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alt title(s): Japanese Vampire
Our Vampires Are Different

You see, doctor, there are as many species of vampire as there are beasts of prey.
There are as many types of vampire as there are disease; some are virulent and deadly, and some just make you walk funny and avoid fruit.
— Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum

Subtrope of Our Monsters Are Different. This one deals with everyone's favorite undead bloodsuckers.

The baseline rules for vampires are:

  • They need blood. Mostly.

    You can also have a critter that sucks out someone's youth, or soul, or "will", or fear. It's a whole big sucking thing. Usually for a vampire, it is blood; whether or not they consume anything else varies between versions.

    Some are Vegetarian Vampires who get by on animals and blood banks, and sometimes all they require is a quick, easily healed swallow from humans from time to time. These can become Friendly Neighborhood Vampires. The ones who must drink live human blood in fatal amounts aren't so lucky. The ones who enjoy it, well... Kiss Of The Vampire is the option for Friendly Neighborhood Vampires. Otherwise? Vampire Bites Suck.

  • Vampires are viral.

    • They are capable of changing human beings into other vampires. Classical vampires like Dracula needed to go through a more elaborate process to make another vampire, but bowdlerized versions removed the detail where he made the victims drink his blood to begin the transformation, leading to the idea that victims can become vampires from just a bite.

      The more involved procedure has regained popularity and explains why every victim of a vampire doesn't become one and, by extension, their rarity. These offspring are usually beholden as servants to the parent vampire. Very few have the Heroic Willpower needed to resist becoming fully evil. Attempting to change a loved one into an eternal companion this way rarely works.

      Modern versions that don't have such a process often blur the line between vampire and zombie, sometimes leading to a full-on Vampire Apocalypse because of a runaway Viral Transformation. Worse, sometimes Vampires who don't keep fed turn into Zombies.
    • Recently, the idea has arisen that vampires judge each other by how far removed they are from a "source." The highest social status belongs to someone who somehow became a vampire without being turned by one via bite.
    • Of course, there can also be a fusion of "types". A vampire may create mindless undead slaves via simple feeding; (often refered to as "spawn") but to create a thinking vampire with the potential for the gambit of powers, the full process is needed.

  • They are Bad Ass. Vampires are almost always inhumanly strong and fast, as well as Immune To Bullets and most other mundane weapons..

  • Achilles Heels

    • Wooden stake through the heart. In most modern depictions, this is fatal; in the original folklore, it merely stops the vampire from leaving his coffin. In most of the older stories, one had to use a hammer or a grave digger's shovel to drive the stake in, which meant that vampire stakings mainly happened during the day when the vampire was asleep, but recently, it's become oddly easy to do by hand. Remember, the ribs are there to prevent just such an occurrence.
    • Decapitation. Although, really, this one works on pretty much everyone. So do stakes through the heart, for that matter. Really, the only vampiric weakness unique to vampires is...
    • Direct sunlight. Originally, they actually had to sleep in their coffin during the day, and sunlight wasn't fatal - they were merely dormant during the day, making it "easy" to sneak up on them. Nowadays, they just hole up inside, and sunlight practically has the power to make them spontaneously combust. Sometimes this is specifically ultraviolet radiation - sunlight is dangerous, but a lightbulb is not. The Dracula in Bram Stoker's novel was unharmed by sunlight - he just could not change shape during the day except at dawn, noon and dusk. As were other vampires before Stoker's, such as Carmilla and Varney the Vampire. An interesting inversion are Arabian vampires. They're active during the day and sleep at night, since people were naturally more afraid of the daytime in the desert.

  • Harmful but not instantly lethal

    • Attempting to cross flowing water (e.g., rivers and oceans). Frequently interpreted to mean vampires can't cross flowing water. The effects of flowing water very greatly depending on the story. Dracula, for example, could cross running water at the slack or flood of the tide.
    • Crosses, but not necessarily other religious symbols. Originally, it had to be a full blown crucifix (that is, a cross with a figure of Jesus on it). In modern renditions, this is usually subject to the power of belief of either the wielder or the vampire. For instance, if a character is a sincere Jew, then they could use the Star of David to ward off a vampire. Then you can have a vampire who carries his own crucifix, as he is a believer too, like Henry Fitzroy in Blood Ties. He also prays and goes to confession (he figures that he is subject to the same sins as humans, and needs to do penance for them). Fortunately, he is a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire. In other cases, the religion the symbol represents has to have been around during the vampire's lifetime to have any effect. If a vampire predates all modern religions, don't go reaching for your crucifix.
    • Holy water
    • Communion Host
    • White roses
    • Fire
    • Garlic
    • Silver or otherwise magically augmented weapons and ammunition.
    • Thorns (especially hawthorn) in Middle- and Eastern European folklore
    • Also, folklore tells us vampires get disoriented (or even driven mad) At The Crossroads, and cannot tell one direction for another. Urban vampires seem to have developed a strong resistance to this weakness, especially those that frequent downtown districts (probably bu building up an immunity from all the intersections).
    • They cannot enter a home unless invited in by someone. This can range from killing them to simply that they physically can't enter. However, it is still a large disadvantage.

  • Mandatory tell-tale

    • No reflection (often because the vampire has no soul, but see below).
    • No heartbeat/breath.
    • No brain activity, (making them easily recognized by telepaths)
    • Don't bleed
    • Physical features, such as being exceedingly pale, having unusual eyes (see Glowing Eyes Of Doom), and, of course, fangs. In folklore, there were numerous physical telltales — eyebrows that met over the nose, fingers all the same length, hair in the center of the palms or backward-facing palms — that are mostly overlooked in modern versions. The original novel-version Dracula has practically all of them. If they can hide some or all of them, dropping the disguise constitutes using Game Face. Sometimes vampires will become more and more human-like in appearance as they consume more blood/live longer. Sometimes... not.
    • Body temperature: Vampires, being dead, are almost always at room temperature or colder.

  • Immortality

    • Technically, they are dead. Pretty spry for a dead guy, though.
    • Vampires don't age as we mortals do. Sometimes, this is genuine eternal youth. Sometimes, long periods of time undead can result in a pretty inhuman-looking character, but in either case there is no threat of dying of old age.
    • Relatedly, they usually suffer from Creative Sterility in both the biological and artistic sense. They can not beget any children... unless it's a male vampire and a live woman, in which case a Dhampir is the result. They may however be capable of turning a child into a vampire, which results in an ageless Undead Child. If it's a "living" vampire species, this is usually waived.
    • Rarely, the vampire is immortal but must restore his/her youth by drinking blood. In abstinence, they "age", and immediately begin to grow young after they've fed. This originated with Dracula and with persistent stories about one Elizabeth Bathory's bathing habits.
    • Interestingly, this isn't indestructibility, and sometimes the vampiric condition itself is reversible. What this means is that despite the above, Undeath Always Ends.

A work will usually address these baseline rules even if they're not enforced. Sometimes an unused rule will be explained away as a Fake Weakness propagated by the vampires themselves.

Some stories claim the only way to permanently kill a vampire is to hammer a stake through its heart, shove garlic in its mouth, cut off its head, tear off its ears, dismember it, burn the pieces in a fire, and then scatter the ashes across holy ground. This will also permanently kill most anything, including pale spooky goths who happen not to be vampires. A few old stories suggest that even this only works until a full moon shines on the ash. All this on the theory that vampires were corpses animated by evil spirits. Doing all these things rendered the corpse unusable by the spirit. By contrast, the easiest supposed way to stop a vampire is finding his coffin and turning him face down to make him "bite the dust, not people".

Somewhat-common additional (mostly modern) rules for vampires are:

  • Cannot be photographed or caught on video, often an extension of the "no reflection" rule. This may also be related to the silver rule; mirrors and photographic film are both (usually) made from silver.
    • In Moonlight, Mick explains in a voiceover that he could not be photographed when silver was used in film, but digital cameras have changed all that.
    • In the TV series Ultraviolet (unrelated to the film), the vampire hunters use sights that pretty much amount to video cameras strapped to their guns in order to tell vampire from non-vampire.
    • In the anime Magical Pokaan, Pachira does not show up on a normal digital camera but is perfectly visible when viewed with an infrared camera.
    • In the TV series "Being Human" they do have a reflection on glass etc as there is no silver involved.
  • Cannot be heard over phone lines.
  • If there are any actual Holy Relics, these things will kill a vampire even if they're just in close proximity. However, these are rarely used. Some variations have the relics only being effective when the faith of the wielder is strong. In other variations, the relic is only effective if the vampire believes that it can harm them.
  • Can turn into bats, wolves, or wisps of smoke for travel. (Bats are by far the most common.) A rare transformation featuring prominently in early literature (such as Dracula) was the ability to turn into elemental dust in moonlight.
  • Can turn into other creatures that drink blood: vampire bats, mosquitoes, ticks. (Sometimes they become a single creature, more rarely a whole flock/swarm.)
  • Unaided flight in human form.
  • Wall Crawling.
  • Have a hierarchy of strength or other powers based on age.
  • Can pass through locked doors. Can sometimes alter their bodies to slip through impossibly small spaces.
  • Cannot enter certain locations, especially homes, without invitation.
  • Can mesmerize mortals into doing their bidding, most often by looking straight into their eyes.
  • If killed, can be restored to unlife with the proper procedure. One early version of this, appearing in both pre-Dracula stories The Vampyre and Varney the Vampyre, is that a vampire will be revived and healed automatically if its corpse is bathed in moonlight.
  • Animals react with fear or aggression towards them.
  • Sometimes, vampires have two options of converting their prey a la The Virus. With some effort and rule-following, they can be changed into full, if younger, vampires. Sometimes, they have the option of just making either zombie-like or less powerful (often carnivorous) vampire slaves. Killing a vampire also kills any vampires that particular one created by the above means. Occasionally, it just restores them to non-vampiric life.
  • Must sleep in the soil from their homeland/original grave.
  • There are two social profiles for vampires. The first is a loner who may keep a cadre of vampire slaves and possibly a mate. Dracula fits this profile. The second is a "vampire society" where houses of vampiric lineages act and compete within a Masquerade.
  • Level of "deadness" varies. On one side of the spectrum, it's just lack of heartbeat and skin that's cool to the touch. On the other, they're literally a moving, rotten animated corpse.
  • Modern updates of the vampire legend may completely avoid using the word "vampire" to describe them; see the "Curse of Fenric", Ultraviolet, and Preacher examples below.
  • Level of retained humanity also varies immensely, from being ravenous, soulless monsters incapable of passing for anything but the above, to being soulless monsters who are very good at pretending to be their former selves, to being basically normal folks Blessed With Suck (or Cursed With Awesome, depending on viewpoint) and most likely a desire to be human again.
  • Occasionally suffer from severe OCD. One folkloric method of dealing with Vampires was to drop thousands of grains of rice in their coffin, the theory being they'd be compelled to count them all when they awake, wasting the whole night instead of getting up and terrorizing people.
    • The folklore version also is told with sesame seeds, and may also extend to any small, numerous nut or grain, if not any particulate (handfuls of sawdust?). Fairies also have this problem.
    • Dropping a bunch where you stand is a known way to escape the OCD variant of vampire.
    • A similar folklore variant involves hanging a sieve, colander, or other household item that's full of holes outside your front door. That way, the vampire will stop and count all the holes, leaving them vulnerable at sunrise. ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR! FOUR GRAINS OF SAND! AH-HA-HA-HA!
    • Apparently poppy seeds were used to great effect in Greece, as they had the additional benefit of putting the vampire to "sleep".
  • Also on the OCD theme, vampires will, like fairies, be obsessed with out of place and messily-tied knots, and must stop what they're doing to untie them.
  • Act like Bela Lugosi's portrayal of Dracula.
  • Sometimes use Vampire Vords.
  • May or may not be at war with werewolves.

Usually, their preternatural powers include:

The purpose of vampires in the story varies quite widely. They serve as the Big Bad or as a metaphor for something (communicable diseases like AIDS or STDs; alcoholism, drug addiction, denial of aging). There is some danger of the vampire character being too on-the-nose for the metaphor.

The "baseline rules" above are strongly influenced by Hollywood tradition, and not "real" vampire folklore, or even classic vampire fiction. For instance, as (properly) shown in the 1992 Dracula with Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder, and in 2003's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Dracula and other "folkloric" vampires were at the most inconvenienced by sunlight, not killed instantly.

In Stoker's novel and earlier vampire lore, sunlight did not cause vampires to go up like flash paper. Several times in the novel, Dracula appears in broad daylight with no ill effects. He is simply incapable of using at least some of his vampiric powers during the daylight (he cannot change form except at dawn, noon and dusk, but still seems to be able to charm wolves to some degree). Sunlight causing a vampire to suffer pain and damage, smolder, or go up like a one man pyrotechnic band was pretty much wholly created by Hollywood, and specifically, by F.W. Murnau in Nosferatu, the first film to use this idea and probably its inventor.

Note that having a heroic vampire no longer counts as "different". Vampire Refugees are also a frequently used trope.

Differences may be reinforced by spelling it "Vampir" or "Vampyre", or using a clever synonym like "nosferatu" "sanguinarian" or "strigoi". If the differences are emphasized by overt mocking of other authors and unused vampire tropes it becomes Your Vampires Suck.

See also Chinese Vampire, Classical Movie Vampire, Looks Like Orlok.
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Examples

    Advertising 
  • Rare commercial version: A famous Rayban commercial suggested that seeing direct sunlight was what harmed vampires. It showed a group of them gathered on a seawall, watching the sun rise over the ocean; it's only when one fails to put on his shades (and suffers the consequences) that we find out what they are. Maybe it wasn't the seeing of sunlight. Maybe the glasses were just that good.
  • Reactolite did the same in England. Count Dracula no longer dies when people throw open the curtains, as he wears Reactolite Rapides.

    Anime & Manga 
There are plenty of examples of vampires in anime, but being a cultural borrowing (much like the American use of ninja) their vampires are different. The Japanese Vampire is based almost entirely on the "decadent aristocrat" of later film and fantasy depiction rather than the shambling horrors of European folktales. They are usually "supernatural" rather than The Undead and, Christianity being rare in Japan, any religious elements will be used for coolness and exoticism rather than to show them as unholy and unnatural. Blood-sucking is more likely to be treated as a source of healing or superpowers rather than a physical necessity, and in some cases isn't even included.

The Japanese vampire typically has very pale hair (usually blonde, though white and lavender also work) and bright red eyes. This may reflect the influence of Yoshitaka Amano's illustrations for the Vampire Hunter D series and for the Japanese adaptations of Elric Of Melnibone (which stars a handsome Heroic Albino). It may also be part of the idea that vampires are European and will look like it. They are also usually very "beautiful" (see Bishonen and Bishoujo), but, possibly surprisingly, they rarely sparkle.

They also tend toward being (and in some works exclusively are) members of highly wealthy families, and usually reside in a Big Fancy House at the very least, and a massive ominous castle if possible.

Half-vampires are common, and will not be happy about it.

Sometimes a Handwave is given towards why they don't have certain traits and weaknesses common in depictions of Western vampires; "I trained" or "I grew out of that".

  • The Vampires in Black Blood Brothers suffer from all these weaknesses — well, some of them do. Different bloodlines of vampires have different weaknesses; many, for example, can walk around in daylight, but our hero can not, as it is a weakness of his bloodline. Some bloodlines need invitations to cross barriers, but others do not. While the main bad guys of the series are the Kowloon child bloodline, who kill their victims because one bite is enough to turn someone, for almost every other bloodline, humans are lining up to be bitten, as it is seen as very pleasurable (not to mention briefly giving that human vampire senses).
  • The Karin anime and manga series has a family of vampires, and they explain that it's not the fact garlic is harmful, they just have much more sensitive senses of smell. They have no idea where the running water weakness came from, can stand short stints in sunlight (which they can then heal with rest), and point out that "A stake through the heart would kill anybody!" They are pretty much all atheists, so religious icons have no power against them. As far as feeding habits are concerned, they don't suck their victims dry or really take over their wills. Instead, in a manner more reminiscent of Japanese Gaki than Western vampires, they suck out some aspect of the person they're drawn to — stress, lying, pride, sadness — erasing the victim's memory of that aspect in the process and leaving them less stressed, unable to lie, more humble, and very happy and energetic respectively. (Some vampires are stuck draining things like love, though.) Oh, and they can be seen in mirrors, are the bearers of Cute Little Fangs, can't change into bats (but can control them - and these are some incredibly versatile bats), and animals don't seem to be all that upset about them. It is also very on-the-nose: when Karin and Anju's respective first times at biting a victim are shown, both of them have the fronts of their white dresses conspicuously covered in "virginal" blood. Afterwards, both are referred to as vampires and adults.
    • As a double inversion, the eponymous character in Karin is different even from the vampires in the rest of the series. She is called a "blood-maker" by her family (when they aren't calling her "mutant" and "loser"). She produces too much blood, and must bite "victims" to give them her extra blood. As a side effect, the extra blood tends to cheer them up or make them feel better. If she fails to do so, she eventually has a spectacular nosebleed. On the flip side, she can eat normal foods, is immune to sunlight — she's actually quite a morning person — and in most respects resembles a normal human girl.
    • In this series, vampires do not transform humans into vampires, instead they reproduce the same way humans do.
    • They can also die naturally, if deprived of blood for extended periods of time (i.e. several years).
    • There are some vampires out there who sell commercial blood flavored after specific emotions. Calerra usually beats the snot out of Henry if he doesn't bring her blood from a truely despicable liar. Henry himself has been shown drinking himself to sleep off of bottled Pride blood.
  • Hellsing's vampires diverge somewhat from the norms. Humans who are artificially "turned" via special chips or, in the manga's case, by surgically implanted bits of Mina Harker's remains exhibit "standard" weaknesses. However, more powerful "true" vampires can ignore the rules. This is especially notable in the series's Heroic Sociopath, Alucard, who survives decapitation, holy bayonets and any number of other attacks. He dislikes sunlight, but it won't kill him. (It's also been said by his boss that the organisation has spent 100 years "enhancing" his abilities beyond the normal limits.) In volume 8 of the manga, it is revealed that Alucard contains within him the lives of all those he has fed off of, making him nearly indestructible. He can also summon these souls forth into physical form to fight for him, at the cost of substantially reducing his own power. The only thing that finally stops him is is a serious case of existence failure. But even then, he eventually returned after thirty years of reestablishing his existence, more or less pulling the vampire equivalent of a Doc Manhattan. There's also a rule that to be turned into a true vampire has to be a virgin. Otherwise you just become a ghoul. This is how Seres joins the undead.
  • Blood+ stretches Our Vampires Are Different nearly to the limit by including several different types of vampires — referred to under the general heading of "chiropterans," from the word for bat — none of which display many of the traits listed above. The vampires are communal, like bees, the mook Chiropterans are the workers, the Chevaliers are the drones, and Saya and Diva are the Queens of their "Hives".
    • The source of all the various types of chiropterans are the chiropteran queens, of which there are apparently only two at a time, always born as twins. Each queen's blood is lethal to her sister and to any chiropterans created from her sister's blood. The queens need blood to live (transfusions work fine, although drinking it makes them more powerful) and are basically immortal, but that's about where their resemblance to classical vampires ends; they have none of the usual vulnerabilities, and aside from the opposite queen's blood, the only thing that might possibly be sufficient to kill them would be complete exsanguination or decapitation. Maybe. They also alternate between a few years of activity and thirty years of hibernation wrapped in a cocoon.
    • The queens can create "chevaliers" by feeding a human some of their blood; the chevaliers, even more than the queens, are supernaturally strong, fast, and resilient, with the ability to shapeshift in various ways, most notably into monstrous batlike forms or into the forms of people whose blood they have drunk.
    • The application of Mad Science to a queen's blood created a drug called Delta 67, which turns humans into huge, batlike, mostly mindless monsters who feed on the blood of other living things. These are slightly easier to kill than the queens and chevaliers, but still resilient enough that the two best options are either the opposite queen's blood or encasing them in concrete and dumping them in the ocean.
    • Then there are the Schiff, a group of people created via experimentation with chiropteran blood to be weapons; as incomplete beings, the Schiff are the closest thing the series has to classical vampires, mostly in that they're the only kind of chiropteran which is injured by sunlight (it causes them to burst into green flame). They are afflicted with a disease they call Thorn, which gradually crystallizes their bodies.
  • The Nasuverse (emphasis on Tsukihime) muddles the meaning of "vampire" quite a bit:
    • True Ancestors are the original vampires, spirit beings so powerful they can manifest in a physical form. They were willed into being by the planet itself as a self-protection program against the spread of humanity. They don't need to drink blood at all, but because the Crimson Moon tricked Gaia into using him as the template, they inevitably succumb to bloodlust anyway.
    • Dead Apostles start out as mindless zombies (created by another vampire injecting some of their own blood into a person) that gradually gain in power and intelligence over hundreds of years as they feed on flesh and blood until they finally evolve into complete vampires. Arcueid gives specific, vanishing odds for undead to make it out of each stage. Of course, if you have the magic potential and/or sheer luck, it is possible to skip a few steps, like Satsuki, who skipped straight to the final stage, complete with a Reality Marble.
    • And then for the wtf-factor, we have: a mobile bloodsucking forest, a phenomenon that doesn't actually "exist", a crow-man/thing, a little boy with demons for limbs, a chaotic composite of 666 familiars that feast on human flesh, and an Eldritch Abomination/personification of Mercury that half got the designation by virtue of killing a Dead Apostle who tried to study it.
    • In any case, neither are susceptible to stakes, or the traditional anti-vampire weapons. While cannon fodder vampires can be harmed by guns and swords, most of the stronger Dead Apostles (and all of the True Ancestors, as well as the strange group of Dead Apostle Ancestors) cannot be harmed by "real" weapons. By the rules of the Nasuverse, this means something mythical on the same scale as a "mythical" being like a vampire. Not to mention, even if they are hurt, the stronger ones can come back to life by reversing time. The most extreme example? Roa regenerating himself after being slashed apart down to his ankles by Arcueid in Tsukihime. Granted, that was only possible because the moon was full.
    • Basically, the one "weakness" common to all Nasuverse vampires (True Ancestors and Dead Apostles) is Nanaya sunlight. On one end are most Dead Apostles, for whom sunlight greatly hastens their bodies' degeneration; on the other end is Arcueid, who during daytime ranges from "somewhat weaker" to "sluggish and lethargic" (on the sunniest of days). Arcueid also seems to have very allergic to garlic, though whether this applies to all vampires (or should even be considered canon) is not clear.
    • Then again you could probably count on your fingers the amount of times the word "vampire" was actually said.
      Arcueid: "Dead Apostiles eat people and True Ancestors are out to hunt them."
      Shiki: "Oh, you mean like vampires, right?"
      Arcueid: "Yeah, I guess you can call it that."
  • Ergo Proxy Proxies
  • Battle Angel Alita: Last Order's vampires have a lot of notable differences from the mythical standard. First, they're more literal representations of The Virus; their condition is due to genetic modification from a factor called the V-Virus, which transforms them via an excruciatingly painful experience called Altered Shock. (They consider "vampire" to be an insult, and prefer the term "Cognate".) Less than one percent of individuals bitten by infected hosts survive this process, and those that do often commit suicide out of inability to cope with the increased carnivorous urge colloquially termed the "thirst for blood". Cognates don't have any particular aversion to sunlight, holy symbols, or garlic (though individual tastes and cultural stigma, as usual, do vary), and they do show a reflection. However, they also lack many of the more fantastical abilities of mythical vampires. They are not truly immortal (aging is halted, however), as their mechanism for fending off physical injury and aging (unlimited cell division) makes them highly susceptible to another means of death: cancer. Their regenerative capabilities can also be overridden with enough damage (decapitation and striking vital points are handy). The shapeshifting and hypnotic powers are also lacking, though individual Cognates that are very long-lived can sometimes undergo second "Altered Shocks", which tend to grant them unique and powerful abilities such as the ability to read minds by detecting neural pulse flow or the like.
  • Jojo's Bizarre Adventure is rather... complicated about vampires. For starters, the most powerful ones are created by Mayan artifacts called the Stone Masks. While they have fangs, they feed through their fingers. They are not adversely affected by water, but direct exposure to sunlight means instant disintegration and permanent death for them. They don't need to drain blood constantly, but doing so keeps them young and, if the person they drain was particularly powerful, it makes them exponentially stronger. Those killed by Stone Mask vampires rise again as undead, but are much weaker and are usually called "zombies"; this variety has a simple personality based on their most outstanding personality trait and, unlike Stone Mask vampires, cannot heal wounds. The only method short of sunlight or the Ripple that slays a vampire, Stone Mask or zombie, is grievous head trauma; decapitation merely leads to a living, severed head that can then attach to and take over any handy body, as Dio did to Jonathan Joestar's corpse. While it was never 100% explained why blunt head trauma was deadly to the vampires, it is most likely due to the fact that the vampires in Jo Jo were originally humans that had specific points in the brain exposed to a severe acupuncture, which awakened what was supposedly a human's "true potential". That being said, getting punched in the head really hard may damage one of the activated brain points. Their powers are also outside the norm, including (but not limited to) the ability to shoot high-pressure liquid metal blood from their eyes, blood freezing, and the ability to walk on walls and ceilings.
    • And that's not even counting the Pillar Men vampires, which created the Stone Masks because their favorite food are those vampires. Needless to say, nothing short of top-tier Ripples can can kill them, and even that takes an eternity to work. Sunlight only turns them to stone for as long as they're exposed, and even if you were to grind up the remains into dust, Ripple is still needed to finish the job. They feed by absorbing anything they touch (typically vampires and humans), and can shapeshift their bodies around to utilize their bones and veins for weaponry or to fit into tiny drainpipes and stretch their body parts. Also, they have horns on their heads, and the number of horns denotes their potential power levels. Oddly enough, vampires and zombies are portrayed as Always Chaotic Evil, but their more superior and deadly creators the pillar men were mostly honorable warriors.
  • Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle features a variation on the standard vampire tropes, although since Tsubasa is essentially a multiverse AU it is not clear whether this particular vampire definition applies to the whole CLAMP multiverse or just the unknown world the vampires in question originated from. So far, the established rules are that vampires can be both "pure blood", presumably by birth, or "turned", by drinking the blood of a vampire. Kamui and Subaru are pure blooded and Kamui is responsible for turning Fay. Vampires are explicitly stated not to be vulnerable to sun or holy water and while they are long-lived and have incredible healing capacity, they are not outright immortal. (This is also basic rule of the CLAMP-verse, everything no matter how powerful dies eventually.) Vampirism comes with a couple nifty side effects like enhanced speed and strength, nails that can turn into massive claws, and golden, slit-pupiled eyes like a cat's. There is also an interesting twist on the need to drink another's blood, at least for turned vampires, as when the turning is performed, the old vampire's blood can be mixed with the blood of a human who will become the new vampire's sole host. Kurogane agrees to become Fay's host in order to save his life. The only on-screen feeding seen so far has NOT gone for the usual jugular-biting, but rather from an intentional wound in the wrist. The relationship between the particular vampire and host may have had something to do with it... (not that it's stopped the fans from imagining the "possibilities")
  • Bisco Hatori's manga Millennium Snow features vampires similar to the ones in Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle: they are not hurt by sunlight or crosses, and are not really immortal, living for about a thousand years. Millennium Snow's vampires do not strictly have to drink blood to survive, although doing without requires them to eat a lot of food to keep up their energy. When one of these vampires drinks the blood of a human, it forms a bond between them which extends the human's lifespan to match the vampire's, and that human becomes the vampire's sole source of blood. These vampires are also able to fly, and drinking some of their blood can heal a human, although It Only Works Once.
  • Mahou Sensei Negima borrows the "Shinso"/"True Ancestor" term from the Nasuverse (though Del Rey may have translated it differently). The primary example, of course, is Evangeline A. K. McDowell. Among other things, she can fly, walk freely in the sunlight, is perfectly comfortable wearing a crucifix necklace, does not appear to need blood to survive (although it makes her considerably more powerful), and seems to be virtually invincible (though a flashback shows her being easily subdued by being dumped into a pot of garlic and leek soup). She also has the ability to control the people she's drank blood from. To top it off, she's a supremely powerful mage who, on the one occasion her powers were completely unsealed, essentially curb-stomped a demon god.
    • How exactly one becomes a Shinso is so far unknown, since a flashback indicates that Eva was born human and had all the normal weaknesses at first. However, it apparently involves a ritual that can be done by a lone sorcerer, and does not need consent from the target. Eva was understandably pissed about it, so she killed the guy who turned her.
  • One of Bleach's earlier arcs focused on the Bounts, a tribe of artificially developed supernatural soul-suckers. Historically, they've been known as vampires although they notably don't conform to many of the usual tales; for example, people simply die after being a Bount's meal. And no one knew about the talking supernaturally powered dolls, all with German names and summon commands.
  • How different are the "Vampires" in Osamu Tezuka's "Vampires"? Well, they're actually werewolves.
  • In Vampire Hunter D movie, the mere presence of a vampire noble causes all sorts of minor disasters — crosses bend out of shape, mirrors crack, flowers die... They must find it hard to make any kind of casual visits.
    • They also have immense supernatural powers at night... and are stoic as all hell, a trait D the Dhampyr has inherited.
  • In Record of Fallen Vampire there is only one pure vampire (the rest are Dhampirs); according to lore they came to earth from beyond the moon and over time lost the need for blood (they kept the fangs). They're immortal, very sensitive to sunlight and the shape of the cross can effect them. the Vampire King and his Dhamphir enemies are currently teaming up to fight alien invaders, who are coincedentally hiding behind the moon and only want to kill half the earth's population...
  • The vampires in Vampire Knight are ranked by how "pure" their lineage is. Pure-blooded vampires—those that don't have any human blood in them—have all sorts of mystical powers and suffer little to none of the typical weaknesses. It seems acceptable for them to indulge in incest to keep their blood pure. Other vampires, that are descended from pure bloods but have some human ancestry, have some of the weaknesses of traditional vampires but still seem very powerful. Both types crave blood, but are able to satisfy their cravings with special blood tablets. However, humans that are turned into vampires have a much more difficult time controlling their bloodlust, and eventually lose their humanity and turn into nothing but monstrous, mindless killers.
  • According to Rosario To Vampire, a vampire is an S class monster, and as such one of the most powerful monsters in existence. Vampires have super strength and super speed, and a huge ammount of youki or spiritual energy. Sunlight does not seem to bother them, and neither do religious icons nor garlic. They are, however, extremely vulnerable to water due to its purifying properties; even touching it will cause immense pain. To compensate for this, water used for bathing and cooking is treated with herbs. Vampires do not need blood to survive, but they find it a delicious treat and can consume it alongside regular food. Human blood is supposed to be especially tasty to vampires, compared to that of a monster.
    • Vampires are capable of having children. They can donate their blood to a human, giving them a temporary Healing Factor and super strength and speed. However, the human risks turning into a ghoul, a mindless, souless berserker that cannot be restored except with powerful magic. If the human is restored, their strength, speed, and other attributes will be on par or even greater than a vampire, and they are not affected by the water weakness. Vampires can also shapeshift, but most consider it a lost art due to vanity.
    • Nothing said blood isn't required, just that Moka hasn't bitten anyone before. The neck bite isn't the only way to get blood.
  • In To Aru Majutsu No Index, their vampires aren't different. Not from normal people anyway. Presumably, we haven't met any since they're apparently in hiding, but we're informed that they're just like normal people; They love, life laugh etc. Aisa Himegame is rather horrified with her natural ability to draw them in and then simply kill them due to something about her blood.
  • Trinity Blood has vampire's called Methuselah, the result of humans being infected by a extra terrestial bacterium, they are living creatures, look almost totaly human and at puberty they develop a weakenss to sunlight, are able to breed with each other, biting of humans results in death of the victim. They are naturaly faster, stronger and more resilent then humans, although some humans can match them in combat with enougth training
    • Then there are the Krushnik the results of test tube babies being infected with nanomachines they feed off the blood of the Mesthuselah, have no known weakness, and at full power are basicaly unstoppable death machines, there are thankfully only 4 of them.
  • Yami No Matsuei featured a vampire girl who turned out to be something closer to a zombie.
    • In the manga, Muraki is described almost like an energy vampire of some kind.
    • In the anime adaption of the Yami No Matsuei manga, the singer Maria Wong (who was brought back from the dead and turned into a vampire by Doctor Muraki's sorcery in the Nagasaki Story Arc) has brown hair and eyes when she is human, but while possessed her hair and skin (and clothing) turn white, her eyes bright red, and she grows fangs and sharp fingernails. Once the spell is broken, she returns to her normal appearance... Unfortunately, she's still (un)dead, having killed herself months earlier after cracking under the abuse of her stepmother. In the anime, Maria still gets a Bittersweet Ending: she has some bits of energy left for a brilliant and very succesful last performance before she truly dies.
  • The vampires in Junji Ito's short Blood-bubble Bushes feed on the fruits of the titular bushes. An arch-vampire implants the bush into the wounds of human victims, and the plant will continue to grow and bear succulent globes of blood, until the victim's body is reduced to a dry husk. The only way a victim can save herself is to consume the fruit sprouted from her own wound, but that will turn her into another vampire.
  • Master of Mosquiton is a perfect example of this trope.
  • Hazuki in Tsukiyomi Moon Phase partly fits the trope by having royal lineage, but her hair and eyes are dark.
    • Justified by her parentage - her mother is implied to have been Japanese.
  • Miyu of Vampire Princess Miyu fails this on every count; she has brown hair; normal eyes when pretending to be human, and predatory Eyes Of Gold otherwise; and despite the series name, is not of royal or noble descent. Also, in the setting, vampires are a form of Eldritch Abomination called a Shinma, who police the rogues of their race and return them to their own reality when they escape to torment humans: Miyu is the one who carries out this mission. It's an unusually extreme Japanese Vampire version of Our Vampires Are Different.
  • Nightwalker.
  • Soul Eater has Mosquito whose appearance, depending on the amount of blood he's consumed, varies from a little old man, a giant insect, something kind of resembling a gorilla, to a black suit-clad bishounen (each form older and stronger than the last). The kind of blood seems to matter, as Mosquito is very interested in Death the Kid's 'D-type' blood. He doesn't get to drink it, merely cause the boy to lose quite a bit through (temporary) loss of limb.
  • Svetlana Chmakova's Nightschool plays with the "no reflections" rule a bit; a vampire who's been very recently turned still has one, which means that they can still regain their humanity if they're taken to a healer quickly enough. They also face losing their minds and turning into "Rippers" as they get older, which are little more than withered husks with a ravenous desire to feed.
    Teresa: It's not even blood they want, not really. It's life. A taste, any taste of what they once had.
  • The male crossdressing vampire Lady Bat from Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch is rather mysterious, its said that he feeds from memories instead of blood, but in a later manga chapter he said:
    Lady Bat: Ah, the sweet scent of mermaid blood emaning from your necks...
He also can sing a song which cause hipnosis to anyone who hears, which able him to suck memories/blood withouth resistance. Oh, and he can also turn into a swarm of bats.

    Comics 
  • In the Marvel Universe, it is clearly established that a believing Jew can use the Star of David to ward off a vampire just as well as a Christian using a cross can. Conversely, a cross won't work for an atheist or a Jew. If you're an atheist, it might be a good idea to keep some garlic or one of those little Darwin fishes handy.
    • This, of course, gave Nightcrawler a Crowning Moment Of Awesome when the X-Men fought Dracula. Drac laughed when Wolverine tried to use a cross to drive him away, saying You do not believe, little man! Night crawler picked up the fallen cross, and held it out, saying, But I DO!
    • The best examples from Marvel are Hannibal King, Blade, and Morbius. All vampires with completely different origins and abilities. Blade being the strangest, he originally he was immune to vampire bites until he found Morbius who was a completely different kind of vampire but didn't get many of Morbius's powers(or weaknesses) after being bit, becoming something new.
    • Non comics simplify Blade's origins and just make him a hybrid.
    • Technically, Morbius really shouldn't count seeing as he's a regular Mad Scientist who injected himself with bat DNA.
    • The Marvel Universe has a large variety of vampire types, from Dracula himself to those based on the patterns of insects to "pseudo-vampires" created by science here.
  • Cassidy from Preacher is a vulgar, foul-mouthed, grungy character. Holy symbols have no effect on him, he casts a reflection and can be photographed, he eats and drinks (and drinks, and drinks...) like a mortal, and only needs blood for healing wounds and prolonging his life. He can get this blood from rare meat, and only bites humans if they're trying to kill him. Stakes don't kill him, but they hurt, and he has also survived decapitation. He can't change shape. Sunlight causes his body to burst into flames. He doesn't even have fangs! Despite this, the word "vampire" is never used. The closest the book comes is Cassidy referring to himself as "the V word".
    • A spinoff book contrasts Cassidy with a Gothic poseur vampire in the Lestat mold, to the detriment of the poseur, who gets killed by Cassidy after Cassidy discovers that he is feeding off a group of human Lestat wannabes using the false promise of turning them into vampires, and for being "too much of a wanker to live".
    • Even though Cassidy averts almost all the traditional vampire tropes (he's left with needing blood, although rare meat is good enough, and bursting into flame in the sun), it's revealed near the middle-to-end of the series that Cassidy is very much a metaphorical vampire, based on how he handles relationships.
  • In an issue of Badger, Norbert "The Badger" Sykes sets out to fight a vampire. Being politically correct (he lives in Madison, Wisconsin), he realizes that one cannot assume that everybody has the same culture as oneself, so he carries a variety of Christian, Jewish and Muslim relics to cover different eventualities. Badger is helped by a pig who can snuffle out vampires, although she confuses their scent with that of IRS employees.
  • In the first storyline of the Jack Staff comics, tabloid reporter Becky Burdock (known in her paper as "Becky Burdock, Girl Reporter", much to her distaste) is killed and transformed by an evil vampire. However, it turns out that she doesn't have to drink blood to survive, and even has no trouble standing in sunlight. She's more concerned by the vampire hunter who's now fallen in love with her and the demonic hounds who want her to join their evil army. Worse, her newspaper has given her the even tackier title of "Becky Burdock, Vampire Reporter"...
  • The Star Wars Expanded Universe has the Anzati, essentially a race of psychic vampires, featured prominently in the comics about Anti Hero Quinlan Vos, whose parents they killed. Anzati live for millennia, have no pulse, can regenerate from a lot of grievous injuries. They feed by mesmerizing they preys, before inserting the proboscises extending from their cheeks into the nostrils of the victims, and drinking their "soup". That is, their brains, and their imprint in The Force. Weirdly enough, they're also the resident ninjas.
  • In Grendel, Tujiro is an Asian vampire who has a largely different set of rules from the traditional European type. For one thing, he seems to change only into a cat, being hit with water is highly painful and fire are a concern. However, sunlight is no impediment for him, which he uses to maximum effect to give the Christine Spar Grendel the scare of her life when she wakes up in the middle of the morning and finds the vampire waiting right at her bed just to taunt her.
    • Later in the series, the vampiric plague started by Pellon Cross clarifies several details about vampires in the world of Grendel: each one csn assume a single animal form, called a 'totem', that reflects his or her personality; they don't bleed unless they'd previously been hemophiliacs, in which case it makes them ravenously hungry; they can subsist on blood from animals or dispensed by machines; they share Tojiro's vulnerability to water, which can kill them in sufficient amounts; and, while sunlight couldn't kill Tojiro (probably due to his age), younger vampires dislike it so much that they prefer to live far from the equator.
  • Aside from being several hundred years old the vampire in Theo's Occult Curiosities displays none of the traits usually associated with vampires: He is unaffected by sunlight (he spent 150 years living in the jungles of South America) doesn't seem to be able to transform himself into a Bat, etc. He does drink blood, but that is more because of a warped sense of duty, he is a devout Christian who believes that God has chosen him to purify the souls of sinners by drinking their blood, than out of necessity.
  • The Vampires in Jack Chick's First Bite are not only capable of getting pregnant (and impregnating others), but also lose their fangs once converted to Christianity. Of course, Jack Chick's work has never made the slightest bit of sense, but still...
    • Loath as we are to defend anything Chick's ever written, this one does make sense, from point of view of mainstream theology and conventional mythology. Vampirism is either a curse from God, a punishment for sin, or it's a dark blessing from Satan. Sincerely accepting Christ into one's heart would indeed be more than enough to gain absolution of one's sins, and obviously Satan would have to withdraw his blessing from someone who truly and sincerely loved God. This might be the first and only time Chick did his homework, but it seems more likely he just lucked into getting something right.
  • The DC/Vertigo comic, Bite Club, has vampires as an ethnic group. While they drink blood they can use laboratory made substitutes, They are only little sensitive to the sun but they can be killed relatively easily, also some are color-blind. There are many ways to become a vampire, If you are bitten by vampire bats, then you become an Alpha, Betas are the sons of alphas or other Betas, and you can also make more vampires by biting humans.
  • Swamp Thing provides another DC/Vertigo example with the vampires of Rosewood. Formed from a vampire colony which had been mostly destroyed when the town was flooded, the survivors (sleeping in sealed freezer units) adapted and became aquatic vampires. John Constantine explains that the vampire virus is anaerobic; running water is aerated and damages vampires, but they can tolerate stagnant water — and being underwater shields them from direct sunlight. They were even becoming fish-like.
  • In a Thor story in Marvel Comics Presents, the Thunder God answers the distressed prayers of a colony of Vikings settled on an island off the coast of what will be the New World. He is too late, and they are all vampires. Some attack him on sight, and instantly turn to dust. Their master, Dracula's Atlantean predecessor as Vampire Lord, Varnae, however, is almost invulnerable to him, since the gods of Atlantis that he worshipped are long gone. In a Marvel Conan story set millennia earlier, a sorcerer manages to turn Varnae away with incantations spoken in the names of gods of his time.
  • Vampires in Nikolai Dante are members of the Selene family, and most commonly beautiful women. They have impressive claws and are capable of extending black wings from their shoulders, and cannot be detected by any form of surveillance equipment.
  • In the cult comic series Trencher, the title character fights a vampire named Dr. Tushman who lives on farts instead of blood, frequents a strip club where they only serve baked beans for his victims, and, when he's finished draining a victim, puts a fake butt over their real butt in order to cover up the bite marks. Trencher beats him by lighting a match. Yes, it is as ridiculous and immature as one would expect from Keith Giffen.
  • In the horror series, 30 Days Of Night Vampires are portrayed in a manner much more terrifying than the typical metrosexual portrayal. Instead of just two neat, little fangs for canines, they have entire mouthfuls of pointed teeth, like sharks. Their bite transforms a victim into one of them unless the victim is immediately killed. They have superhuman strength sufficient to rip humans apart like phone books. They are also some of the most hostile vampires ever put to any medium, while still retaining a measure of individuality. Turning into a vampire in this series generally seems to entail degenerating into a dick.
    • As for their weaknesses, vampires in this series seem to vary based on the author. They seem superhumanly tough, capable of taking such serious injuries as being impaled, shot in the face or even having grenades going off on their person. As one vampire character puts it, 'It'll all grow back, except the head'. The only thing that seems to consistently hurt the vampires in this series is sunlight, though this is balanced by the fact that it seems to take very, very little sunlight to reduce a vamp to ashes.
  • In DC's Final Crisis, the secondary Big Bad (after Darkseid) was Mandrakk, a rogue, twisted Monitor who fed on the Bleed (aka ultramenstruum) - which is, technically speaking, the life blood of the Multiverse itself. Mandrakk had once been the good and wise Dax Novu until he had been corrupted and overwhelmed by vampiric hunger. It was further revealed that all the Monitors - meta-beings from a sort of sentient super-universe in which the entire Multiverse was a mere lesion - were vampiric in this way - either by feeding on Bleed, or, in a more metaphorical way, by 'leeching' on the stories of the universes they watched. One female Monitor, Zilla Valla, was seen physically feeding on Overman, a Superman from a universe where the Nazis had won World War II. In spite of the insane scale of the Monitors, Mandrakk was, in the end, killed very basically, by having a stake driven through (what presumably was) his heart. Admittedly it was a stake composed of the joint energy of most of the Green Lantern Corps, but the principle remains.
    • Mandrakk also had trouble coming near Superman because of the stored sunlight in his body, so he's weak to sunlight too.
  • Atomic Robo and Jenkins sometimes fight off invasions from the "Vampire Dimension." Robo explains:
    "They're not literally vampires. Sunlight, garlic, crosses, none of that applies. But we call them vampires because they're ageless super strong monsters that feed on the blood of the living."
  • DC/Vertigo's American Vampire plays up this trope. Skinner Sweet, a Wild West outlaw, gets "turned" inadvertently...and when he gets out of his coffin several decades later he's different from the vampire that turned him. He is not adversely affected by the sun, just for starters...but he's still an Axe Crazy Complete Monster. Of course, the more "traditional" vampires we meet in the Hollywood storyline aren't a lot better...
  • Roman Dirge's comic Lenore The Cute Little Dead Girl has a 420 year old vampire named Ragamuffin, who instead of sucking blood, kills and eats people to survive. That is, until, he happens to kill the wrong person at the wrong time, and is turned into a doll for the majority of the comic.

    Fan Works 
  • The infamous Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way of My Immortal is a vampire, but it doesn't seem to affect her much except for being Immune To Bullets, being pale, drinking blood, and having a liking for Count Chocula cereal. She does dislike the word "cross" to the extent that on one occasion she types it "c-r-o-s-s" and on other occasions changes it to "pentagram", as in "She looked like a pentagram of Lindsey Lohan and Hillary Duff", but on one occasion she still wears cross-shaped earrings. Apparently she could be killed with a "steak", which was probably supposed to be "stake".
    • Well then, she had better not go to any barbeques.

    Films 
  • George A. Romero's movie Martin features a main character who so grossly avoids every major Vampire-related trope, that there is some debate whether he actually is a vampire, or just a very disturbed boy. Specifically: he occasionally drinks blood but he admits that it's not necessary in order to keep him alive, he can go outside during the day with no ill consequences, and he has has no apparent supernatural abilities (except that he claims to be several hundred years old).
  • In Lifeforce, a.k.a. The Naked Space Vampire Movie, there is a naked vampire from outer space who sucks out people's lifeforce (duh). Humans killed in that way rise as lifeforce-sucking vampires themselves, but they're still not from outer space if they weren't before, and they're only naked underneath their clothes.
    • Plus they can be killed by a lead spike through the "energy centre" two inches below the heart.
  • In Blade, the title character is the son of a woman who was bitten by a vampire and went into labour. He's inhumanly strong, fast, and tough; he can stand sunlight, silver, and garlic; and he craves blood (which he avoids by using a serum, though at least once per film he drank blood and got "supercharged"). The vampires fear him because he hunts them down; in the second film, they want him so they can figure out his immunities and create vampires with them.
    • Incidentally, these vampires are ludicrously vulnerable to their traditional weaknesses, to the point where their survival for more than five minutes is quite impressive.
    • To summarize their weaknesses: sunlight (UV light) burns them, silver burns them, garlic makes them go into anaphylactic shock, anticoagulant makes their blood explode, and being staked through the heart or beheaded will dust them.
  • The Little Vampire based on a children's story has vampires that drink the blood of cattle like vampire bats do in real life.
  • The Hunger featured David Bowie as a vampire who loses his immortality and gradually ages later on in the film.
  • Near Dark featured Adrian Pasdar as one of a band of vampires who feed on blood, catch fire in direct sunlight, and can be cured with a blood transfusion.
  • Vampires in The Lost Boys are vulnerable to holy water, and have variable amount of vulnerability to sunlight. Some of them venture into the daylight wearing sunglasses, but sunlight causes Kiefer Sutherland's hand to burst into flames. Humans turned into vampires by drinking the blood of another vampire don't become fully vampiric until after feeding on a human. The curse can be reversed before this happens if the head vampire is killed. Anything that can be used to destroy the heart of a vampire will kill it, and leave a mess. Vamps don't need an invitation to enter a home, but if you do invite one it, you'll be unable to exploit any of its weaknesses to expose its true nature. In addition to such superpowers as strength and flight, vampires can make people percieve Chinese food as being made of worms and maggots.
  • Once Bitten has a female vampire that requires the blood of a virgin to look beautiful/stay young. This one bites her victims on the inner thigh not the neck.
  • The movie Fright Night also played with this trope.
  • In Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, vampires can go out into the sunlight if they receive skin grafts from lesbians. No, really.
    • Not all lesbians, just ones who never had penetrative sex and are thus, still virgins.
  • The movie Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter (1974) introduced the idea of there being a variety of breeds of vampire, with each one having unique weaknesses. So the first step to ridding an area of an infestation is to capture a vampire and experiment on it until you discover how it dies. (Which, if viewed by a passing local, might be misunderstood and get a pitchfork-and-torch-carrying mob to convene ...)
    • The vampires in question fed on youth instead of blood and were only killable by steel.
  • In Nightlife, a made for television movie from 1989, vampires are allergic to UV light rather than sunlight per se, and feed on adrenaline rather than blood. The last is played up in the plot. The lead female vampire wants to leave the killing behind and takes up with a doctor so she can have access to donated blood, but blood isn't (normally) donated fearfully, so it lacked the adrenaline she needed, causing her to starve on a full stomach. Only when an older vampire starts to gleefully rant about hunting and how blood tastes better when it is "full of fear", does the doctor realize the missing ingredient. Vampires are created by drinking from a victim without killing him, which causes him to slowly transform into a vampire. Vampires in this world are explicitly not undead, just people suffering from a virus.
  • In John Carpenter's Vampires, vampires have most of the usual weaknesses, however the original vampire, Jan Valek, is immune to silver bullets and garlic. In fact, the only thing that can harm him is the original cross from which he was crucified. His vampire minions can see through his eyes, and he's strong enough to decapitate a man with his bare hands.
    • Valek is still vulnerable to sunlight. Indeed, the plot of the movie revolves around him attempting to retrieve his cross in order to gain that immunity.
  • In the Swedish film Let The Right One In, the vampire girl Eli appears 12 but is quite old. She is very light and waifish, but has incredible strength, speed, and agility. She is immune to extremely cold temperatures and can walk barefoot in the snow without discomfort. Victims she bites begin to turn into vampires within about a day unless she kills them. Cats are particularly hostile to her kind. Sunlight will burn her, and she must receive spoken permission to enter someone else's home or else she will begin to rapidly hemorrhage.
    • She also seems to suffer ill-effects from eating normal food, a trait also featured in Near Dark, IIRC...
  • Shadow of the Vampire has an interesting take on the shadow-film-reflection triad. Vampires don't reflect, but they do cast shadows (as per the original Nosferatu) — and, of course, they can be caught on camera. The title may (as well as being a quote from Nosferatu) constitute Lampshade Hanging.
  • In the Underworld series, vampires are the result of one of the sons of the first immortal having been bitten by a bat, which somehow caused the immortality virus in him to mutate into a vampiric one. Vampires have great strength and speed, as well as hightened senses. They need blood to survive and will actually die if they ingest normal food. It is interesting to note that one of the vampire's leaders, the Elder Viktor, has passed a law that vampires are forbidden from drinking human blood (a rule which he himself routinely violated) to avoid antagonizing mortals. The vampires' only weakness is sunlight (specifically, UV rays), which have been weaponized by their enemies, the lycans (it is revealed in the second film that the UV rounds were designed by an exiled vampire historian in exchange for a comfortable life and protection). All immortals have an interesting trait that allows them to experience memories transferred by blood. A vampire's (or lycan's) bite transfers the virus into the victim's bloodstream. Best-case scenario is the human turning into a vampire. Worst-case (happens most of the time) is the human dies an agonizing death within minutes of being bitten (the virus did evolve from a deadly plague). Vampires are not considered to be undead, as they are able to have children, even with lycans (although this is expressly forbidden by vampire law, so just guess what happens...).
  • Santi, the teenaged protagonist of the Spanish film Shiver, has elongated canine teeth, a severe allergic reaction to sunlight and a tendency to view himself as a monster, though he never actually claims to be a vampire. He has no supernatural powers, and his condition causes him no small amount of trouble when he moves to a small town in the countryside and people start turning up with their throats ripped out and their blood drained.
  • In the movie version of 30 Days of Night, the vampires, though still snappy dressers, have pale skin, completely black eyes, sharp fingernails, and shark-like teeth. They tear their victims' throats out to drink blood, and they behead them so they don't turn (they don't want the competition for food). The vampires are also vulnerable to UV rays (a UV lamp does considerable damage to one), and beheading is also an effective way to kill them. Though they can speak, most just hiss and shriek. These vampires are very clever and vicious, and are essentially walking sharks.
  • Vampires in the movie Daybreakers are pale, have yellow eyes and fangs, no reflections, and a tendency to burst into flame in direct sunlight. They're also the dominant race on earth, and have hunted down humans to the point that they're literally an endangered species. This is generally not a good thing, especially given that blood-deprived vampires gradually mutate into mindless bat-monsters, and vampire blood only serves to hasten the change. Unfortunately, the fact that anyone bitten and not killed will become a vampire no doubt made it hard to avoid before society's infrastructure was remodeled. Vampires can be restored to humanity by controlled exposure to sunlight—and by drinking the blood of a former vampire.
  • Vampires in the Lucy Liu film Rise: Blood Hunter are almost indistinguishable from humans physically—they don't even have fangs, which makes feeding very messy. (They tend to slash throats with a blade if possible, but at one point Sadie has to chew through a victim's skin.) Their biological functions are less than clear—one minion of a vampire tries to suffocate Sadie with a plastic bag, and seems to be succeeding. (Also you'd think he'd know better if it didn't work.) However, getting shot has little effect except pain, and Sadie survives a fall from a bridge into traffic, though she's beaten up very badly. Vampires have a powerful sense of smell, and seem to be a little stronger and faster than humans, but not very much so; they can't break handcuffs, and it takes several blows to break a locked door. They die from crossbow bolts (presumably wooden) to the heart except Sadie, who survives one.
  • Vampires in the movie From Dusk Till Dawn are an interesting case. They are vulnerable against sunlight and wooden stakes. Religious symbols are also effective; a bullet with a cross etched onto the point is lethal. They often explode in a mass of green goo when killed. Vampires can disguise themselves to look human, but they really are monstrous. Appearance-wise, there really isn't a set rule. Some look more human, some look more animal, some are demonic in appearance, and some look like grotesque caricatures of their human forms. They can also turn into bats.
  • In Modern Vampires, humans are turned into vampires via STD rather than biting.

    Literature 
  • In the Thrall series by C.T. Adams and Cathy Clamp, the Thrall are parasites that lay eggs in the bodies of psychics. Not only are they not immortal, they make the Host infertile, use up the body's resources, and die within 3-4 years. They have dependent Herd members to feed on, and if a queen dies without laying lasting eggs in a new host, all of the people she "made" die.
  • The Laura Caxton series by David Wellington avoids most of the tropes of the genre, preferring to return vampire fiction to its roots as a subgenre of horror instead of romance. Wellington's vampires are completely inhuman. They reproduce by inviting suitable humans to share the curse, who must then commit suicide to actually turn (no I Hate You Vampire Dad here.) Once turned they become deathly pale, lose all their body hair and grow pointed ears. All their teeth are replaced by razor-sharp fangs. They need blood in the way that a heroin addict needs his next fix, which soon replaces their former personality with that of a violently psychotic junkie (something remarked on in the books.) They are ridiculously strong, ripping apart steel plates like tissue paper, all but invulnerable (when well-fed bullets just bounce off them) and powerfully psychic, but are expressly never stronger than on the night they rise. In addition to all of this, they can raise their victims (of which there will be many) as a kind of short-lived zombie, which will, as its first act in unlife, proceed to rip off its own face out of self-hatred. On the downside, they literally die and rot every day when the sun rises, complete with maggots. Although they can potentially live forever, they can only move by their own power for sixty or seventy years, after which they can't feed their growing hunger for blood by themselves anymore. This causes them to become immobile and skeletized and forced to rely on their offspring for nutrition. Coupled with their self-destructive need to feed, this means that the oldest vampire in existence is at most 200 years old.
  • In Under a Velvet Cloak, from Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality, the vampire colony does just fine with small amounts of blood obtained from local livestock. Their major interaction with ordinary humans is for sex (they do have high sex drives). They're nocturnal (although one with unusual powers pre-turning does manage to come up with a way to function during the day). Turning involves reciprocal consumption of blood, although one female character discovers to her sorrow that conversion while pregnant has major consequences for the unborn child. These vampires can be (and are) killed by hacking them into pieces during daylight.
  • Amelia Atwater-Rhodes' vampires take nearly every vampire trope in existence and throw them out the window. They don't have any of the usual vampire weaknesses, and are all very much human in their emotions and motivations. They can, on the other hand, be killed by a stake through the heart, decapitation, etc. and need to drink blood to survive. While they are not vulnerable to sunlight, most adapt to a nocturnal schedule. There is a ritual to changing a human into a vampire, requiring the exchange of blood. A vampire's power post-bite is determined by how much they fought the change, so vampires who were changed by force tend to be exceptionally powerful. Almost all of them have Black Eyes Of Evil.
    • The vampires also have very few weaknesses outside of a particular Witch Species' blood. Unless said witch consents under some specific conditions.
    • Some of the vampires have use of mental powers and Voluntary Shapeshifting if the vampire in question was a shapeshifter before being turned or if the vampire has a particularly strong sense of self, then the shapeshift is something akin to casting a glamour that isn't superficial.
    • More specialized powers, like the ability to dreamwalk, are specific to certain vampire lines. One vampire line, prizing strength, uses whether or not a victim fights against the bite as the criterion for who becomes a vampire and who becomes dinner.
    • At the same time subverted by another particular vampire line whose originator ran afoul of one of the aforementioned witches is cursed with some of the traditional vampire weaknesses, including the aversion to holy items. Unfortunately, 'holy' has a loose definition and anything the vampire loves or holds precious becomes anathema.
  • In the Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs, vampires become weak if they don't drink blood every once in a while. Most vampires keep a "flock" of humans at their house to feed on. They can avoid killing if they want to, but only Stefan really makes an effort to do so. Being a vampire's "sheep" has fringe benefits - it extends your natural lifespan, and gives you resistance to blood-borne diseases like HIV or leukemia. Vampires are dead during the day (but they don't need to return to their original coffin - at one point, Stefan spends the day in Mercy's closet), but come back to unlife at night. They can be killed by the standard methods, but the best one is fire.
  • In Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls, vampires are a predatory subspecies of humanity, living alongside, feeding, and interbreeding with humans. Being bitten by a vampire doesn't transform the victim into a vampire. Giving birth to a vampire/human fetus results in Death By Childbirth, and the Half Human Hybrid will manifest the thirst for blood at puberty. Interestingly, the younger vampires have lost a lot of the traditional vampire weaknesses, such as aversion to sunlight, along with their fangs, because of their mixed human ancestry. The older vampires still retain these traits.
  • Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files have so far shown us three different kinds of vampires (White Court, Red Court, and Black Court), splitting up different traits and weaknesses among them. A fourth, the Jade Court, has been mentioned but not not described in detail.
    • Black Court: Rotting corpses, ridiculously strong and tough but they have ALL of the typical vampire weaknesses. In the Dresdenverse, Bram Stoker was urged to write Dracula at the behest of the White Court, so that all of humanity would know about the weaknesses of the Black Court. This led to the slaughter of most of the Black Court, with only the strongest and most craven of its members surviving.
    • Red Court: Hairless, anthropomorphic bat-things in human disguises. Have weaknesses to holy objects and sunlight, but can be killed by old fashioned violence. Ensnare people due to their saliva being a powerful narcotic. Based mostly in South America, with some strong indications that either they were or inspired the ancient Mayan/Aztec gods that demanded blood sacrifice. They definitely have an ancient Mayan/Aztec motif to them.
    • As of the latest book, Changes, the population of the Red Court seems to have been completely eliminated via Harry using a "bloodline curse" to kill everyone in the Red King's "bloodline" - in other words, killing all Red Court vampires.
    • White Court: Nearly indistinguishable from humans. None of the traditional vampire killing tactics effect them (including sunlight) but they are the most mortal. Feed on life force by inducing emotion (fear, lust, or depression). Dresden compares the White Court vamps to succubi on several occasions.
    • The Jade Court has been mentioned by a Japanese Knight of the Cross in Death Masks, but has never appeared in the books. Presumably, they cover the Asian vampires, which are quite different from Western ones.
    • The "must be invited in" thing applies to all magical creatures and magic-users in the Dresdenverse, including mortal wizards. A home has an magical threshhold from the hearts of those who live there, and you can't forcibly breach it without cost.
  • While Artemis Fowl doesn't seem to have any vampires in sight (yet), The People in general have some vampire traits- pale, cannot enter a human dwelling without permission (they risk losing their magic), and sunlight is deadly or at least very harmful to them, as is holy water (though it can be countered by magical water).
  • Vampires in the Undead and ___ series by Mary Janice Davidson are relatively "traditional" — they need to feed on blood, can't take the daylight, get burned by holy water, and so on. Not only does the cross hurt them, but hearing "holy names" (God and Jesus) does the same thing. The main character, Betsy the Vampire Queen, is a prophesied exception and is unaffected by most of the rules.
  • The vampires in Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter usually look like normal humans. But when they're on the attack, their fangs become prominent and the pupils of their eyes dialate to the point where their eyes are entirely black. Exposure to sunlight does not kill them, but they are sensitive to it. A newborn vampire will blister in the sun, but as time goes on they adjust to being able to stand it for periods of time. One thing that does not adjust is their eyes, so they wear dark glasses when out in sunlight.(And many carry parasols for additional shielding.) Killing them can be done by burning, decapitation, or a stab through the heart.(While this last one can be done by the traditional wooden stake, other weapons work as well. A few include a knife, crossbow, and the ax, which is Abe's weapon of choice.) They can also be photographed and can only kill people by biting/sucking(turning requires the human to drink THEIR blood. The older vampires can also turn a fresh corpse, but the method is not explained.) Other than that, they're typical vampires.(Feed on blood, cold temperature, etc.)
  • Vampire-like creatures appear in English folklore dating back to the Middle Ages, with Walter Map and William of Newburgh being two prominent vampire story tellers. Not too many English vampire tales after that date, though.
  • Richard, a vampire in Sue Dent's Christian werewolves-and-vampires novel Never Ceese needs blood to survive, but copes with it in a novel way — he tells a sob story to people on the Internet about his mother needing blood transfusions and gets donations to live on. He still occasionally craves blood from a living animal, but can cool his urges by draining blood from livestock. One of the biggest weaknesses of vampires focused on in the book is that vampirism is a "curse" that prevents a vampire from interacting with, speaking of, or even thinking of anything holy — not just crosses, but Bible verses, God himself, churches, etc. Richard, with help of a mentor, can fight against it enough that he can manage to quote John 3:16 ("For God so loved the world..."), but still has to go through quite a bit of pain to do it.
  • Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen is not traditional about its vampires. For example, they can go on just fine without drinking blood. Kettle, the undead child, however does prey on people for their blood, and after killing and draining one hundred passers-by she has accumulated enough lifeforce to turn into a living little girl.
  • While Silas in Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book is never explicitly ''called'' the v-word or seen drinking blood, the evidence leaves little to the imagination: active only at night, no reflection, flight, hypnotic abilities, sleeps in a dirt lined box "when away from home", etc.
  • And then there's Bunnicula, from the Bunnicula series of children's books by James and Deborah Howe. You're reading that right. A vampire bunny, yes. He sucks the juice out of vegetables. A good bit of The Celery Stalks at Midnight was spent finding vegetables he had drained and staking them with toothpicks.
  • Anne Rice, who can take a lot of the credit for the modern Goth, angsty, bisexually curious, gender-ambiguous portrayal of vampires, had them originating through accident: an Egyptian Queen was accidentally bonded to a mostly harmless (if annoying) spirit during an assassination attempt, and became the first vampire. The more distant a vampire's connection to the oldest vampires, the weaker they were. One attempt to end the curse (by exposing the Queen and her husband) to the sun resulted in their skin barely darkening, older vampires being mildly discomforted, and "younger" vampires bursting into flame and dying. The vampire weaknesses to religious artifacts were psychological: Lestat, a non-religious (almost atheist) person in life, found they didn't affect him at all. Interestingly, despite this, it is revealed in later books that God and Jesus exist, and Lestat actually meets Him. And apparently, neither God nor Jesus give much of a damn about Lestat being a mass-murdering monstrosity. (Wasn't there a commandment against murder?)
    • Traditionally, the Christian punishment for sin comes after you die. Being immortal might delay this for a while, but the fun has to end eventually.
    • Although, it's stated at the end of Memnoch the Devil that Lestat isn't sure if what he experienced was really Christ and God, or a trick of spirits. And since Maharet, one of the elders, thinks he's completely mental, it's possible it was all just a guilt-induced hallucination. (Later books never clear this up, either, though the only evidence against it is the existence of Veronica's Veil, which could easily be the replica Roger meant to give his daughter.)
    • Anne Rice's vampires seem to have a partially crystalline biology: Their skin becomes less porous and smoother as they age. Possibly this explains their growing resistance to sunlight.
  • In the Russian Night Watch book series, vampires can stand in direct sunlight without ill effects (though it does dull their senses), have no issues with garlic or religious artifacts and reflect in mirrors. Nor are they undeathly pale or cold- they seem perfectly healthy and normal because they are living off of others' lives. Alcohol, on the other hand, has much the same effect as holy water is supposed to - in one scene, the main character splashes a vampire he's fighting with vodka from his hip flask. Silver bullets and stakes slow them down, but neither is fatal. However, they can't enter another person's dwelling uninvited. They are stronger and faster than normal humans and possess heightened regenerative abilities. The more powerful vampires can change shapes, fly and hypnotize, but such vampires are rare. Like all supernatural creatures in the Watch universe, they can enter the Twilight, another "level" of reality that renders them invisible to the mundane population. Also, like all supernatural creatures in the Watch universe, they can only legally prey on humans if they have proper licenses, which forces them to rely on blood banks as primary source of sustenance. Some vampires attempt to feed without said license, forcing the Night Watch to hunt them down. Despite these advantages over humans, amongst the 'others' they are pretty much the lowest of the low and often used as cannon fodder by the more senior dark others.
    • Both light and dark others actually act as 'psi-vampires' amongst other methods they can draw energy by draining people's good and bad emotions respectively.
    • Also, as stated in the fourth book (and seen in the movie), the "no reflection" thing works pretty much the other way round: Vampires can turn invisible, and while invisible, a mirror is the only way to see the vampire. This has a simple explanation: he does not actually become invisible, it just manipulates the minds of everyone around the vampire, forcing them to ignore him, but light behaves as usual.
    • The stories about vampires being repelled by garlic and silver are revealed to be spread by the vampires themselves in order to throw the humans off the trail (it's implied that Stoker was eiter a vampire or impelled by them in his work).
  • In Christopher Golden's Shadow Saga, almost all of a vampire's supposed weakness are psychological. Any vampire who actually believes that sunlight will destroy them will be destroyed by it, but one who doesn't believe can walk around during the day comfortably. The Roman Catholic Church actually captured many early vampires and brain washed them into believing these things would kill them in order to control them. The only thing actually capable of harming a vampire is silver. In the third book of the series, though, a serum is invented that will stop a vampire's cellular reconstructive abilities and allow them to be killed.
  • The vampires of Baltimore, or The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola are pretty basic (true vampires create wraiths when they feed, they turn into bats, they are afraid of crosses, etc.). The difference is that they were awakened by the deaths from World War I and when they started feeding on live humans, it started the Spanish Flu.
  • The vampires in The Saga Of Darren Shan lack fangs and the ability to turn into bats. Most traditional vampire weakness except sunlight, will slowly burn them, like when you get sunburn, don't apply to them. They still can't be seen through camera, though, due to the vibration of their molecules. There's also a subspecies of purple-skinned Always Chaotic Evil vampires called the Vampaneze. Many powers and behaviours attributed to vampires are explained as distorted details of their culture (for instance, wolves are sacred to them, they believe that dying in running water traps a person's soul on earth, and they execute criminals by repeatedly dropping them into pits of stakes).
    • For more differences, the vampires never kill their victims; they knock them unconscious with their breath, open a vein with their ultra-sharp and hard fingernails, drink some blood, and use their healing saliva to close the cut. The vampaneze, on the other hand, drain their victims completely, giving them purple skin, red eyes, and red fingernails after a while, and also transferring part of the victim's soul and memories to the vampaneze. Both species are still very hard to kill and are superhumanly strong and fast, though not invincible, even against armed humans. They can "flit" by vibrating at such high speed that they can run fast enough to go from one side of a city to the other within minutes (Mr. Crepsley uses the static buildup of flitting to pick locks). They're not immortal, and age at 1/10 the human rate (1/5 for half-vampires, who are not fully transformed). They're completely sterile, "blooding" humans by cutting their fingertips and the human's and transferring blood between them. Half-vampires will undergo the "purge" after around 10-15 years, growing and losing hair, gaining and losing strength, and having their senses alternate between heightened and painfully-sensitive as the vampire cells destroy the human cells and fully convert the half-vampire into a vampire. Half-vampires are generally weaker and slower than vampires, but not as sensitive to sunlight.
    • The vampires are ruled by the Vampire Council, who call a worldwide meeting and festival at Vampire Mountain every few decades. The Council consists of Princes who vote on matters and select Generals, who lead and teach lesser vampires.
  • Simon R. Green's vampires (only seen in brief detail in Hawk and Fisher) fall under the "rotting corpse that clawed out of its grave" category, right down to mold growing on the skin. They generally have a servant known as a Judas Goat, who (by virtue of appearing outwardly sane, unlike Dracula's Renfield) acts as the vampire's protector.
  • Simon R. Green's other series of books, Deathstalker, includes a race of humanoids who have had their blood flushed out of their systems, and replaced with a liquid that basically makes them immortal. This liquid is also a well-known drug. These beings are known as Wampyrs, and they freely distribute vials of their blood in a known rat's nest the titular Deathstalker and his entourage eventually end up on. The love interest, upon reaching this rat's nest, proclaims that she has been hooked on Wampyr blood before, and sweated it out.
  • And in his Nightside series, Green plays vampirism for laughs: the taps at Strangefellows can dispense blood for polite vampire customers, or spray holy seltzer water to force rude ones to assume bat-form and flee. Usually while other customers throw things at them.
  • Barbara Hambly's two novels featuring vampires — Those Who Hunt the Night (aka Immortal Blood) and Travelling with the Dead — tweak the concept quite a bit: Vampires grow slowly more resistant to their banes (silver, certain woods, sunlight) as they age past their "death". This comes with occasional side effects: Don Simon Ysidro and his sire Rhys developed a condition called bleaching, where they turned into near-albinos, and the Bey of Constantinople became unable to fully create new vampires — attempts simply produced a functioning mind in a rotting body. They're also psychic, able to affect people's minds — the famed "dissolve into mist" act is just mentally blanking a person's ability to focus on them, and since they feed on the psychic energies of their prey's death-by-bite, they cannot feed without killing. They all cast psychic glamours that improve their appearance — even the ones that aren't vain about their appearance prefer to at least seem alive, which without the glamour it's immediately obvious they're not. They avoid mirrors not because they aren't reflected, but because they are, and the mirror shows their true unglamourous appearance.
  • Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire series keeps some tropes, tosses some, and invents a couple new ones.
    • When vampires are starved for blood, they seem invariably to pick a target of their gender preference and are inclined to have sex with it while feeding from it, whether the target is willing or not. Ew.
    • When vampires are staked, their bodies do disintegrate into flaky ash, but it isn't necessarily instantaneous. It can be, or it can take a few minutes.
    • Sharing blood is an erotic experience on par with sex if the vampire has an emotional attachment to the person sharing it.
    • Vampires regard themselves as a different, superior species from humans, seeming to be embarrassed by [or forgotten] that they were human once.
    • Vamps can and do just stop and go into what Sookie calls "vampire downtime", where they become statues until something needs their attention.
    • Fairy blood is a particular delicacy to vampires, nigh-irresistable.
    • Vampires have complex and convoluted politics and laws.
    • The human world is aware of vampires, and has varying reactions to this knowledge. Despite this, Arbitrary Skepticism prevails.
    • The creation of synthetic blood is what caused the vampire populace to go public. They can drink it and survive on it, but they still prefer it straight from the real source. Truth In Television indicates synthetic blood is becoming available in Real Life. Let's hope it stops there.
  • In The Hollows series by Kim Harrison, the saliva contains neurotransmitters that make the pain of a vampire's bite feel like pleasure. Vampires can also sensitize their victim's bite so that only that vampire can affect the victim, leaving the victim mentally bound to that vampire. There are two kinds of vampires, living and undead.
    • Living vampires are normal humans infected with the vampire virus. They are divided into two groups, high- and low-blood.
    • Low-blood vampires are normal humans that have been infected by an undead vampire, and have only a small amount of the benefits the virus grants, such as increased strength and speed, as well as the craving for blood. When low-blood vampires die, be it of natural causes or otherwise, they simply die like any other human, unless an undead vampire is there at the moment of death to bring them back as an undead.
    • High-blood vampires are vampires that were born already infected by the virus, and having been their development in the womb influenced by it. They have increased strength and speed, more so than low-blood vamps, but not as much as the undead. They also have a greater craving for blood than low-blood vampires, but it is not essential to their existence. When a high-blood vamp dies, no matter the cause, they rise again as an undead the next sundown. When vampires become undead, they gain the full physical benefits of the vampire virus, but lose their souls in the process. They now have the ability to turn humans into vampires and bespell even unwilling hosts.
    • Vampires spend most of the money made during their human lifetimes in order to procure spells that will keep them looking young and immortal. They don't automatically stay permanently fixed in the bloom of youth at the time of death. They age into horrible decrepit-looking monsters.
  • The changers in P.C. Hodgell's Chronicles of the Kencyrath are never described as vampires but follow a lot of vampire tropes. They are created by sex, it seems, by coupling with vile, corrupted creatures of Perimal Darkling, the crawling, infectious chaos. The Darkling influence in them gives them long life, and the ability to shape-shift, both to mimic other humans and to take on a bat-like flying form. They become dependent on blood for energy, and have superhuman speed and toughness. They shun sunlight to a degree but can endure it, but fire is fatal to them, since their corrupted blood is intensely flammable. A vampirish trait is also seen in some Shanir (God-touched) Kencyr; Randiroc, for instance, can only consume blood, milk and honey, and the latter hurts his teeth.
  • Nina Kiriki Hoffman's Spirits That Walk In Shadow features a species of psychic vampires called viri. These Emotion Eaters feed on both positive and negative emotions and have the ability to sense and manipulate the feelings of others. They can take any shape, and it is implied they can even become inanimate objects, though they usually take the appearance of attractive humans for hunting purposes. They have the ability to instinctively locate lonely humans with emotional voids in their lives, and take on the form and persona of the ideal substitute parent, child, friend, lover, etc. They can put humans in trances and erase memories, and also induce feelings of happiness and attraction in their presence, along with any other feeling they want to cause. What's especially unique is their reproductive cycle. When they drain an excessive amount of emotional energy,they put on more physical mass until they finally split and form a new viri through binary fission. Feeding from other types of magical beings gives them more energy than feeding from humans, sometimes too much to handle. Viri can only be killed by other viri, so there are certain individuals of the species that act as vigilante law enforcers, to stop other viri who threaten The Masquerade or treat victims with excessive cruelty i.e. leaving them in a vegetative state or inducing severe depression to feed off of negative feelings instead of positive ones.
  • In Charlie Huston's Joe Pitt series, vampirism is referred to as the Vyrus. Once somebody has been infected by the Vyrus, they must drink blood regularly or else suffer severe withdrawal symptoms. The more they drink, the stronger they are and drinking blood also slows the aging process. If the Vyrus is starved for too long it takes the body over, producing a brief period of incredible strength and speed that normal vampires cannot hope to match. Drinking blood will cure most injuries, but if a vampire should lose a finger or an eye, it won't grow back. Destroying the head or the heart will kill them. Even limited exposure to sunlight (going out for a brief period of time with all available areas of skin well covered) will burn them badly and complete exposure to sunlight will cause the body to swell up with multiple tumours in a matter of minutes.
  • Catherine Jinks' The Reformed Vampire Support Group is basically made of this trope. Not only are vampires not supernaturally fast, strong, or sexy, but they're actually much weaker than average humans. They're frozen at the age they were when changed, clinically dead from dawn to dusk, susceptible to both sunlight and artificial light (the protagonist, Nina, mentions that her eyes bleed from looking at streetlamps), and have very weak stomachs. Being staked through the heart causes them to disintegrate into ash. Other wounds, while not causing death, never heal. After many years, a vampire often becomes cowardly and apathetic, rarely leaving his or her home. In addition, becoming a vampire makes one less attractive; the novel's vampires are all described as extremely thin and sallow.
  • Hideyuki Kikuchi's Vampire Hunter D (novels): The vampires do suffer from many of the traditional weaknesses outlined here, but none of the humans ever know this, due to long years of conditioning against the information by the vampires who ruled humanity for centuries after the nuclear war that led to the setting. This lends the titular character an unexpected advantage on several occasions.
  • In Stephen King's novel Salem's Lot, the most powerful vampire (Barlow) must lie still in his coffin during the day, but is still conscious and can use psychic projection and control the will of humans if they look in his eyes. The humans that he bites turn into a kind of semi-conscious vampiric drone, which exist primarily to serve him and infect others.
    • Vampires also appear in the Dark Tower series, in which they are classified into three types. Both Type I and Type II vampires are fairly traditional; the former are ancient and can transform humans into Type II's. (Crosses work, but are subject to the power of faith. The priest from Salem's Lot, whose cross failed when his faith did, reappears and is able to ward them off with belief alone.) Type III vampires drink blood, but are immune to sunlight, and cannot turn people into other vampires, although they can pass HIV. They disappear when killed.
  • The Damon Knight short story Eripmav features the ultimate in Our Vampires Are Different: It's a vampire from a species of sapient plants. Naturally, it's a sap-sucker.
    • And vulnerable to a steak through the heart.
  • In the Vampire Earth series by E.E. Knight, most people are familiar with Reapers, nearly indestructible beasts that drink human blood to survive, and drain human life force to transmit to their masters. They are sluggish and half-blind in sunlight, but are not actually harmed significantly by it. Their masters, psychic aliens that eat human life force, have hypnotic powers, making it dangerous to meet their eyes.
  • Three kinds of vampires appear in Mercedes Lackey's Children of the Night.
    1. "Classic" Western vampires. The vampire Andre explains to the protagonist that some of the folklore is true, but some was made up. Specifically, he describes the "crossing water" limitation as "We are territorial, and often mark our borders with rivers. You might as well say that we do not cross major roads, or mountain ranges." He also has Super Strength, no reflection, serious burns from sunlight (but managed to escape captivity and cross half the city to find shelter), and greater damage from wooden weapons. However, he's not affected by garlic (in fact, makes a joke about being able to smell it from some chicken soup), and when confronted with a cross takes it out of her hand, kisses it and returns it to her. Drawing blood gives the "victim" intense pleasure, too.
    2. The "psi-vamp", an Emotion Eater. Psi-vamps can draw from "higher" energies (excitement, pleasure), or from the "darker' ones — anger, hatred, fear. They can also directly trigger the emotions they want from their victims, and if they feed fully can kill or "burn out" a victim. They have Super Strength, can live entirely off the energies (don't need to eat, and don't derive value from it anyway), but are badly affected by sunlight or any bright light (worse than Andre, the classic vampire). A small band at a club is changed into psi-vamps when they take a strange new drug - the one who doesn't change is killed and replaced by the third kind.
    3. The gaki, one of the types from Japan. Apparently there are several types. Harmless ones feed on smoke, perfume, music, etc, but there are three that are killers: blood, fear, and soul. The gaki in this one is a souleater; its natural form is like a cloud, and it can take the form of its victims. It is vulnerable only in the latter state. It teams up with the psi-vamps because they have different weaknesses and eat different parts of the victim.
  • The vampires in Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist possess most of the classic vampire features, but also have a number of deviations from the norm; a stake to the chest just above the heart heart kills them because they have a second rudimentary brain there, their fangs can be grown at will (along with claws and a wing-like membrane), and vampires who are killed in any way except sunlight, fire or staking will continue on as mostly mindless "undead", who are extremely strong and seem to be nearly unkillable (fire is apparently all that will put them down for good). Eli also subverts the whole "sexually ambiguous vampire" trope by actually being a cross-dressing boy whose genitalia were removed by the vampire who bit him.
  • In Brian Lumley's Necroscope series of novels, vampires have one of the strangest life cycles imaginable. They start out as mushrooms which give off spores which infect people (or other animals - if no humans are accessible, they'll start with something else and work their way up by host-hopping). The spore-infection develops into a slug which fuses to the nervous system, granting vampiric powers and weaknesses (which in this case include the ability to morph and shape flesh like play-doh). They also, obviously, become hideously murderous and sociopathic. The slug can, at least for a time, leave its host for a new one or to escape if the body is being killed. In this way, the "vampire" is actually the slug and not the host, but the two basically become one. If a vampire truly is killed, more mushrooms come from its body. The hosts can lay eggs which then infest other people, creating a new worm. They are still vulnerable to daylight, silver and garlic, and can be killed by bubonic plague and leprosy. They can also create heinous Body Horror monstrosities, including flying mounts and such.
  • Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend is set Twenty Minutes Into The Future, in a world where most of the human population have been transformed into vampires by a plague. The novel goes to great length to set up biological and anatomical reasons for why these vampires behave in accordance with traditional vampire tropes, i.e. psychological aversion to mirrors and religious symbols, lack of skin pigmentation causing intense pain on exposure to sunlight, and so on. They are, however, extraordinarily stupid, almost like zombies, sometimes incoherent, not even bothering to employ tactics to try and draw Neville out, or traps (the only tactic shown are female vampires taking off their clothes to try and entice the sex-starved Neville out, and Ben's psychological war and his constant hiding). Many future vampire novels drew on the book for its inspiration. Its major film adaptations, The Omega Man and the eponymous 2007 film, retain the photophobia and albinism but drop the vampire conceit — The Omega Man simply refers to them as mutants, and I Am Legend gives them no particular name (though they are referred to as "Dark-Seekers").
    • The Vincent Price B-film The Last Man On Earth, also based(-ish) on the story, does refer to them as Vampires, but also plays up the disease/sci fi elements.
  • Robin McKinley's Sunshine has vampirism being technically illegal in a world full of various types of demons and other supernatural beings which are as morally varied as normal people. Wood is only the best option for staking (specifically applewood grown alongside mistletoe), as other materials may work with much more difficulty. In contrast to other styles of 'aging,' the older a vampire gets the weaker he is physically, to the point where even reflected sunlight (i.e., moonlight) can burn them, although they typically get increased Psychic Powers and run gangs in compensation. There are "different" ways of being vampires, however, meaning there is at least one friendly vampire.
    • Very old vampires can't even say the word "Sunshine" or even "ray" — conveniently for the heroine, because they also have name magic, and her nicknames are "Sunshine" and "Rae" (short for "Raven").
  • Stephenie Meyer's vampires, from the Twilight series, are a little different from the norm. The main vampires fall into the category of "Friendly Neighborhood Vampires", subsisting on animal blood only, but there are "evil" vampires, who are portrayed a little like Anne Rice's vampires: callous and indifferent towards humans but not at all villainous. The Twilight vampires are beautiful, have an entrancing smell and voice; they sparkle when standing under direct sunlight. They can only be killed by dismembering them and burning the pieces; a feat made all the more difficult by their diamond-hard bodies, unnatural strength and speed. Some vampires also have a special ability that could be based on their personality (mind-reading, precognition, mental shield, etc). And instead of two neat teeth marks on the jugular, their preferred method of feeding is ripping their victims into pieces and suck the blood that oozes out.
  • In China Mieville's The Scar, the Brucolac, a member of a species known as "vampirs", has many of the usual traits, but is surprisingly ineffectual and comes from a land where vampires are basically nothing more than pathetic beggars and junkies looking for their next hit.
  • Christopher Moore's vampires in Blood-Sucking Fiends and You Suck lose consciousness when the sun rises, heal rapidly (faster if they've fed recently), suffer burns on any body part exposed to sunlight, can be drowned or frozen and come back to life, turn into mist at will, see auras (particularly if the person is sick), vomit up anything they've consumed that isn't blood, get a sexual thrill from feeding, live for hundreds of years at least, and when turned, lose all physical traits associated with the life they've led, such as scars, freckles, bent toes from wearing shoes, etc. They're also "locked" into the physical state they were at when they died — while Jody's mostly okay with being a vampire, she angsts that she'll never lose those last five pounds.
    • They discovered in You Suck, though, that they CAN eat normal food if it has some human blood on or in it when they tried to feed on a drunk homeless guy and Jody got drunk herself. They determined that if the alcohol in the guys blood could affect them when, normally, they wouldn't be able to touch booze, then it would work on other things as well. Jody about has an orgasm when she discovers that she can have coffee and french fries again.
  • C. E. Murphy's Heart of Stone features gargoyles along with vampires. Gargoyles turn to stone while the sun is up, and a gargoyle speculates that confusion is the source of the (incorrect) belief that vampires are harmed by daylight.
  • Vampires in the Skulduggery Pleasant series can walk about during daylight, in forms which often look plain and uninteresting. They possess greater strength and agility than humans. When night comes, they rip their way out of their human forms, revealing hideous black, bug-eyed albino creatures, which are completely hairless, even stronger and faster than during the day, completely mindless to the point they will attack any living thing, whether it be friend or foe, and with mouths filled with razor sharp fangs. The transformation can be held off by taking a specially made serum, and a human infected with vampirism has a brief time in which they can be cured. They possess none of the traditional weaknesses and are incredibly durable (as Skulduggery says "The best thing for taking on vampires is lots of bullets"). The only weakness they really have is that ingesting salt water causes their throats to close up, suffocating them.
  • Demonstrated in Welkin Weasels: Vampire Voles. The major vampire is a stoat, named Count Flistagga. Mustelids in the books raise rodents such as mice and voles for food. The villain bites herds of voles and ships them over to the city of Muggidrear in order to infect the citizens with the vampire virus. They're easily defeated, though; Bryony doesn't want to kill the infected voles and instead renders them harmless simply by ripping out their teeth while they sleep. (At the end of the book there's a throwaway line about them "annoying respectable mammals by slobbering over their necks in back alleys"). Flistagga is not so easily defeated, though. He ends up being Impaled With Extreme Prejudice by Monty. It's noted that he can cross running water, though most vampires don't like to, but he is vulnerable to sunlight, and literally cannot eat or drink anything other than blood which helps them to catch him when he won't join in the toast at a city ball because he can't drink the champagne. He also apparently can't actually fly, but he can use his cloak to glide and can scuttle headfirst down walls in the same way as the original Dracula.
  • Vampires in Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series come from a number of various "Bloodlines", but are considered biological entities with "just a touch" of magic (they don't cast reflections, for example). Some may be able to transform, while others have corpse-like features, and others suffer from blood frenzy. Religious symbols and even garlic only affect those vampires who believe they can. Sunlight only hurts younger undead, and silver only serves to counter their regeneration abilities; any sufficient organ damage (like, say, a stake though the heart) can kill them for good.
  • On Larry Niven's Ringworld, vampires are non-sentient hominid predators that use hyper-sexy pheremones to make other hominids screw everyone in sight, allowing them to feed at leisure. Becoming a Pak protector can make them sentient, but the side effects of this ( loss of pheremones and all other sexual traits; switching to a diet of mashed tree-of-life root) means they don't really qualify as "vampires" any more.
  • Meredith Ann Pierce's Darkangel Trilogy: stay with me, because this is kind of complicated. The main villain of the trilogy is the lorelei. She makes vampyres (a.k.a. darkangels, a.k.a. icari) by kidnapping little boys (although it's implied, in the third book, that she could have just as easily used girls). When they're sixteen, she gilds their hearts with lead, drinks all their blood, makes them a set of black wings, and sends them out into the world. At this stage, the darkangel is extremely beautiful. Once a year, he kidnaps a young woman, forces her to marry him, then throttles her, drinks her blood, and puts her soul in a little bottle around his neck. This doesn't kill the unfortunate women, just turns them into wraiths (something like a walking mummy), so the darkangel keeps his "wives" around. When he's done this to fourteen women, he returns to the lorelei, who drinks their souls and then his, which turns him hideously ugly. At this point he himself also starts feeding on souls as well as blood. However, a darkangel can be made human again during the fourteen-year period with the assistance of magic and The Power Of Love. The lorelei's goal is to make seven of these vampyre sons and then take over the world. They're vulnerable to running water, a particular magic dagger, nightmares, and occasionally more mundane means (such as being attacked by a supernatural or, rather, Magitek-created guardian beast). If wounded, they neither bleed nor heal on their own; their skin must be sewn back together.
  • In Christopher Pike's The Last Vampire series, vampires don't have a lot of the common vampire traits. Their strength and skills are mostly dependent on their age and how closely their creator was related to the original vampire, Yaksha.
    • They're incredibly fast and strong. Sunlight makes them weaker, but doesn't kill them. They can be killed through pretty much any means as long as enough damage is done to them. Sita, the main character, takes a wooden stake through the heart (shrapnel from an explosion) and survives (though with a large scar that continuously aches and doesn't heal). Weaker vampires can be killed through lesser means such as bullets and knives. Stronger vampires can recover completely from massive wounds. Several of the stronger vampires are killed through explosions or having their heads chopped off.
    • They have no fangs, they use sharp nails to cut their victims' veins from which to drink. The older they are, the less blood they need to survive. Small amounts of a vampire's blood can be dripped onto a human's wounds to heal them. New vampires are created by a massive blood transfusion from the vampire to the human. Drinking (or getting a blood transfusion) from a stronger vampire can give a lesser vampire more strength or powers.
    • Other powers of older, stronger vampires include: mind control with eye contact, mind control without eye contact, "absorbing" moonlight to become as light as air.
  • In Nick Polotta's Bureau 13 series, the characters use "scenario loads", which are ammo magazines preloaded with one silver bullet, one of blessed wood, another of cold iron, etc. "Well, the ones shot with silver just fell down, but the ones shot with wood turned to dust...." At one point, they turn to a cape filled with indexed pockets of assorted "banes", to deal with an unexpected were-squid.
  • Tim Powers' The Stress of Her Regard pushes this trope to its limits, portraying vampires as silicon-based life forms from a pre-Cambrian period of Earth's history, roused from eons of hibernation when one of their kind was surgically implanted inside a human being. They combine features of vampires, sirens, sphynxes, and Pygmalian's statue.
  • Terry Pratchett really goes to town with this trope in his Discworld novels. Specifically, everything you've ever heard about vampires is true on the Discworld, but any two vampires are unlikely to have the same rules.
    • In Carpe Jugulum, Count Magpyr and his family appear to have overcome many stereotypical vampire weaknesses through conditioning (at least temporarily). By contrast, his uncle, "the old Count" (named Bela) was quite willing to give people a chance to kill him, since he could always come back to life again. Later books demonstrate that vampirism on the Disc is more like an addiction than a physical affliction: vampires can give up these cravings (for human blood, at least), given time and something to obsess over besides blood (like photography, or coffee), though they remain inhuman. There's even a support group for "recovering vampires", the Uberwald Temperance League.
    • In Reaper Man, Arthur Winkings becomes a vampire simply through inheriting a certain spooky mansion (which was, traditionally, inhabited by vampires, and tradition has this amount of power on the Discworld); as he half-jokingly puts it, he was bitten "by a lawyer". This means he is now capable of transforming into a bat, and forced to wear evening dress all the time. He does not suck blood from virgins, since his wife (who only acts like she's a vampire, and speaks in Vampire Vords if she doesn't forget to) wouldn't approve of that.
    • Discworld vampires are so diverse in their powers and vulnerabilities that those from two different villages in Uberwald will be vulnerable to different methods of destruction. In Carpe Jugulum, Nanny Ogg carefully questions a vampire as to which town he's from, then shoves the appropriate baneful item into his mouth when he replies.
    • One type of vampire requires a pair of carrots hammered in his ears as a part of the disposal method. As Nanny Ogg Lampshades, it must have been fun trying to figure that out through trial and error.
    • Undead invulnerabilities aside, note that Discworld vampires have NEVER managed to rise from the cat, as demonstrated in Witches Abroad.
  • In Spider Robinson's Callahan series, there's a vampire named Pyotr from Eastern Europe. He's the saloon's designated driver, and the reason why none of the saloon's patrons ever get hangovers (except for protagonist Jake, who has an unusual metabolism and only gets hangovers as a result of Pyotr). He spends all night in the saloon drinking ginger ale, and when he drives the patrons home, he syphons a bit of blood out of them, which gets him drunk. He crashes at the last guy's house each night.
    • He is described as having filtering glands in his oversized canines, and actually filters the alcohol (and nutrients) out of the blood of the patrons, leaving them without a hangover (but with the back of their neck being sore) in the morning.
  • In the Destroyer series by Richard Ben Sapir and Warren Murphy, vampires are a religious order of blood drinkers who believe eating meat destroys the soul. Early vampires actually had supernatural powers, but a previous Master of Sinanju destroyed all but the leader, who has since recruited mere mortal vegetarians into the cult.
  • In Justin Somper's Vampirates, most of the crew drink only once a week, and that from voluntary donors who are well-treated by the crew; the captain does not need blood at all. Also, Darcy can remain outside during the day by turning into the ship's figurehead.
  • In the vampire romance novels of Kerrelyn Sparks, vampires burn in the sun and are allergic to silver. They can be killed through a stake and turn to dust. They are really, really strong and fest, they can teleport and can have a telepathic chit-chat... just that every vampire can hear their telepathic chit-chat what somehow defies the advantage of telepathy. They have to drink blood urgently, after "Be still my vampire heart" they can survive a maximum of three days before they turn into uncontrollable bloodsuckers, but the fangs "jump out" even if they are only hungry. Also, if they are sexually aroused their eyes become red. There are two known kinds of vampires:
    • The Malcontents are the evil race of vampires, they didn't care for their investments and therefore rarely have money. They see themselves as the true ones and feed from humans. They enjoy killing and torturing them and think of themselves as superior to normal vampires who already think to be superior from everyone else.
    • The Vamps are non-human-bloodsucking vampires who owe their existence to the ex-monk and chemical genius Roman Draganesti, the protagonist of the first book "How to marry a vampire millionaire". He has found a way to make artificial blood which not only saves thousands of human lives but also makes human-sucking futile and Roman very, very rich.
    • From the usual bloodtypes filled in bottles which have to be warmed up in microwaves he has developed a "fusion cuisine" with chocolood, bubbly blood (champagner blood), blood light (against the consequences of chocolood) and even blisky, which makes the scottish Highlands-Vampires very happy.
    • A serum is developed which can make vampires stay awake during the day, but for every day awake they age one year.
    • Thanks to Roman, young vampires of whom there is a blood sample can be made mortal again, but the process is risky.
    • Again thanks to Roman, it is possible to genetically engineer a vampire sperm so he can have a Half Human Hybrid with a mortal woman, which doesn't seem to be neither vampire nor normal human.
  • In the novel Blindsight, science fiction author Peter Watts has come up with another take on vampires: that they are predatory subspecies of humanity with specific genetic markers, including a neural miswiring in the visual cortex that causes epileptic seizures when near-perpendicular lines are seen (referred to as "the crucifix glitch"). This was not a major handicap in prehistoric times, but once architecture was invented, it caused the vampires' extinction. The genetic code for vampires is resurrected by a medical research corporation; Watts rationalizes each of vampires' traditional strengths and weaknesses using a scientific explanation in a PowerPoint (ostensibly from this corporation) on his Web site. Several traditional vampire traits are explained here as a result of their being nocturnal, solitary predators who hibernate for long periods of time to keep from hunting their slow-breeding prey into extinction. In the novel, a vampire is the captain of the protagonists' spaceship, and the other characters have vampire-based gene hacks to allow them to survive coldsleep: "Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire".
    • In an earlier science fiction novel of Peter Watts, Starfish, one character, the psychologist Yves Scanlon starts to think of the Rifters, modified humans, as vampires after he discovered numerous parallels; very pale skin, unusual eyes (the Rifters wear their eyecaps most of the time), sociopathy, increasingly abnormal behavior, no breath (in water), seemingly supernatural abilities, aversion to mirrors etc..
  • Dan Wells's A Night of Blacker Darkness features vampires who are... amusingly pathetic, at best. All of the traditional weaknesses are true, but outside of immortality they've made all the advantages up in order to get human prey that thinks Freaky Is Cool to come willingly and please, please stop killing them. The gothic romance crowd doesn't find out until after they've been converted, and go off in a huff to found a book club.
    • Also, they have legends of the a vampire to come who will still be able to do everything normal humans can... which leads to a mundane, live human being mistaken for the Vampire Lord.
  • Scott Westerfield's young adult novel Peeps gives several scientifically backed explanations for vampiric symptoms: Vampirism is actually caused by a parasite that's evolved over centuries (thanks to natural selection) from a nasty case of rabies to a disease that causes the victim's mind to shun the things and people he/she loves. The pale, gaunt look of vampires is caused by the parasite burning away their bodies' calories, which also requires that they eat a lot to keep their energy up. Vampires won't perish from sunlight; they just really, really don't like it because the parasite knows that being out in the sun means a greater risk of capture and a dead host, which is also the same reason why vampires feel compelled to run away from the human beings they're familiar with. And that thing about the "vampire's kiss" is only the parasite's way of spreading itself to other hosts - for additional measure, the disease makes its victims easily turned on to make swapping fluids even more likely. Peeps's main character got lucky and became only a carrier, which gives him the superhuman strength and speed benefits without the "going insane and attacking the ones you love" condition. There are some other properties he finds out about vampires later on, but this entry is ridiculously long already, so read the book if you want to know what they are!
    • The sequel, The Last Days, extends on these ideas and talks more about why the parasite evolved.
    • Just adding more to the list of Justified Tropes, the "vampires have no reflection" is just the fact that they resent the appearance of anything that had significance in the parasite positives' past life; for example, they despise crosses because they were religious or have seen A LOT of crosses. It is also mentioned that if the vamp was a nerd, you can even use an iPod as the cross.
    • In the beginning of the novel, the main character is hunting a parasite positive girl who worshipped Elvis Presley before getting the virus. He uses paraphernalia of The King on her to envoke anathema - not because it's supernatural, but because of the scientific/biological reasons Westerfeld (brilliantly) explains.
  • Family Bites by Lisa Williams features vampires that don't fly or turn into bats — they can, it's just "not the done thing". They can also bite to kill or not by choice (and with practice can leave no mark at all), can see themselves in mirrors if they concentrate, and the more modern ones don't feed on humans directly. Newly created vampires are faster and stronger than other vampires, sunlight is a problem that can be got round by wearing cloaks and wide-brimmed hats, and the surest way to kill a vampire is to bury them alive (although stake-through-the-heart with optional beheading also works well).
    • One of the main characters is a half-vampire, who doesn't have any problem with sunlight and lacks most vampiric powers, but has to drink a glass of blood once a week, which he hates.
  • Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Short Sun, with its inhumi feeding on human blood and requiring it to maintain their ability to reason, but without most of the qualities usually associated with vampires (though they have a few); they could be described as essentially shapeshifting, flying, reptilian leeches.
  • In Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Chronicles of Saint-Germain, most of this trope is discussed in Hotel Transylvania, both the parts that are true and those that aren't.
    • Vampires are vulnerable to sunlight, but only if they are not on their native soil; consequently, they put some inside their shoes and in the foundations of any houses they own outside their native lands. (Saint-Germain's prot�g� laughed at this, and said she'd just thought he was wearing lifts in his shoes).
    • They can cross running water if they are protected by their native soil, but even then it makes them feel ill. If they are not protected and an attempt is made to drown them (as in A Flame in Byzantium), they do not lose consciousness or drown, but become immobilized.
    • They are not vulnerable to holy symbols; as Saint-Germain remarks, most of his kind are buried in holy ground. In The Palace, he even takes Communion.
    • They do not drink...wine. (Some variation of the statement appears in every book). They seem to feed primarily on emotion; they can feed on dreams, although that's less satisfactory than having a conscious partner. They cannot feed on any one person by drawing blood more than a half-dozen times or so without passing on vampirism.
    • They do not reflect in mirrors.
    • After they have died and risen, they can be killed by spinal injuries or decapitation (or, by extension, high explosives). If such methods are used to kill them in the first place, they will never rise.
  • In Elizabeth Bear's New Amsterdam wampire, or "the blood" as they prefer to be called, need feed only every two or three days and only need a pint on each feeding, thus they usually keep a "court" of humans, usually of both sexes with them to avoid killing any of their food supply. Their existance is known and is legal in some countries (like Germany) and punishable by death in others (like Britain). They do not sleep and can go out in daylight as long as they avoid direct sunlight which, along with fire, can destroy them. They are immune to holy symbols but are affected by magic, including conjured light. They, like all other magical creatures in this universe, require an invitation to enter a domicile the first time.
  • In Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher series, "high" vampires subsist perfectly on normal food, and drink blood only for its inebriative effect (which sometimes leads to outright alcoholism). Also, they are immune to sunlight, garlic, silver and any religious symbols, and do not produce other vampires by biting. On the other hand, they share some of the common vampire traits like being inhumanly strong and agile, not aging beyound maturity, not reflecting in mirrors, hypnotizing humans, transforming into mist and bats and being pretty hard to kill. One of them complains about having to regenerate for 50 years after being staked, decapitated and drenched in holy water. Beyond high vampires, there are all kinds of bloodsucking monsters, mostly non-sentient.
  • Vampires in the Kitty Norville books have none of the really bizarre abilities or weaknesses. They are undead and need blood to remain active and to heal, and only breathe when they want to talk. They have superhuman strength and speed, but their mind control power seems like just as important an ability. They tend to be cold-blooded, as well as arrogant and melodramatic, but aren't particularly evil. Their physical strength and speed is proportional to their age, as is what happens to them when a stake is driven through their hearts: old vampires turn to dust, but new vampires leave corpses just like a human staked through the heart would. They can appear in mirrors and on film or not as they choose; it's all just tricks of the light. They burst into flames in sunlight and get very weary during the day even if they are indoors at the time. They are allergic to garlic and holy water, which leads some people to use holy water in spray bottles as weapons. It slows vampires down, and inhaling holy water will incapacitate them if they're dumb enough to breathe in just as they're sprayed, but it's generally pretty ineffective. In addition, all the weaknesses can be suppressed by magic.
  • The vampires in Vampire High are surprisingly human: they eat 'human' food, have children, and can be killed by the same things that kill mortals. They can be out during the day, but need to wear sunglasses because the light hurts their eyes. They still need to drink blood, but only drink bottled blood that was donated to the Red Cross. They also dissolve in water except for a small group that can turn into 'selkies'. They appear to age at a 'human' rate, except for Dracula, who shows up at the end as the true form of the principal's dog Charon.
  • Barb and JC Hendee's Noble Dead series plays with the vampiric lore, made even more interesting in that the vampires themselves don't automatically know everything there is to know about their condition. They are faster and stronger than humans, can heal injuries rapidly when they feed, and can subsist on animal blood, if they choose to. There doesn't appear to be any prevalent religion in the region, so holy symbols are probably useless. Injuring their heart won't destroy them outright, but it will weaken them significantly. Most of them are disposed of by decapitation and subsequent cremation.
  • In the Night Huntress series, vampires can only be killed by shredding their hearts with a silver knife. They are inhumanly fast and strong, and only need to breathe or beat their hearts during unusual physical exertion. They can mesmerize humans with their glowing eyes, and wipe their memories or give them orders. Their blood can temporarily transfer some of their powers to humans. Their secret society has an elaborate hierarchy based on lineage from a Master vampire.
  • The world of Dragaera has one known vampire, Sethra Lavode. She drinks blood, is rather pale, is undead, and is several hundred thousand years old, but other than that she's pretty normal. And she didn't become a vampire after getting bitten; the explanation given is that the Gods needed her around but she refused their offer of godhood, so they let her come back to life as an undead.
    • Loraan from Athyra might also be one, as he's similarly an undead and like Sethra, falls into some traditional vampire superstitions (namely Animals Hate Him for both of them). However, being an Evil Sorcerer, he might be intended as more like a lich.
  • The vampires in Oleg Divov's Night Watcher (no relation to Night Watch above, probably) may or may not have been a result of a government experiment and reproduce through "initiation", If You Know What I Mean, which only works on 1% of the human population. Vampires have Super Strength, Super Speed, Super Senses and Psychic Powers, as well as Nietszchean pretensions (not necessarily unjustified). Vampires are weak against silver and die from hunger and old age (also, you could just dismember them with a goddamn axe, as one character is fond of doing; if you do it properly, they'll die just fine, it's just that it's difficult due to the whole superhuman power thing). Regular vampires drink blood to boost all their superhuman abilities to truly insane levels, are addicted to it and tend to be progressively lethargic by day to compensate for their crazy night life. They also decay in mind and body relatively quickly (first at day and then at night), eventually degenerating into what is essentially humanoid pack predators with superpowers and would die naturally within 6 years if they are not (as happens very often) killed way earlier by humans or fellow vampires. If a vampire quits blood successfully before its too late, he becomes a superhuman being that can live for up to 150 years, functions during the day just fine, has a metabolism that is twice as fast and keeps the non-blood-powered benefits (including mind powers that can now be honed properly). Those vampires nevertheless also tend to get bored with humans and have their own society.
  • In The House Of Night by Kristin and P.C Cast, vampyres have Power Tattoo going on, and worship the goddess Nyx. Teenagers are "fledglings" until they either go full vamp or die...and "dead" fledglings sometimes become a different, more feral version of vampyre. Our Zombies Are Different, anyone?
  • The Ak'Zahar in Maggie Furey's Shadowleague trilogy are named as vampires, even though they do not change anyone (well, except perhaps into 'lunch') and are considerably more feral and inhuman than most named here. They appear to be winged humanoid creatures, perhaps reaching your waist in height, bear poisoned blades and teeth and swords and swarm like hornets. This world is sectioned off with walls separating the different races, a few individuals of which are members of the Shadowleague who patrol the stability of the walls. It was pretty dumb of the Ancients to have their country right next door to the large human-inhabited Callisiora. So when the walls started to come down... At any rate, these creatures are really too mindless to count as vampires according to most definitions of the term. Maggie Furey's vampires are wildly different.
  • Tanith Lee's Vivia deals with vampires who appear to be two different types. True (for want of a better word) vampires are born as a result of sexual reproduction with a human who has been turned by the true vampire, and are as standard somewhat gargoylesque. They do however have a great deal of power and can create a perfect paradise in order to seduce their intended. Human vampires can also turn humans into vampires, although there seem to be conditions as to whether it works or not. One is described as having been too smart to rise from the dead.
  • Armenian folklore tells of a vampire named Dakhanavar, who sucked blood through the soles of people's feet. He could easily be tricked by two people sharing a sleeping bag with their heads on either end, though.
  • J.R.R. Tolkien's Silmarillion mentions vampires that are simply evil, blood-drinking spirits inhabiting physical forms resembling semi-humanoid giant bats. They've never been humans, and their exact powers and weaknesses are unknown. Sauron takes the form of one to flee Luthién and Huan from the original Minas Tirith (different place from the one in The Lord Of The Rings). See also Our Werewolves Are Different.
  • In The Guardians, vampires are half-human half-nosferatu hybrids. They are killed by sunlight, feel Blood Lust, and are neither bound nor protected by the Rules. Vampires born from nosferatu are more powerful and less common than those born from other vampires. All vampires have reflections save one, the source of that rumor, and in his case it's caused by a completely unrelated curse.
  • P. N. Elrod's vampires (in both her Revolutionary War-era and 1930s-era series) are superhumanly strong and fast, and can influence the minds of humans with direct eye contact (though it doesn't work on the insane or those who are thoroughly drunk or drugged). They can turn to mist, but not into animals. They cannot rest except in their home soil, suffering nightmares throughout their daytime "sleep" if away from their soil. They find the growing light of pre-dawn blindingly bright, and though sunlight may not harm them physically, they remain physically inert from dawn to dusk (waking refreshed with no sense of time passing if in their home soil, waking exhausted and shaken if not). Turning a human requires repeated mutual feedings—but is not guaranteed, and there's no way to know if it "took" except to wait to see if the human lover rises as a vampire after death.

    Live Action TV 
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer 's vampires are described as a type of demon (just one of many) and are said to lack souls, explaining their amoral behavior. They have "demonic" faces that only appear just before they feed or during a fight, or any other time the writers want them to look more intimidating — Whedon explained in interviews that he was unnerved by the thought of a teenage girl murdering normal looking people on network television, so the "vamp face" was created to allow for guilt-free slaying. Vampires have many of the usual traits otherwise, including sensitivity to sunlight (although very much the direct-sunlight-only variety; put them in any kind of shadow and they're quite cozy) and the stake-through-the-heart kill. When killed, however, they turn to dust instantly — a conscious decision by the producers, since they didn't want to devote time in every episode of a teenage-oriented show to "Well, let's clean up all the dead bodies."
    • Buffyverse vampires are insanely allergic to wood. Bram Stoker's Dracula needed a stake of ash wood severed from the tree by a bolt of lightning driven through his heart, and that was just to keep him in place. Buffyverse vampires however "dust" when stabbed in the heart with a pencil or chopstick, and crossbows are a common weapon despite their modern-day impracticality. You still have to hit the heart, though — Angel's taken wooden stakes in the neck, the arm, the shoulder, and in one case in the chest but just missing the heart, and was only mildly discomfited. The rib cage also seems to cave in immediately against wood, as vampires have been staked with blunt wood objects, such as a spatula handle or a tree branch, and without much force behind the blow (Xander accidentally staking Jesse, in fact just any non-augmented human staking a vampire basically implies their ribs can't handle any damage from wood).
    • It does have to be wood and only wood, though. If anything else pierces their heart, they're discomfited, but still alive. Well, alive in an undead kind of way.
    • Let's not forget the influence of Character Shield. Angel and Spike have both had some close brushes with heart stakage, whereas Vamp Willow in Doppelg�ngland was killed by being stabbed through the stomach.
    • In the BtVS fifth-season opener "Buffy vs. Dracula," Dracula had some of the traditional vampire traits that other Buffyverse vampires don't, including shape-shifting and mesmerism. These "special powers" are dismissed in exposition by Spike with a Hand Wave as "Nothin' but showy gypsy stuff."
    • He also displayed an immunity to being staked. When stabbed, he'll disintegrate like a normal vamp, but he can regenerate at will.
    • As well, Drusilla, in "Becoming, Part 1", used a mesmerism-like power on Kendra, enabling her to kill her.
    • Although, since only three vampires in the entire Buffyverse seem to have the ability of mesmerism (The Master, Dracula and Drusilla who was psychic before being vamped), it's possible that this is not a vampire ability at all, and instead is an unrelated magical or mystical ability.
    • On that topic, it is possibly worth noting that Dracula himself is presumed to be Romanian, perhaps giving credence to Spike's "showy Gypsy stuff" comment.
    • And, if Spike vs. Dracula can be considered canon, then it was confirmed that Dracula learned all his "showy gypsy stuff" from the elder woman who cursed Angelus with the restoration of his human soul. This is also the precursor of why Dracula owes Spike eleven pounds.
    • Although Drusilla didn't like using her powers when she was human and the whole mesmerizing thing has to be incredibly intentional, so she might have been able to do that before.
    • One classic power is anti-lampshaded in the pilot, specifically to distinguish from The Movie:
    Buffy: They could be miles away by now.
    Xander: They can fly?
    Buffy: They can drive.
    • Vampires also seem to age by becoming more and more inhuman, and stronger as they do. It is unknown how old the Master is, but he has mutated to the point where his skin is wrinkled, his fingernails are claws, and has the general features of a bat. He is also faster than any other vampire and it took a broken table to kill him. Even then, he didn't fully turn to dust, just his flesh did, and the next episode was spent smashing his bones into dust with a sledgehammer to prevent any resurrection. Another vampire, Kakistos, had cloven hands and feet, and was large enough that a standard stake didn't reach his heart. Though he still turned to complete dust when a pole was shoved through his heart. Then, there are the completely monstrous Uber-Vamps of the Turok-Han.
    • One episode of Angel featured the "Prince of Lies", a Shout Out Captain Ersatz of Count Orlok from Nosferatu. He seemed senile and frail for a Vamp, but he eventually flipped out and put up quite a fight.
  • In the Doctor Who serial "The Curse of Fenric", "Haemovores" can be repelled by a focus of belief. A Soviet soldier is therefore able to ward them off with a red star, while the Doctor can summon enough belief without a focus, by thinking of his companions. The doubting priest on the other hand had some trouble.
    • In the new series story "Smith and Jones", the blood-sucking Plasmavore (not the same kind of vampire) is impervious to sunlight, looks completely human, and drinks blood from human necks with a plastic bendy straw.
    • "The Vampires of Venice" features vampires. In Venice. Except they're actually stinkin' alien fish disguised as humans with ugly teeth.
    • The serial "State of Decay" had traditional vampires... IN SPACE!, on a Planet Of Hats version of Uberwald. The Great Vampire, however, is a giant bat-monster, the last of a race wiped out by the Time Lords.
    • In this episode, while Romana tells a soon-to-die ally that vampires can only be killed by a wooden stake, the Fourth Doctor offs the Great Vampire with a dart-shaped shuttlecraft, like the bowships the Time Lords used on the Great Vampires long ago. How he managed to hit the heart is probably one for another trope. Oh, yeah — when the Great Vampire dies, all the vampires created by it go to dust as well. Gotta love efficiency.
  • Double The Fist gives us pale, naked humans who use their capes to glide, as well as the basic fangs and sunlight allergy. They are also invisible on camera, and have fangs on their penises, according to the DVD commentary. The Crazy Awesome character of Mephisto was originally intended to be a vampire, but actor and special effects man Doug Bayne missed that brainstorming session. That this gone through, their vampires would have also had aids and their own cult.
  • The series Ultraviolet has "leeches" (vampires) who are susceptible to ultraviolet rays (found in sunlight), do not show up on any equipment, and are injured by carbon-based bullets.
    • They also violently explode if staked or shot through the heart with a carbon bullet.
    • And if another vampire spills blood on their remains they can regenerate, which is why the vampire hunters must gather up the ashes and keep them locked away.
  • Kamen Rider Kiva has the Fangires, stained-glass based creatures (resembling different animals and monsters) that can masquerade as humans and suck the "life energy" of their victims out through "phantom" fangs that appear above their heads, turning the victims transparent, as a result. They're also the strongest and most prolific of the 13 Demon Races in the show's setting, having dealt with most of the others one way or another (nearly wiping out the Wolfen, Merman, and Franken races and actually having wiped out the Goblins centuries ago.
  • Vampires in Moonlight can go about during the day provided they keep mostly covered up. They have a drink/drinkback siring process, and a special "vampire face" as in BTVS. They must rest in a cold place, typically a freezer or an ice bath. They can be photographed digitally, but not with any silver emulsion, nor do they reflect in silver mirrors (modern aluminum mirrors haven't been brought up). They also have a strict code of ethics aimed at preserving the Masquerade and enforced by hot vampire chicks, but that's another trope entirely.
    • The are a couple more differences between this show's mythos and traditional vampire stories. Garlic has no effect on vampires (in the first episode, Mick mentions that "it tastes good on a pizza"). Silver is toxic, but not immediately fatal. It will kill a vampire given sufficient time or amount. A stake through the heart paralyzes them, but remove the stake and they get better. Fire and decapitation still work, though.
    • Fire was used during the Reign of Terror in France to weed out and eliminate vampires, as fire would instantly turn any part of the body coming in contact with it to ash, while a human would only get a nasty blister and charred skin. This explains the most common ways to execute people during that time: burning at the stake and the guillotine. It is revealed that the entire French royal family was made up of vampires. Those of that line can also resist fire. Lance was shown to be immune to it, and Coraline survived being in a room on fire.
    • While there is no permanent cure for vampirism, a rare compound was developed during the Reign of Terror that temporarily suppresses the vampires' true nature. For all intents and purposes, they become human. They have no fear of sunlight, fire, or silver, can eat normal food, do not need to cool down during the day, etc. However, they also lose their superhuman abilities, such as strength, speed, and smell. A vampire who has temporarily become human can be re-turned by another vampire.
  • One episode of The X Files had Mulder and Scully investigate a series of vampire-like tourist killings in a small town. They went to investigate, and it turns out the entire town was vampires. They were able to go out in daylight, and even eat normal food. They also had OCD, which saved a drugged Mulder's life when he threw a bag of sunflower seeds at the one malicious vampire instead of grabbing his gun. He then blacks out, and comes to just after the vampire has finished and is about to bite him. Mulder is trapped in a trailer while the entire town surrounds it, and wakes up the next morning in their rental car, with the entire town gone. Scully, meanwhile, had had a very informative chat with the local sheriff - right before he drugged her, while explaining that the vampire that had gone after Mulder and other victims "just isn't who we are any more. Still, though he is a moron, he is one of ours".
    • Another episode, 3 (not starring Scully; she missed that episode) starred three vampires and a vampire wannabe. These vampires always killed their food, and were extremely vulnerable to sunlight. Exactly how you turn someone into a vampire isn't clear (the usual blood sharing is presumably required), the final step requires them to kill someone who truly believe that vampires exist. More interestingly, they cannot be permanently killed by any non-vampires, though this is their only real super power aside from being a little stronger and tougher than normal humans.
  • Stargate Atlantis has a race of beings known as the Wraith. The Wraith were once insects who evolved to a human-like state, but still retain their most basic instincts, which is to feed off of beings by sucking the life force (literally) out of your body with their hands, to rejuvenate their own life. Doing so allows them to live for thousands of years. It is unknown whether a Wraith can starve to death although there is an instance where one went delirious and spoke in rhymes.
    • It is said that Wraiths have a Healing Factor dependent on when they fed last. A well-fed Wraith can knock humans across walls and swallow up to forty bullets before dying. However, their physiology is similar enough to humans that Wraith weapons designed to stun humans work on their owners as well. Additionally, a retrovirus can suppress the insect DNA, transforming the Wraith in question into a regular human with amnesia (temporarily unless a viral inhibitor dose is also used regularly).
    • They're known to have a great weakness: a virus that makes a human not only immune to Wraith feeding, it also kills the offending Wraith. Plus, although they have a hive-like hierarchical society, they are quite willing to kill each other or resort to cannibalism if there's not enough food for all of them (as in the case of the show).
  • In "Justice is Served", a first-season episode of CSI, a nutritionist with Porphyria liquifies human organs and drinks them to get the enzymes she needs. Interestingly, porphyria is often cited as a possible influence for the creation of vampire myths, as the symptoms of some forms of it can mimic vampire traits; extreme pallor and sensitivity to light, receding gums which make the teeth appear longer, mental disturbances such as paranoia and hallucinations, etc. However, since vamps being harmed by sunlight is a recent invention, this speculation is questioned just as often.
  • Tragically few details are given about the specifics vampiric nature of Count von Count, but he is known to have the obsessive-compulsive bit and is suggested to have control of the weather. Uniquely, he also has purple skin, although if this is a result of vampirism, puppet-ism, or the combination of the two is unknown. He has been seen in the sun, although, again, his lack of actual skin brings into question whether other vampires of his world are similarly immune or if it is a puppet advantage.
  • Star Trek had a "salt vampire" that used its ability to appear as someone's ideal lover to lure victims.
  • Sabrina The Teenage Witch features a vampire who follows the Bela Lugosi mold to a T, though he's also a professional actor, so he may be hamming it up on purpose. He's repulsed by garlic and mirrors, and immune to witch-magic. Sabrina kills him by driving a steak through his heart. A porterhouse steak. Magic in the Sabrinaverse is largely based on wordplay.
  • In The Middleman, vampires can tell all about a victim from one sip of blood, including their motivations and thoughts. And they can only be killed by a stake of purest Carpathian wood. And sometimes their souls can get trapped in evil puppets.
  • On an early 1990s Saturday Night Live episode hosted by James Woods, Woods played a vampire who, before biting a potential female victim's neck, screens them for AIDS by asking questions about their past sexual partners and even takes the blood to a lab to get it checked.
  • In Being Human, the vampires do not really need to drink blood in the first place (they just experience intense cravings for it akin to an incurable drug addiction), and bloodbanks aren't good enough. They are also attached to their creator in some way, and able to locate the creator vampire from a distance. Oddly enough, drinking vampire blood seems to stave off cravings for human blood, for a while, anyway... They can venture into sunlight, but they're not exactly fond of it. A stake through the heart kills them. People wielding signs of faith (including holy symbols and recitations from the Bible) can ward them off. They need an invitation to enter homes.
  • The vampire in The Vampire: A Soap Opera has a special condition for remaining a vampire: he must kill three women in three nights, or he is doomed to hell.
    • This idea comes from John Polidori's The Vampyre and its theatrical adaptations, especially the opera Der Vampyr upon which the miniseries is based.
  • Charmed's Paige was partially turned into a vamp. They have a hierarchy similar to bees. Vampires only appeared in a single episode, because in order to save Paige before she finished transforming, her sisters killed the vampire queen, freeing Paige and causing every other vampire in the world to die instantly.
  • Vampires from Young Dracula have most of the stereotypical abilities and weaknesses, except for the ability to throw fireballs. There's also no mention of them being affected by holy symbols or water, the usually ignored garlic and garlic juice being used instead, presumably to avoid offending anyone. They can also be born mostly human until they're exposed to their Superpowered Evil Side.
    • To be fair, not being able to travel over water was brought up in one episode as a minor plot point.
  • So Weird: Fiona's family nearly falls victim to a group of vampires. None of the traditional vampire wards work — she tries crosses, holy water, and garlic. What does work is an angel necklace given to her brother by his girlfriend. Later, Fiona speculates that it worked because the pendant was a symbol of love.
  • Supernatural's vampires were intended to lack several traits of vampires seen in other media, so they tend to be, well, different, aside from being undead and feeding on blood. Vampire hunter Daniel Elkins thought that they were extinct and that he killed the last ones, but it turns out he was wrong and the heroes end up encountering some and learning why what they've heard about vampires was wrong. A pair of fangs? Nope. They have normal human teeth (making it easy for them to blend in with humans) and a retractable second set of pointed teeth used to bite people (or cattle in the case of a group of vampires who avoid attacking humans). Strong weakness to sunlight? Nope (not unlike Dracula in his original appearance, as opposed to how later media featuring Dracula forget this). The worst they get is a bad sunburn and the first time vampires are seen in the series, one of them is actually seen outside in the day with no problems caused by doing so. Killed by stakes? Nope. Decapitation works fine, though. Repelled by crosses? Nope. In fact, one of them wore a cross around her neck! In addition, dead man's blood is poisonous to them, so they're required to drink blood fresh from living prey. Humans are turned into vampires if they ingest the blood of a vampire.
  • Lost Tapes has two vampiric animal monsters as antagonists. The first are featured in the episode "Cave Demons" as nearly man-sized semi-vampiric/predatory bats with impressive wingspreads. The second weas out and out called a vampire and is a horrible brutally animalistic, but living, creature the feeds on blood from humans and small animals it can catch. The episode also portrays its lair as something akin to a racoon's or a pack rats, as it lives in the basement of a old home.
  • In Wizards Of Waverly Place vampires are extremely fast, are repelled by both garlic and pumpkins (Why people created jack o' lanterns) can go out in the day if they avoid direct sunlight and sleep in coffins. They can turn into bats or just make their arms into batwings so they can fly.
  • In True Blood, the invention of synthetic blood by a Japanese scientist (ostensibly for transplant patients) has allowed vampires to "come out of the coffin" to the mainstream public. All they have to do is drink TruBlood (now sold as a soft drink in most restaurants) and can "mainstream" more or less successfully, though a human notes "Imagine you suddenly can't eat any of your favorites foods, and have to spend the rest of your life drinking Slim Fast." There are references throughout the series to a Vampire Rights movement, along with a Vampire Rights Amendment (VRA) working its way through Congress. Much of the conflict of the show deals with the desire to treat vampires like normal people, but the begrudging acceptance that they are still natural human predators, and thus have to be evaluated on an individual basis. Vampire traits:
    • They are immune to crosses, holy water, can travel freely, don't need to sleep in coffins, and can be seen by cameras and mirrors. Garlic, while not lethal, is very irritating to them. Bill Compton explains that most vampiric rumors were actually invented by vampires themselves in order to trick potential victims into lowering their guards. Vamps are still allergic to the sun, and their weakness to it actually increases with age. They have to sleep somewhere during the day, preferably underground, though Bill sleeps under old floorboards in his closet. Silver burns their skin and completely paralyzes them. In the first episode, Bill is essentially chained to the floor by a silver necklace draped across his wrists and neck.
    • Though decapitation has yet to be mentioned, staking has definite death potential for a vampire. However, in contrast with most modern vampire stories where a staked vamp either turns to dust or simply drops dead, True Blood vampires explode in a fountain of blood and viscera when staked, leaving behind a disgusting, corn syrupy mess that's an absolute bitch to clean up.
    • Another major plot point of the series is the effect of vampire blood on humans. When drunk by a human who has been drained by the same vampire, the human in question will eventually become one too. However, when drunk by a human after suffering serious injuries, vampire blood has healing properties, and can rescue humans that have suffered severe (non-vampire-related) blood loss. Finally, when taken by humans as a narcotic (also known as V or V-juice), vampire blood has hallucinatory effects and leads to a greatly increased libido. However, Jason takes too much of the stuff and suffers a vicious case of priapism. Don't know what that is? Good.
  • Vampires in Sanctuary once ruled the world due to being better than humans in pretty much every way (getting thrown off a skyscraper fails to phase one). Eventually the other species rose up and wiped them out but their genes lived one in a few families. Nikola Tesla accidentally turned himself into one when he injected the last remaining vampire blood into himself. They have spikes that come out of their fingers, hugely dialated eyes and ignore sunlight.
  • Koishite Akuma (The Loving Demon) is a Japanese vampire drama similar to Twilight: the new boy in town is a budding vampire who falls in love with a human at school and struggles with his urges to guzzle blood and sleep in coffins.
  • The lore of The Vampire Diaries takes some major turns from other vampire tales. While they're still immune to the sun, a few vampires have special rings that allow them to walk during the day. They can also have the ability of compulsion. Crosses, silver, and holy water aren't a problem, but any kind of wood implement causes pain. A person becomes a vampire when they die with vampire blood in their body, and one extra weakness is to the plant vervain. When a human wear vervain, they cannot be compelled, and ingesting the plant is toxic to vampires.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Vampires in White Wolf's Vampire: the Masquerade are vulnerable to sunlight and fire as a whole, and various factors have led to the species diverging into a number of different "clans", each having its own additional weakness, some of which also come from the "traditional" list. (The Lasombra don't have reflections, the Ventrue have very specific feeding requirements, etc.) Vampiric powers are represented by "disciplines", with each clan specializing in certain ones. Stakes to the heart merely paralyze vampires in this setting instead of killing them.
  • Masquerade's Spiritual Successor Vampire: the Requiem goes a step further, and rather than the different clans being subspecies of the main vampire race, they're entirely different creatures who have just enough in common to coexist, making it Our Vampires Are Different... From Each Other.
    • Incidentally, both games take the rib cage into account — staking a vampire through the heart in combat (in other words, when they're awake and your time is limited) requires a miraculous degree of luck on one's dice rolls.
    • The Vampire games also have an example of complicating the matter of propagation. A human who is to be turned must be drained of blood until dead, then the vampire must immediately feed the empowered blood from its own system to the victim. Vampire: the Requiem additionally added the requirement that the sire expend a permanent point of Willpower on the process, to impart the necessary vital spark and stop the blood going intert as it does shortly after leaving the vampire's body. (as well as to prevent players from "embracing" hordes of vampires willy-nilly).
  • Vampires in Palladium Games' Rifts and other games are the spawn of huge, multi-tentacled Eldritch Abominations called Vampire Intelligences. They come in three levels: The Master Vampire, who makes a pact with the Intelligence to become a Vampire, the Secondary, who is created by the Master over a three-day "Slow Kill", and occasionally another Secondary when things go right, and the savage and feral Wild Vampire, which is what happens when a Secondary Vampire's attempt at transforming a human goes wrong. While they can be hurt by silver, wood, magic, or the claws of a Dragon, actually killing them requires sunlight, or impaling (staking) them through the heart followed by decapitation (just staking them turns them into a skeleton, but it's really a cheap form of suspended animation; remove the stake and you'll have a live (and hungry) vampire in under a minute.) and burning both head and body to ash separately. Oh, or running water. Not only can they not cross running water, but merely touching water in motion is dangerous, and can kill them on its own. This makes fire hoses, rain, and even water guns deadly weapons against them. They must also sleep in or near the soil of their native land; a generous layer of the stuff in their coffin will do. If they lose their soil, and can't get any more before the night is over, they can't sleep, and are easy prey for the rising sun. Finally, crosses ward them off regardless of the faith of the wielder (it's not religious but a property of the Intelligences' hyperdimensional geometry), and the touch of a cross will harm them. They are also harmed by the shadow of a cross falling on them. Many Vampire hunters have taken to taping a cross over flashlights or the headlights of their vehicles for an extra measure of protection.
    • The Nightbane game also adds the Wampyr, which isn't a Half Human Hybrid, but rather a mutation of a Secondary Vampire. They're invulnerable to water, and can stay out in the sun for periods of time, but are not as strong as a normal Vampire.
    • Vampires in RIFTS can actually cross water if they are "sleeping" at the time, or restrained in some way. If they are awake, they will feel extreme discomfort or even pain, as well as an overwhelming desire to get somewhere dry.
    • This may make it seem that Palladium vampires are weak, but keep in mind that in Rifts at least, they're capable of tearing tanks apart with their bare hands. Furthermore, nothing not listed above can even scratch them.
  • The Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay supplement "Night's Dark Masters" gets around this problem by simply listing pages and pages of weaknesses and quirks of vampires, from the classics like weakness to sunlight to lesser-known ones like obsessive counting and fear of sawdust, and then simply says that all vampires have some of them but not others. This is neatly explained by the fact that inbreeding and crossbreeding between different vampire clans has accentuated some traits and rarified others.
    • The Warhammer novel Drachenfels expands on this further, from the point of view of its heroine, the Vampire Genevi�ve Dieudonn�. And if that name sounds familiar to fans of the Anno Dracula series, guess who Drachenfels author Jack Yeovil is a pseudonym for?
    • All of the Warhammer novels with Genevi�ve are "abnormal" when looking at stereotypical vamipres. And just one thin I'd like to add: The blood-suckers from the Twilight novels? Those aren't vampires; Genevi�ve is a real vampire. Read any of those Warhammer novels and you'll see what we mean.
    • The Vampire Counts of the Strategy game, however, limit Vampires to five major bloodlines: Von Carstein (classic Dracula-style), Lahmian (female temptresses), Blood Dragon (Fallen Blood Knights), Strigoi (ghoulish and savage monsters) and Necrarch (Mad Scientist necromancers).
    • These bloodlines are also promeniantly figuring in "Night's Dark Master". It's just that there is always a chance of some sort of randomness in a specific Vampire's weakness (and to keep the players guessing about a Vampiric Antagonist's weakness). To make the players never to always rely on the same tactic against vampires.
    • The latest army book has dropped the separate bloodlines, allowing aspects of each to be combined in a single vampire, although the list of powers is still divided by the themes of the bloodlines.
    • In the latest Vampire Counts armybook, there is a section about the various mythical weaknesses of vampires and explanations on why some of them might work and why others are just myths.
    • And then there are the Varghulf. They are vamps who give in to their bloodlust and reverted into mindless predaotrs that look like giant bats.
  • Warhammer 40000 also has an entire army of Super Soldier vampires, the Blood Angels.
    • In one of the background novels, the vampire analogues are still subtly worked in- the newest trainees are locked a casket for an entire year while being transformed, they have many rituals and traditions involving blood, and aren't averse to drinking blood when they get the chance. They also make the longest lived Space Marines of them all, quite a feat considering that most marines can live for centuries if they survive that long.
    • And in the Captain Leonatos series, one of the Blood Angels marines is afflicted with Red Thrist, a rare Blood Angel genetic flaw that makes him degenerate into a monster craving blood. When it first activated he was held captive by chaos cultists. He broke out of his cell and killed them all with bare hands before resorting to eating their flesh when their "weak blood" failed to sate him.
    • In truly ancient 40k backrgound (from the time of Rogue Trader), there is a mention of an alien race commonly known as vampires. They don't seem to have much to do with the typical vampires, being shapeshifting creatures who feed on physic energy (their natural form is batlike though).
    • In James Swallow's Deus Encarmine, Arkio's metamorphosis makes him vampire-like, and Rafen, fighting him], explicitly thinks that they do not talk of that word: vampire. Later, in Red Fury, faced with Bloodfiends derived from their gene-seed, a Blood Angel and a Flesh Tearer (a successor chapter to Blood Angels) agree that it is vampiric.
    • Oddly, the Blood Angels are one of the nicer Chapters (relatively speaking) of Space Marines, probably because of all the self-restraint they have to go through to deal with their... issues.
  • All vampire PCs in Demon Hunters are of the Friendly Neighborhood Vampire variety by virtue of an artificial blood they can drink out of water bottles. However, vampires are still subject to something called The Chill: since vampires aren't technically alive, they are cold blooded, and they can feel it. The only thing which makes them feel warm (other than sitting in a sauna or something) is drinking human blood.
  • In older versions of Dungeons And Dragons, vampires had the somewhat inexplicable ability to permanently drain life force (in the form of levels) by simply hitting their victim in melee, which for sufficiently low-level characters (like, say, your average peasant) would basically translate into an automatic no-save-allowed death touch; depending on the precise edition and type of vampire involved this could be in addition to or in place of drinking blood. They were also resistant to nonmagical weapons, could create a Charm Person effect on eye contact, and had the ability to turn into bat, wolf, or mist form... as well as the traditional problems with sunlight, running water, and having to sleep in a coffin.
    • This was expanded further in the Ravenloft campaign setting, that included a bewildering array of vampires: Not only were the standard type given expanded weaknesses (and opportunities to NOT have those weaknesses) there were also Vampyres (living creatures that feed on blood) Nosferatu (slightly different powers than normal vampires) elven vampires (who kills plants and are vulnerable to moonlight) dwarven vampires... Even the dreaded Kender Vampire. Van Richten's Guide to the Vampires rather than dispelling the classical vampiric weaknesses spent a lot of time detailing how vampires got around them: A vampire could not cross running water for instance, but nothing prevented them from being * carried* (including in a carriage) a vampire could not enter a home uninvited, but Charm Person is a wonderful way of getting an invitation extended. Oh, and if you're thinking of hiding from Strahd Von Zarovich, remember that as the legal ruler of his domain he technically "owns" any house in Barovia...
    • 4th edition vampires vary almost as much, including spirit-form vampires and the Vampire Muse, which looks like a goth eladrin.
  • In Exalted, the only way the Abyssals can regain essence when not in the underworld is to grow fangs, and then either suck blood or eat people. (Or with a charm, suck out their essence by cutting them with magic swords). As a single normal person drained to death only gives you back the essence required to grow fangs in the first place, this is only effective when killing large numbers of people at once.
  • In Magic: The Gathering, vampires are a staple rare flyer for black. They often have a feeding mechinic over limited use, given that they don't often get into creature combat. Recent vampires have deal with this by focusing on the bat aspects or by feeding on players. They don't have explict weakness due to creature type.
    • On Zendikar, vampires are more common, and apparently alive. They do have a blood lust, though: Several vampires get more powerful when an opponent is at 10 life or less. Interestingly, the method for turning is a slight variation on the normal variety. On Zendikar, only specific Vampires (called Bloodchiefs) can create other Vampires. The rest create zombies, referred to as Nulls (and on another note, a Vampire family's status is apparently related to the number of Nulls is has)
    • An interesting method of turning would be that of Crovax. His method of transmission? Glass shards that imbedded themselves into his skin resulting from a curse after killing his former Guardian Angel.
  • The vampire template from GURPS: Fantasy has the odd flaw that it cannot heal from injury unless bathing in blood. Wood is the only thing that can kill them and crosses won't repel them unless imbued with real divine power.
    • The old GURPS Supers had as a sample character Nightflick, a vampire who rejected his sire and only needs to feed during the full moon— retaining almost all of his human traits and personality, he becomes a Super Hero. He can fly in the form of a man-sized bat, bullets pass through him without harm, and he hides his identity while vigilante-ing by dressing up as... a vampire. Pale makeup, black cloak, fake fangs, red contacts, speaks in Vampire Vords, etc., the Full Lugosi.

    Video Games 
  • Vamp from Metal Gear Solid is...different. He acquired his unusual dietary habits when, as a child, he was buried alive under the rubble of a bombed church, with only the blood of his family to keep himself from dying of thirst. He has a Healing Factor but it's due to nanomachines.
  • Slayer from the Guilty Gear games seems completely unaffected by sunlight and other vampiric banes (although, truthfully, he has never been shown exposed to any other weaknesses). He seems to be completely immortal. Even when he's defeated in combat, his sprite for lying on the ground shows him not dead or knocked out, but holding his head up, legs crossed, looking amused.
    • He has some shades of being a Friendly Neighbourhood Vampire, since he's Happily Married to an immortal woman- he can drink all of her blood and she just regenerates it back.
    • Venom came the closest to defeating Slayer, in one of his endings where he locks him in a metal coffin. Although that's probably because Slayer simply let him do it.
  • Demitri Maximov from Darkstalkers has many vampire powers but none of the weaknesses, as he is so powerful that they don't affect him anymore. He also has odd abilities that normal vampires don't have at all, such as the ability to shoot flames and the ability to turn men into women (as he only drinks the blood of attractive women).
    • As well as the ability to turn already attractive women into humorous forms that he also drinks blood from. And every few frames of animation his appearance becomes that of a demonic gargoyle thing, though only for a single frame.
    • Demitri is really from another world, which explains why he's so stupidly more powerful than the classic vampire.eating a planet eating alien just returned him to his original strength after he had been banished to Earth he's to sunlight, but that's because his dimension has no sun, no other traditional weaknesses apply except blood drinking and he develops a personal force field for sunlight.
    • Donvan on the otherhand is an Earth native vampire hybrid. He's able to grow wings and electrocute people but his most impressive powers come from his big sword.
  • The vampires in the video game Boktai are made of real tough stuff. Not only can they endure just about any of the vampire weaknesses you can throw at them, they are notorious for tanking the shots of a gun that is not only powered by sunlight, but actually fires off rounds made of solar energy. Even if they do die, they tend to come back at inopportune times, so the best way to render them Deader Than Dead is to drag its coffin to the Pile Driver and fire it up!
    • In one of its sequels, Lunar Knights, vamps are not only as tough as the ones in Boktai, but smarter, too: Thanks to intervention by the Big Bad, they got armor that neutralizes sunlight and a device that mollifies what naturally exists. Thus, every time Anti Hero Lucian puts one down, he has to call his Humongous Mecha and fly their remains into outer space!
  • In the original Shadow Hearts, Keith (Keith Valentine... Hmmm) explains that the stories about vampires are false, and that they're just like humans but tougher and they live longer. They aren't affected by any weaknesses and don't appear to feed on blood.
    • Well, except that he does have an attack "Blood Sucker".
    • In Shadow Hearts Covenant, when Joachim is in his bat form, one of his win quotes is "I feel like some tomato juice" and another is "I want to suck your blood... just kidding". (Note: When in bat form, he loses his frickin' mind. It seems to be just him, though. Another choice quote is "Oooo. Goooold", referring to the color of his fur.)
    • Bear in mind that Joachim is a Hard Gay, improbable weapon wielding, pro-wrestling, super hero.
    • Shadow Hearts 3 features a vampire who sucks the calories out of people to change form. Apparently, she can go hungry, as demonstrated, though she can eat human food too. Perhaps Shadow Hearts vampires can be sustained in more than one way?
    • Do note that the above three are all siblings and Dracula's grandchildren.
  • In the world of The Elder Scrolls, Vampirism is a disease called "Porphyric Hemophilia". The recent games seem to treat vampirism differently.
    • In Morrowind, there are three "clans" of vampires. Every vampire clan is very tough, able to levitate, vulnerable to sunlight and can't heal without draining life energy. Each clan has a different set of bonus skills, reflecting their clan specialty.
    • In Oblivion, there is only one type of vampire native to Cyrodiil. They don't require blood to stay alive, but they get stronger, more monstrous in appearance and more vulnerable to sunlight the longer they go without drinking blood. The blood apparently makes them able to blend in. In-game books state that there are many different types of vampires, each with their particular strengths and weaknesses.
    • The real difference with Elder Scrolls vampires is in their origin story. They were created after a god that was born in a semi-alternate timeline (Vivec) raped the God of Rape (Molag Bal).
  • Fallout 3, made by the same folks as The Elder Scrolls series, has the Family, who aren't supernatural at all - they suffer from some form of mutation or psychological disorder that gives them an insatiable hunger for human flesh, but drink blood as a substitute. Their leader states that they follow vampiric traditions mainly because it allows them to think of themselves as something other than ravenous cannibals.
  • Castlevania vampires vary in weaknesses, powers, and whether or not they can ever go back to being humans. Crosses and holy water only seem to be nasty because the Belmonts and their associates use them as weapons (Crosses become boomerangs, and holy water creates fire somehow), and they're put in the same catagory of weapons as thrown knives, axes, and stopwatches. And of these weapons can hurt anything in the games, vampire or not. Dracula himself only shows an aversion to sunlight in one game, and most of the time appears less a traditional vampire and more as some kind of uber-demon with a human form he just prefers. He also comes back from the dead with almost monotonous regularity, no matter what killed him last time. None of the vampires are shown as NEEDING to drink blood, though they can apparently make more vampires by doing so. None of these lesser vampires come anywhere near matching Dracula's array of powers or strength, though.
    • On the other hand, he and his half-vampire son Alucard have the usual unaging benefits, and the ability to tranform into bats, wolves, and mist. Dracula also has a lot more demons transformations. They both also have some apparently magical abilities, like their classic "Hellfire" teleport-fireball.
    • This gets explored in the Sorrow games. Dracula is the "Dark Lord", the setting's closest equivalent to Satan.
    • Alucard does exhibit one classical vampire weakness: the running water one, of all things. Just to make things even weirder, he can get around that one by... using a holy symbol on himself. The symbol is snorkel-shaped, by the way.
    • Vampire turning appears to go like this: If a person has just been bitten recently, it is possible to fix them if they haven't crossed a point of no return, time-based. It takes a powerful holy magic, and if one isn't available, they're doomed.
  • The Legacy Of Kain games really go to town on vampires. While at first they seem to fit the regular variation, Soul Reaver added on evolution, with vampires changing and adapting every couple of centuries, turning into inhuman monsters. And that's not even going into the "Vampires vs Hylden" aspect of the games.
    • Or the fact that the Vampires were originally a non-blood-drinking race of Precursors who were, as far as can be inferred, fairly decent folks who just happened to have clawed hands, blue skin, and black-feathered wings growing out their back.
    • There's also Raziel's character, who becomes a half-vampire half-wraith in the second game, replacing his bloodlust with a need to feed on the souls of others, while initially retaining most of his vampiric weaknesses, such as burning his skin to the touch of water.
    • There are exactly three kinds of vampires in Nosgoth. The blue skinned and winged Ancients such as Janos Audron, the humans transformed by the Ancients/humans transformed by existing ones such as Vorador, and reanimated corpses such as Kain.
  • Dreadlords, as introduced in Warcraft 3 and reappearing in World Of Warcraft. Technically, they're demons. They have bat wings, claws and horns. The standard ones show limited control over bats and other carrion, the ability to put enemies to sleep, a "vampiric aura" that restores health to them and their allies in melee combat, as well as a Limit Break that calls a flaming demon from the sky. Other Dreadlords have shown capacity for things like raining hellfire on targets. However, no bloodsucking is explicitly demonstrated (They suck souls instead). They are perfectly capable of walking around in daylight.
    • Wrath of the Lich King has now introduced more traditional vampires in the Darkfallen, undead elven royalty raised by the Lich King. They have extensive blood-based and necromantic magic powers, grey skin, and boss-level strength, though otherwise their powers vary. One, Prince Taldaram, can become invisible, and another, Blood Queen Lana'thel, has bat wings.
  • There are two known vampires in Gensokyo: Remilia Scarlet and Flandre Scarlet. Remilia is somewhat more traditional as a vampire, disliking sunlight, turning into a bat, claiming direct descendence from Dracula, and such. However, she actually likes cross imagery, and is really weirded out when people seem to assume it should hurt her (she also tends to drink her blood in teacups prepared by her servant because she seems to find biting people to be distasteful and a hassle). Flandre, on the other hand, looks like a vampire only in her drive for drinking blood - she's a cute little Person Of Mass Destruction (and how!) with "wings" made of rainbow-colored romboid crystals and a happy, experimentative disposition.
    • There is actually a third vampire in the Touhou series, but nobody remembers Kurumi because she's a minor character of Lotus Land Story, which, like the majority of the PC-98 games, is already almost completely ignored as a whole. She has the odd happenstance of living in a lake of blood and is also considerably weaker than Remilia or Flandre.
    • Must be noted that the 'cross imagery' part is due to Clap Your Hands If You Believe and the dominant faith (if any) in Gensokyo is a bizarre mutation of Shinto, not Christianity. Heroine Reimu Hakurei uses amulets and other religion-themed projectiles in battle and they are as deadly to Remilia and Flandre as they are to all the other Obake in the series.
    • Their powerset is pretty much standard vampire, but their weaknesses are bizarre. The only normal ones are sunlight and running water (which also applies to rain), but they can't approach sardine heads or shattered holly branches, and roast soybeans burn them  * . Oh, and they're bound in an unbreakable contract to never attack humans in Gensokyo in return for getting blood supplied for them, taken from suicidal humans that live in the outer world.
    • Really, where Remilia and Flandre are concerned, it seems to vary depending on what ZUN feels like at the time. Remilia is actually more active during the day rather than at night  * , and while she is vulnerable to sunlight and rain, she can actually counter these by carrying a parasol, which, while efficient, cannot possibly protect her completely. This is further evidenced in Touhou Hisoutensoku, where Remilia cannot play in any non-indoor stage unless she's got a Security Parasol card in her deck. It's possible her weaknesses to sunlight and water may be psychological rather than physical.
    • Note that, in Silent Sinner in Blue, she is clearly shown burning when she gets exposed to a bit of sunlight, explaining that part.
    • Although, by that point, they're on the moon, where there shouldn't be any atmosphere at all to protect from solar radiation. Why Remilia only is affected is puzzling.
    • Last and not least, it should be mentioned that vampires in Touhou are considered to be not undead, but (in the original Japanese) akuma, which is translated as devil (Hence the name "Scarlet Devil"). Also, it seems they can't turn others into more of their kind (humans drained of blood "move around as a zombie for a while, then evaporate under sunlight")
  • Vampires in Dating Sim Fortune Arterial possess none of the traditional weaknesses, but cannot make more vampires via feeding. Rather, one who consumes a vampire's blood becomes a kenzoku (progeny,) gaining the abilities of a vampire (minus blood-sucking) but becoming bound to that vampire as a servant and an all-day breakfast on legs.
  • Like the Callahan example above, the Callahan's Crosstime Saloon computer game takes the player to Pyotr's hometown of Floresçu. Once there, we meet another vampire like Pyotr, named Sasha, and it's revealed that Callahan's vampires have traditional greeting in which a normal human offers them a wrist, and the vampires take only a little bit of blood, to show trust from both parties.
  • In Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, Gabriel goes up against an army of self-styled vampires called "Night Visitors", who kidnap what they believe is the last in the Holy Bloodline, in order to drink the blood and achieve immortality.
    • Since they seem to be able to levitate, and their leader has red eyes and fangs by the end of the game, drinking holy blood does seem to be working for them. Their most notable exception to the usual tropes is that they're extremely picky about their victims, and aren't superficially different from ordinary people in normal circumstances.
  • Most people don't immediately recognize the vampire in Eternal Darkness Sanity's Requiem, it probably shouldn't even be called a vampire, but it is.
  • Vampires in Runescape comes in two flavours, the easily disposed of kind with enough blunt trauma or a nice swipe of a sword. Vampyres are basically a vampire on crack, while restrained to a certain area, they are nigh undefeatable without silver weapons and something similar to holy water.
    • And there's also Vyrewatch, who are Nigh Invulnerable winged humanoids.
    • Until you get a silver flail meant to kill vampires, then it is mostly open season for them.
  • Since Soul Calibur III both Raphael and Amy have become semi-vampiric beings, due to the influence of Soul Edge. The Pale skin and Glowing Eyes Of Doom are present, as well as a weakness during daylight and an insatiable thirst during the night. They (or Raphael atleast) are also able to infect others throught a neck bite, turning them into more typical Soul Edge-infected Berserkers.
    • Then again, Soul Edge tends to affect everyone differently.
    • It's stated that the difference between the infected berserkers and the Sorels is that the infection didn't touch their minds. Which is probably why they satisfy their "night thirst" through neckbiting rather than messy slaughter.
  • Suikoden Vampires are created by the influence of The True Moon Rune. They get sleepy and lose their powers in sunlight, and apparently only need to drink blood if they're not in the presence of the rune. Neclord at least when he was in possession of the rune was shown to be immune to everything but the Star Dragon Sword, Another vampire's attack and the special techniques of the Marley Family.
  • City Of Heroes has Vampyrs (and werewolves} that are very different- a variant of the Super Serum used by the Fifth Column and later the Council creates monstrous creatures that join the Equinox division and have strange life-sapping powers. The head of the Equinox division and creator of the Vampyrs is called, naturally, Nosferatu.
    • Of course, the concepts created by players run the gamut, from predictable Mary Sue concepts (bonus points for Cat Girl vampires), to truly bizarre twists. Somewhere in between is a vampire that uses the Fire Armor powerset- he's so old and powerful that he turns his sunlight weakness into a weapon!
  • The Sims 2 adapts traditional vampire traits to the gameplay mechanics, making them sufficiently different. Vampire Sims smoke in sunlight and must sleep in coffins during the day, can turn into a bat, don't appear in mirrors, don't age, and turn other Sims into vampires by biting their necks. However, they eat normal food, can die by any means besides old age and starvation, and their main draw is their needs not dropping at night.
    • Not to mention their skin also turns a purplish color.
    • By the way, transformation into meta-human Sims can stack, so it's perfectly possible to end up with a plant werewolf vampire witch zombie Sim. It's not a good idea, though, to turn the solar-powered robot Sims or solar-powered plant Sims into vampires, though, since they burn to death when they try to recharge.
    • Actully Plantsim-Vampires are the easyist to care for. 1, their needs don't drop at night anyways for the most part, and 2, the Sun Lamps will give them the boost they need without being deadly.
    • Also, Sims vampires say "Bleh!"
  • Nitara from Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance introduced a Vampire race to the series. This variation presents huge vampire wings on their backs, the common thirst for blood, an allergy to the Earth's sun and vulnerability to wooden stakes (any other material wouldn't kill them). In MK: Armageddon, they race's name is given as Moroi, and their realm is named Vaeternus.
  • Sacred featured the Vampiress, a human woman bitten by a Vampire and turned, then given a soul when she bit a Seraphim. This allowed her to resume her human form and safely travel during the day, though she had no restriction on changing and no weakness to fire. However in Vampire form she takes continuous sun damage but gains sufficient power boosts to make up for it.
  • Rachel Alucard from Blazblue seems to have none of the traditional weaknesses of vampires. At least, none that we know of. She can walk around in broad daylight, and although she uses Nago as a parasol, this seems to be for decoration rather than protection, as she is no less powerful in daylight than at night. She even pulls a crucifix out of the ground during her Astral Heat. She's also one of the most powerful characters in the game (in terms of storyline).
    • Slayer from Guilty Gear is pretty much the same way, and he even has a crucifix motif for most of his clothing, almost in mockery of traditional vampire weaknesses.
  • Nevan in Devil May Cry 3 is never outright referred to as a vampire, but she tries to suck out Dante's soul by kissing him, attempts to bite his neck, has a flowing waterfall just outside the cave mouth leading to her lair (preventing her from leaving, it looks like), is deathly pale, and has an affinity towards bats and can transform into a swarm of them. Calling her one is a pretty safe bet.
    • On the other hand she turns into an electric guitar that shoots lightning bats once you defeat her, which isn't exactly traditional vampire behaviour. It's Devil May Cry, so who the fuck even knows anymore.
  • Leonid from Romancing Sa Ga 3
  • While not actually a vampire, Vincent Valentine of Final Fantasy VII has one hell of a Dracula complex.

    Web Comics 
  • Irritability parodied the concept with Scary Larry.
  • Lampshaded in this strip from Sluggy Freelance; the vampires which Muffin the Vampire Baker fought were completely different from the Lysinda Circle vampires, which only made things confusing when Sam, a LC vamp, showed up in Hell Mouth.
    • The strip later introduced the Vrykolakas Circle vampires, which are substantially different from the Lysinda Circle. Lysinda vampires can't enter houses without being invited, but Vrykolakas vampires can. A person drained to death by a Vrykolakas vampire becomes a new one and retains no independent will or shred of humanity, whereas Lysinda vampires can only be made via a special ritual, and they keep their individuality and can even betray their superiors if they choose. A Vrykolakas vampire can be turned to dust if staked through the heart, whereas a Lysinda vampire just shrivels up and stops moving, but immediately comes back to life if the stake is pulled out.
    • Riff, being Jewish, can burn vampires with his Star of David.
  • There are three different types of vampire in Clan Of The Cats, each stemming more or less independently from a single 'parent' (Lilith, Dracula and Kern), none of which are quite the same as the legends.
  • Triquetra Cats has three unrelated species grouped under the "vampire", each with different characteristics and weaknesses. One is basically a blood-drinking animal.
  • In Pandect, a vampire is one name for the soulless creature formed when a human and an Ace conceive a child. They are basically killing machines which can change form and kill with a bite to the throat, but other than that they do not have the stereotypical traits (and weaknesses) of classical vampires. As one character notes, humans gave them the "vampire" name, not Aces.
  • The vampires in Dan and Mabs Furry Adventures are different in that they are long extinct. As they were only one of many species that preyed on non-magical Beings, they'd often fall victim to stronger predators. They would also burst in to flames when in contact with sunlight, further dropping their numbers. As the last few remaining Vampires met to discuss how to avoid extinction, a dragon accidentally stepped on them.
  • In Last Res0rt, vampires are a subset of the Dead Inside/Djinn-si, a catch-all term for creatures who have altered their souls after birth, and are even sometimes referred to as "Life Djinn". Unlike other types of Dead Inside, vampires must be deliberately transformed, and are often thought of as unable to travel in space and limited strictly to the human species. Of course, both of these stereotypes are proven blatantly false by an alien marsuipal being transformed into a vampire.
  • The vampires in the Boys Love webcomic Arcana differ in the fact that if they drink Harpy blood they will die. Also, it seems that when changed into a vampire, the victim will acquire some of its attackers traits. In Vincent's case, he ends up ultimately raping and doing physical harm to his human lover. Finally, some of the vampires seem to harbor feelings of guilt and self-hate over their conditions (beliving they're monsters/unworthy of love). Other then that, the vampires in this story host the traditional traits (sunlight intolerance, bloodlust, etc.)
  • 8-Bit Theater took the modern Goth-Vampire trope to its (patho)logical extreme — Vilbert Von Vampire is an angst-ridden teen Goth who writes aching poetry and enjoys live-action role-playing. He appeared to show no weakness to the sun, and the group's attempts to violently murder him with knives (as per their usual idiom) were foiled when it was shown that he had a resistance to such weapons — leading the group to drive an entire armoire through his heart. Of course, this only served to anger his Father, the fiend of Earth, Lich. (His mother appeared to be a fairly normal human woman — well, normal for the 8-Bit universe, anyway.)
  • From The Princess Planet, this.
  • Possibly Mr. Raven, the Sadist Teacher from El Goonish Shive.
    • As it turns out, despite the rather pronounced canines, he's actually an elf.
    • There was also supposed to be the vampire bat/bird/whatevers chimera, Vladia, but these days the only source of blood that won't make Grace irredeemably angry is stock cattle.
    • Jossed by a recent NP comic, in which he denies having ever been a vampire, or having seduced a drunk girl and stolen her money. He has however eaten the occasional sandwich.
    • And, cringing, Susan resorts to 'vampire' to describe a monster she encountered to two people she's with. 'No, not really, but it was a monster that used to be human, hypnotized young women and sucked blood out of their necks. It doesn't matter what I say. You two are going to hear "vampire".' The accompanying comments say no, it's not a 'real' vampire.
  • The Adventures Of Doctor McNinja hasn't gone into any detail regarding vampire abilities, but the vampire society is certainly different. On the one hand, Sebastian's coven secretly runs The Red Cross, while behind the scenes they're Anne Rice-style goth vampires cranked Up To Eleven. As for Dracula, he's pretty much identical to Bela Lugosi's version of the Count, only living on a Moon Base. With a Moon Laser.
  • Gore, from The Life of Riley, was a housemate to the Bobs, and like to watch the game while feeding. Later he Took A Level In Badass, and proceeded to run interference for an infiltration team while carrying paintball cannons so huge humans couldn't wield them, and wound up at the end of the story arc immune to sunlight thanks to the newfound power of his succubi ex-girlfriend. The last time you saw Gore, he was fast, strong, unkillable, and had moved his heart to prevent staking from working. His opponent was curious about where such a young vampire gained a lot of tricks that should have taken him a few thousand years to learn, whereupon Gore revealed his powers were taught to him by Lilith. It's sad that a combination of Real Life and internet douchebaggery took this awesome comic down.
  • In Charby the Vampirate (see here), there are "elites", a sub-race of vampires who are unkillable in any of the conventional ways (or unconventional).
  • Tristram's species in Earthsong. Green skinned, among other things. On his planet there were two species—his vampire-like species, and a more human-like species that were treated like livestock, with the males used as beasts of burden and the females used to drink blood from. Tristram was part of a group that rebelled against the idea of drinking blood from the other race and committed the serious taboo of feeding upon wild animals, but at one point he was locked in a room with a girl and purposefully starved by his fellow vampires until he couldn't help but feed.
  • The title character of Digger is attacked by vampiric squash. Now that really is "different". Strangely enough, they were based on an actual legend from the Balkans, which claims that if vegetables are left in the ground too long they turn vampiric.
  • Thunderstruck actually ignores Rule 3: its vampires need blood (particularly when they have just been created), they spread like a virus, and they have all the traditional weaknesses. However, they are not Bad Ass, but pathetic, weak, coweled creatures that cannot cope with the modern world.
  • Vampirates is a cute webcomic featuring... vampiric pirates. It's set in a world where vampires seem to be relatively accepted and can survive off of fresh blood, bagged blood, or special drugs given by the government. Sunlight doesn't seem to affect them, and they can loose large quantities of blood but survive.
    • Actually the drugs don't sustain the vampires. They help surpress a vampire's hunger. See here.
  • Geist Panic has a vampire being a pathetic misfit. It seems vampirism is a horribly debilitating blood disease.
  • The vampires of Sam And Fuzzy are very different from most depictions of vampires. 1) Sunlight doesn't bother them. 2) Their bites turn people into werewolves, not more vampires. And 3) A stake through the heart won't kill them. They can however, be taught how to integrate themselves into human society by disabusing them of the misconceptions about vampires. The Golden Rule they need to be taught is that "vampirism does not make stalking attractive" (possible Take That to Twilight?).
    • Despite being Made Of Iron, they also don't appear to be particularly stronger than scrawny humans making it quite easy to detain them.
  • Amaranthe from Not Quite Daily Comic prefers the term "person with defunctory impairment" and rationalizes some of the common vampire traits.
  • Liz from Blip. In addition to the usual (blood-sucking, weakness to sunlight, Living Shadow and Super Smoke powers) she has Rubber Man powers, the ability to hover, and Laser Guided Amnesia-inducing breath.
  • Vampire bats in Kevin And Kell, despite being living creatures like everyone else, are analogous to vampires in folklore: they are stigmatized, many of the vampire beliefs get dumped on them (such as the ones about garlic, shapeshifting, and mirrors), and are considered the ultimate scourge on society. This is why Desdemona Fuscus, Fenton's mom, kept it a secret: she didn't want her son to be shunned by society because he was half-vampire bat. This is also why she tried to speed up his wedding to Lindesfarne: as a geneticist student, she had the potential to find out he was and Desdemona was afraid she'd call off the wedding if she knew.
    • Recent strips show that she's started a web site to dispel myths on vampire bats. Two of them, the ones on mirrors and garlic-were started because they affected sonar-which, as she pointed out, affected regular bats as well.
  • Vampires in A Loonatics Tale are numerous and varied-many unique species actually run in family lines. Not all of them can "turn" their victims, but those that do typically transform them not into vampires like themselves, but into a vanilla religion-and-garlic-averse vampire (with the exception of the aquatic mermaid vampire, which turns it's victims into a seadweller like itself). There are also catacomb vampires, which come about when a black cat jumps over a grave and are bloated corpses which are otherwise indistinguishable from their original living selves, and blood bag vampires, which should become catacomb vampires, but decomposition has set in too far when the cat comes along, forcing them to spend the first 13 years of their vampiric lives reconstituting into catacomb vampires.
  • Scandinavia And The World focuses on the personifications of national stereotypes. Word Of God states: "Romanians have two stereotypes; vampires, and thieving gypsies. Therefore, Romania is a vampire who would rather steal your wallet than your blood. Yes, I'm aware this makes me a horrible person."

    Web Original 
  • This video shows the inherent problems this trope makes with creating any sort of Intercontinuity Crossover with more than one series that includes a vampire. In a very humorous manner.
  • Consult this handy chart.
  • Limyaael has a rant on vampires in fantasy fiction, which is apparently common breeding grounds for vampiric love interests.
  • As mentioned above, Gaia Online vampires do not die in sunlight. They just get really sunburned, really easily. And sometimes catch fire. They do still need blood though, but most of them drink a soy based substitute. Also, (as Louie is quick to point out), they do not sparkle. Stop asking.
  • Eddie Izzard has a bit (about 0:50 onwards) about vampires, and the tendency of directors to "change the rules".
  • Vlad from Vladimir and Mr Smith is a puppet (and decidedly non-threatening).
  • It's more of a metaphorical lesson on power-hungry humans, but Fred Clark does pose an interesting idea as to why vampires fear crosses in this blog post.
  • skary.net, the website of Katy Towell brings us the Mockingbird Song, an animated short about a girl named Shawnee Jenkins. Her parents are attacked and bitten at some point. They eventually turn into feral vampires. They degrade to the point where they're basically animals, unable to even speak. Yet Shawnee continues to care for them and clean up the messes they leave behind. They're still her parents after all.
  • Mortasheen's non-humanoid vampires tend to be mostly based on aquatic life (Word Of G Od has it that the virus originated from the sea), and the human ones are said to look like Count Orlock

    Western Animation 
  • An episode of Mighty Max, "Fly By Night", took Our Vampires Are Different to its natural extreme by featuring a female vampire, Countess Musca, who ignored almost all of these vampire tropes (aside from the obvious blood-drinking). To top it all off, instead of a bat, she turned into a giant horsefly.
  • In Count Duckula, a vampire who has been killed can be brought back by a once-a-century secret ritual. In the most recent ritual, tomato ketchup was accidentally used instead of blood, resulting in the title character becoming a vegetarian. And he's a duck, which is pretty different all on its own.
  • In Scooby Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf, the Big Bad is a vampire named Count Dracula. However, he is comically inept at his goal of making Shaggy lose the Monster Car Road race. He did find a way to counter the sun weakness, by wearing sunscreen.
  • Buzz Lightyear Of Star Command has a robotic vampire called NOS-4-A2 who drains the energy of robots and other machinery as opposed to drinking blood. He also has mind control abilities over said machinery. In combination with radiation from a certain moon, it also can turn humans into feral mechanical "wire-wolves".
  • In an episode of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, a vampiric tomato was going to suck blood from someone's neck until the local censor said that sucking blood wasn't "nice" enough, and suggested that he try kissing instead. He does, but that turns her into a vampire anyway, and starts a race of vampires who are obsessed with smooching their victims instead of drinking their blood.
  • An episode of Moville Mysteries had the main characters believing an exterminator was a vampire... and he was, sort of. He was actually the "adopted son" of a group of vampiric mosquitoes led by a human-sized, repulsive queen who just happened to sleep in a coffin. The exterminator's Game Face had him adopt insect-like traits and he winds up being ripped apart and eaten by a swarm of hungry frogs. The queen and her spawn are destroyed by a giant, makeshift bug zapper.
  • On Adventure Time With Finn And Jake, Marceline the Vampire Queen can drink blood, but actually only needs to eat the color red (which she can suck out of anything, leaving it gray). This does not necessarily make her a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire, however—-she seems to like the title characters, but once mad, she transforms into a horrific bat-monster and tries to kill you really fast.
  • In the Halloween episode of Duck Tales, "Ducky Horror Picture Show", Scrooge unknowingly allows a bunch of monsters into his new community center, and his home, one of which being a Vampire. It is discovered when Hewey, Dewey, and Louie bring him Apples, that he does not bite people or animals, instead, he eats apples. They keep his teeth shiny, you know.
  • Codename Kids Next Door features the villain Count Spankulot who, well, spanks children. Doing so without his gloves will transform the victim into a spanking vampire himself.

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