one or another can read the other's mind. Nonsense, of course. Psychic phenomena have never stood up to any kind of rigorous scientific inquiry. The idea is pablum for weak minds, a way of explaining away vampire powers without going to the trouble of trying to actually understand them. Certainly victims suffer from venom addiction, and may aid the vampire, but the creature has no control over the human's actions.

FICTION
Vampires can levitate

FACT
Various types of vampires have the power of flight in folklore usually via shape shifting, but this doesn't seem to have been a feature of the more common European legends.

Moviemakers discovered that hoisting a human actor on wires is only slightly more believable than showing them transform into a rubber bat. Intended to be spooky in films like 'Salem's Lot, the silliness of the effect was mercilessly spoofed by a scene in The Lost Boys, with the inexperienced new vampire almost floats out a window, all the while trying to assure his mother over the phone that nothing is amiss. Possibly inspired by the gliding gait of Dracula's brides, or a confusion with ghost stories. Real vampires are not supernatural, and cannot circumvent the laws of physics.

Vampires are more lightly built than humans, though, which allows them to jump higher and farther than the finest athlete. Also, perhaps at some point in history a K-type vampire in attack mode sported flying squirrel style patagium that allowed him to glide.

FICTION
Vampires can turn into mist

FACT
A popular early trope little seen nowadays. Clearly this is a folk explanation for the vampire's impressive but entirely natural ability to squeeze through very small spaces. The skeleton is hollow-shafted and mostly cartilaginous, the skull plates collapsible to an extent, and if it can fit its head through a gap the rest of the body can follow. A room that would be safely locked against a human enemy would be easily accessible to a determined vampire.

FICTION
Vampires can transform into a bat or other animal

FACT
The vampire of legend was gifted with the ability to transform into a menagerie of animals, usually those vilified by human beings: the wolves which raided their flocks, the disease-carrying rat, poisonous serpents, and harmless beasts who were considered ugly or associated with the darkness, such as bats and spiders. Movie vampires undergo a more limited transformation into an actor with oddly colored contact lenses, fangs so lengthy they would otherwise inhibit dialog, and prosthetic appliances to distort the face. Some vampires could also control creatures such as wolves or bats through a form of telepathy, usually for the purposes of flanking vampire hunters.

This is one case where science had to catch up to folklore. For many years only Q-type vampires were available for study, the K-type population having been almost exterminated. Q-type vampires are incapable of transformation, but K-types can shift their shape into a form into what is technically known as a "cannibal morph" for the purpose of fighting other K-types (not usually vampire hunters).

This sort of sex-based transformation is not completely unknown in the animal kingdom. Male deer grow antlers during the mating season and shed them after the rut, the gonads of male canaries grow and shrink according to season, male octopi flash colors to ward off rivals. The cannibal morph of a K-type vampire does not closely resemble a bat or a wolf. One observer likened it to a cross between a praying mantis, a flayed lion, and one of those small predatory dinosaurs like Velociraptor, another to a human corpse made out of beef jerky or a mummified ape.

FICTION
Vampires cannot cross running water or a line of salt

FACT
Salt is used in mythology to ward off all sorts of unpleasant supernatural misfortunes, so it's not surprising it shows up in vampire lore as well. Running water is a bit more difficult to explain. Perhaps vampires once used streams as a handy indicator to mark off the boundaries of their territory. Another thought is that, with no body fat and little air in their lungs, vampires are more likely to sink than float. Avoiding a dunking becomes an understandable precaution.

Then again, vampires are perfectly able to extract oxygen dissolved in water for short periods of time. Instead of swimming, they usually crawl across the bottom of large bodies of water. An observing human may have assumed the vampire drowned or was dissolved away because it did not surface again to breathe.

FICTION
Older vampires are more powerful

FACT
Vampires with experience are indeed more competent and in control. Vampires initially rise as 'berserkers', bloodthirsty, mindless beasts seeking only to sate their hunger, until the Infernalis colony manages to reawaken the frontal lobes and they pass into the 'harvester' stage.

But there is no benefit in being of an old bloodline. Possibly the observation that Q-type vampires can control their daughter-clones and K-types can control Q-types led to this confusion. In fact, few vampires live to be over two hundred years old, and K-types particularly suffer as their forms tend to become twisted and deformed by their shape shifting ability.

FICTION
Vampires must be invited into a home before they can attack

FACT
This is folklore's way of accusing a victim of inviting predation, analogous to censuring a rape victim by telling her she was "asking for it" by dressing or acting provocatively or venturing into unsafe areas. In any case, fictional vampires seem to have little to no difficulty in making an end run around this limitation, usually by meeting a potential victim on neutral ground and laying on the charm so thickly that the victim willingly invites them in.

In eras where most people rarely traveled far from their place of birth and most members of a community were known by sight, it would indeed be unusual to invite a perfect stranger in. Folkloric vampires tended to prey mainly on family members. Vampires therefore preferred to prey on outcasts and itinerants, or to operate in large cities or in places, like inns, where strangers were encountered often.

FICTION
Some vampires are sexually functional

FACT
In some tales, a vampire can mate with a human female and thereby father a dhampir (the other way round was never mentioned). This doesn't seem like a particularly wise action, as folklore informs us the half-breed inevitably grows up to use his inherited supernatural gifts to hunt his full-vampire relatives.

Infernalis actually neuters its human host, a common strategy of many parasites as this ensures the host's energies are fully devoted to supporting the parasite rather than being wasted on offspring. Not only are a vampire's sexual organs rendered inoperative, but the host's primary and secondary sexual characteristics quickly regress to an undifferentiated state, so that without a DNA test it becomes impossible to tell whether they were male or female in their human life. It is also worth noting that the human host's original gender is irrelevant; vampire gender is determined by the gender of the colonizing parasite, not the human host.


Detecting and destroying vampires

FICTION
Garlic repels vampires

FACT
The young vampire hunters in The Lost Boys mashed up garlic into a tub filled with holy water and subjected a vampire to a bath which boiled the flesh off his bones. Garlic is known to have antibiotic uses, possibly the source of this bit of folk wisdom, but it doesn't have nearly so dramatic an effect in mundane reality.

The simpler explanation is that strong odors offends the vampire's extremely sensitive sense of smell. Experiments have shown that vampires preferentially avoid victims who smoke, drink alcohol, or take medication that alters the flavor of their blood. Garlic might also jam the human victim's sense of smell, leaving them less vulnerable to the vampire's enticing pheromones.

FICTION
Holy symbols drive off vampires

FACT
Again, movies have stepped up from Lugosi's Dracula simply recoiling from a cross to the holy symbol burning any vampire it touches like a brand. Other holy symbols include Van Helsing using mashed up Eucharist to seal off a coffin, and blessed water that burns like vitriol even when squirted in a rather disrespectful manner from a squirt gun. Richard Matheson theorized that this was a psychological self-hate in I am Legend, and that crosses would only work on Christian vampires. The Jewish vampire in The Fearless Vampire Killers was repelled by the Star of David, and presumably atheist vampires can be warded off by a copy of The God Delusion.

In Salem's Lot and Fright Night the cross only worked if the human wielding it believed in its power, which is closer to the truth. Holy symbols have the effect on the mind of humans rather like that of Dumbo's magic feather, giving them a fearlessness based on the belief their all-powerful god was watching over them. Over the years, vampires learned this lesson the hard way. They did not fear the cross so much as the hunter who was psychologically propped up by its symbolism and therefore just that much more dangerous.

FICTION
Silver weapons (silver bullets) are fatal to vampires

FACT
A crossover from lycanthrope legend. Silver has long been a metal associated with magic, and the difficulty of the common man obtaining it likely fueled this reverence. It is not beyond the realm of possibility an individual vampire might have a silver allergy, but in general a silver weapon is no more dangerous than any other metal.

FICTION
Sunlight / UV radiation burns vampires

FACT
In Stoker's novel, Dracula could walk about in sunlight albeit with much weakened powers. This has gradually evolved until dawn's early light makes the vampires in Fright Night burst into explosive flame and those of the Blade movies crumble away to cinders like cigar ash (although the sympathetic vampire who also happen to be female expires much more gracefully and prettily than the evil, ugly, males). Hollywood prop makers like to devise glowing ultraviolet weapons for their heroic hunters to use during nighttime escapades, conveniently ignoring the fact that a dose of UV light that concentrated would blind and burn humans, as well. On the set of Blade 2 a malfunctioning UV prop temporarily blinded 30 crew members.

Vampires don't enjoy sunlight for much the same reasons humans with albinism don't. Infernalis ceases the production of melanin, so all vampires lack pigment in the skin and eyes, and even weak amounts of sunlight in small doses cause a painful sunburn.

Further, their vision is adapted to night, and the heat sensors in the skin of the face and hands they use to orient on victims function less well in the warmer daytime hours. For these reasons and to conserve energy, vampires go dormant during daylight hours. Berserkers and younger vampires lapse into this diurnal coma as false dawn's light first touches the sky and don't wake until well after sunset, but older vampires can remain active well into the daytime hours.

FICTION
Kill the "head vampire" and all the other vampires die/revert to human beings

Lisa: Grandpa's a vampire?
Bart: We're all vampires!
Lisa: But, no! We killed Mr. Burns!
Homer: You have to kill the HEAD vampire.
Lisa: [points at Homer] You're the head vampire?
Marge: No, I'm the head vampire.
Lisa: Mom?!
Marge: I do have a life outside this house, you know.
- The Simpsons, "Treehouse of Horror IV"

FACT
A particularly goofy idea analogous curing your flu by hunting down and slaying the co-worker who sneezed onto the break room coffee machine. Beloved by scriptwriters and hack novelists because it allows for a happy ending. Needless to say, this has no basis whatsoever in any kind of reality. Certainly a clutch of vampires would tear itself apart without a K-type leader, but after the initial bloodbath the survivors would merely disperse and be assimilated into other harems.

FICTION
A stake through the heart is a sure way to kill a vampire

FACT
The classic favorite method of slaying. In folklore the stake might be required to be of a certain kind of wood, but in mass media everything from metal crossbow bolts to trophy deer antlers have been used effectively. There is also some confusion over whether the stake can be reused. Taking it out of a vampire, even one reduced to skeletal remains, may allow the monster to rise and walk again.

A wanna-be vampire hunter should be advised that the breastbone and ribs are there for a reason, and that reason is protecting the heart. It requires serious effort to force a stake in, even if the tip is sharpened, and the vampire isn't going to lay still in the meantime. Fictitious vampires comply by resting quietly in their coffins until the first blow drives the stake in, then they writhe about squealing for a bit. The genuine article will catapult from torpor if disturbed into instant flight or fight mode, and presents a bit more of a challenge.

FICTION
To truly kill a vampire, they must be burned or decapitated

FACT
Occasionally a movie or book will go further than the stake-in-the-heart shtick and insist a vampire also be decapitated and/or burned. One legend required people to watch the vampire's funeral pyre, because its flesh would turn into insects, rats, lizards, snakes and other such small vermin and try to wriggle away and escape.

Amazingly, this might have a basis in truth. In rare instances, the Infernalis organism will actually stretch out tendril of flesh and attempt to crawl away from a badly damaged host body. Because each individual zooid that makes up the colony can survive independently for a short period of time, the Infernalis is capable of regenerating and repairing even extensive mutilation of both itself and its host. There are even cases where a vampire has survived decapitation, and in one documented instance last long enough for its head to be reattached to its body.

So, in the end, truth really is stranger than fiction.
A discussion of vampire facts vs fiction, written in an in-universe style for a book I'm working on.

In this story world, vampires are non-supernatural, the result of a very odd parasitic infestation that drastically alters the human host (I'll post the biology lesson later on). Vampires have been around forever, but only recently has human science begun to study them. There is a lot of bad information floating around out there and the average person harbors many misconceptions.

If it seems hard to believe people would still be so uninformed about real phenomena in their world, ask yourself how many movies, books or tv shows accurately depict common human mental illness or diseases, or different cultures. Not many! Reality is usually sacrificed on the alter of entertainment; I figure if vampires existed, the same would hold true for them.


Note: If any of this conflicts with your idea of how vampires "should" be don't spaz out and write a long ranty comment - take a deep breath, hum the Mystery Science Theater 3000 theme, and relax. It is a work of fiction, it's all for fun, vampires aren't real, and this is just how they function for plot purposes in my novel.
© 2012 - 2024 Viergacht
Comments44
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
Jennywolfgal's avatar

What're the Q-types and K-types, specifically what do the Q and K mean here? I'm SO gonna enjoy getting my hands on this novel btw when you've finished and published it, such fun and fascinating stuff!