Actually Not a Vampire

"Though it is true that I am immortal, I am no vampire. I find the smell of blood too revolting to ever drink it."

— Archduke Lester DeRosso, Bravely Default

What type of character does one or more of the following?:

1. Avoids sunlight.
2. Has Super-Strength.
3. Has people begin disappearing when they arrive.
4. Is not a fan of garlic.
5. Seems to have a desire for others' blood/life-force.
6. Always asks for explicit permission to enter.

If you said vampires you'd be right, except for this trope.

This trope is for any instance where a character is set up as a vampire, and is then revealed not to be. It can lead to a massive awkward moment for the character that suspects as much, or it may just serve to deepen the mystery if there is a real vampire on the loose. In the latter case, the suspect may be a Vampire Vannabe who is in league with the real thing because they really want to be one, or they might be something even more sinister.

Sometimes, actual vampires may even coexist alongside one or more other kinds of beings that are capable of Vampiric Draining — the typical hallmark of a vampire.

Can also be Played for Laughs if a character accuses someone of being a vampire when it's quite clear to the audience that they aren't.

Compare/contrast Totally Not a Werewolf, in which the suspect is always a supernatural creature, just not the one they were thought to be, and Sham Supernatural, where the person mistaken as supernatural is making it look that way on purpose. Contrast Technically-Living Vampire, for when the character is actually a vampire despite being still alive. See also Fake Wizardry, Mistaken for Superpowered, Mistaken for Undead, and Not a Zombie.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Arystar Krory in D.Gray-Man. Because he'd attack the townspeople at night and drain them of their blood, everyone (including Krory himself) thought him to be a vampire. He turns out to be a human with Innocence, and he was instinctively attacking Akuma.
• In God Child, the current inhabitants of the Weatherby Castle Darque and Justine. Particularly Justine has a lot of hints, with having a tendency to inherit elongated, sharp canines, and she is also very weak and feels faint when she is subjected to sunlight. There's also Gertrude, who was burned for being suspected of being a vampire, since a lot of people died lately and despite being in her 40s, she looked incredibly young and was thought to have made herself young by drinking the blood of young, pretty women. Turns out the people around Gertrude were dying due to The Plague and Justine is not actually a vampire... or she is... maybe...
• Played With in Hellsing — despite employing 1,000 vampire Nazis and looking just as young as he did during World War II, the Major turns out to be a cyborg. He insists this makes him human, and characterizes his quest against Alucard as one of man versus monster. Integra insists that he's still a loathsome monster (though she may have only meant in the moral sense).
• One Piece: A young Jewerly Bonney was often bullied by other kids and called a vampire due to having to having a disease that would kill her if exposed to natural light, with one of them even brandishing a cross at her. She proceeds to kick him in the face and point out that she lives in a church.
• It is easy to assume that Seishirou Kirishiki in Shiki is a vampire but it is not so. Instead, he is The Team Normal among the vampires.

Comic Books

• Archie Comics: One issue had Archie terrified that the woman who moved in next door was a vampire as she looked and acted like one, and even moved in with a suspiciously coffin-sized wooden crate. It turns out to be fully justified on Archie's case: The woman was a Method Actor who played a vampire on Television, and she ultimately pranks him by "turning" Chuck.
• Astro City:Inverted and played straight, as the superhero Confessor actually was a vampire, but kept it a secret, careful never to use his vampiric powers where people could see him, and never doing anything explicitly superhuman or that couldn't be explained by training really hard. For the most part, he's able to camouflage this, even to the reader, because he's also a Batman Parody, and nearly all of his vampiric traits (great strength and agility, able to get answers out of people just by glaring at them, only operates at night, has never been successfully photographed, can enter and leave a scene without making a sound) just seem like Batman traits at first glance. His secret came out just before he was destroyed, meaning the fact that the Confessor was a vampire is now common knowledge. However, the identity was assumed by his Badass Normal former sidekick, who really isn't a vampire but everyone thinks he is (terrifying the local criminal element, who think he's the original Confessor returned to (un)life but now immune to crosses, garlic, etc).
• Batman:
  • Batman himself is associated with bats, almost never seen in the daytime, seemingly appears out of nowhere and vanishes into thin air and is much stronger than any normal person. It's been shown that a small number of people, particularly Gotham thugs, believe or suspect that he's a vampire, which isn't totally insane in a universe with aliens, wizards, superheroes, and even a few actual vampires (and is actually true in some Alternate Universes). Since Superman has occasionally worn the suit and impersonated him, some people have actually seen "Batman" fly, lift cars and survive hails of bullets, which makes the vampire theory that much more credible.
  • The villainess Nocturna had an accident which turned her skin white and made her sensitive to light. She also has Shadow Walker and Charm Person powers. The New 52 version deliberately plays on her similarity to a vampire, at one point using hypnosis to convice Batwoman that not only is she a Lesbian Vampire, but that Kate herself has been turned. Averted in Outsiders (2023): this version of Nocturna really is a vampire, with a completely new origin involving being turned by a Looks Like Orlok figure in what appears to be 18th century Gotham.
• EC Comics:
  • In an old story, the premise of a game show is to guess the job of a special guest. The contestants get steadily more panicky and more creative as they discover that their guest 'works with a red liquid' and it's not soap, or ink, or anything other than what they're thinking about... he's actually a phlebotomist (someone who draws blood). The contestants are the vampires — the gameshow is for supernatural creatures, and the contestants typically feast on the guest at the end of the show.
  • This trope was also the twist in the EC story "Sweetie-Pie", where bodies of people last seen in cars that were wrecked turn up drained of blood with twin puncture marks in the throat. Turns out that it's the work of a ghoul who prefers his meals exsanguinated.
  • Also the twist in another story about a graveyard-shift cab driver who reads in the papers that another murder has been committed; the victim bears the familiar neck-marks and drained blood. A doctor quoted and pictured in the article states the murders must be the work of a vampire, and he (the doctor) intends to hunt the bloodsucker down. When a sinister-looking passenger gets into his cab, the driver recognizes the man as the doctor he saw in the paper. After he drops the doctor off, the cabbie gets out and follows him on foot — only to be ambushed by the doctor, who reveals himself to be the vampire... and the cab driver wakes up. It had all been a dream the cabbie had while drifting off. But the same man the cabbie saw in the dream gets into his cab, and asks to be taken to the same destination. Instead the cabbie drives into an alley, where — you guessed it — the cabbie is revealed to be the real vampire, and he dispatches the good doctor. The final line of the story, spoken as the driver is getting into the trunk of his cab filled with graveyard earth: "Imagine! A vampire falling asleep at night — and dreaming! Ridiculous!"
  • In "Bats In My Belfry" from Tales From the Crypt #24, the main character, faced with the prospect of going deaf, agrees to a strange surgery wherein the auditory system of a bat is grafted onto his own. It works, very well, but he starts getting the strange urge to scream, and sleeping upside down, and begins growing a strange membrane between his arms and his body. It's when he hears his wife and her lover planning to kill him that he discovers he's not just becoming any old bat-person, oh no, he's a vampire bat! Oh, and he sleeps in a coffin, but only because it's quiet.
• JSA Classified: The serial killer in "Nightfall" has fangs, drinks his victim's blood, only operates at night and claims to be a vampire. When Mid-Nite captures him he proves not to be a vampire after all, but is instead a meta-human suffering from a strange disease and delusions.
• Judge Dredd: In the "Cursed Earth" arc, Dredd travels through an area where the locals' blood is being harvested by a mysterious monster that they believe to be a vampire. It turns out to be the last President of the United States, put into suspended animation after his complicity in the Atomic Wars. When the machine ran out of replacement blood, his three robot servants started to collect it from elsewhere as they were programmed to keep him alive at all costs. Dredd remarks that the man was indeed a vampire, just of a different sort.
• Justice League of America: The Justice League, during their "Justice League International" period (also known as the Bwa-ha-ha era), ran an arc in which a region of Europe was overrun by "vampires". It's revealed that a mad scientist had infected innocent people with an artificially mutated mind-controlling strain of porphyria, a blood disease that was once hypothesized to have been the origin of the vampire myths.
• Mickey Mouse Comic Universe
  • A subversion of sorts occurs in one Mickey Mouse story. Goofy befriends a man who has just moved into an old house in town, and who actually dresses much like the stereotypical Bela Lugosi sort of vampire. The man even admits himself that it is the look he is going for, and that everything else he does, from sleeping in a wooden box to keeping the curtains shut, is just a healthy way of life. Goofy believes it, and wants to try. Mickey is not so gullible, and repeatedly tries to prove his claim by throwing about typical anti-vampire stuff such as garlic and running water. In the end, however, all attempts fail, and Goofy becomes increasingly angry with Mickey for messing around. Cue Mickey convincing him to find the man where he sleeps at day and pulling the curtains. Sunlight shines on him... and nothing happens. Mickey admits defeat, and they both leave. As soon as they have, however, the man pulls away the fake window he had on his wall, with just a normal lamp behind it. He laughs at them in the final frame, and will presumably go on to act like the vampire he is now that the "hunters" are gone.
  • A story with Mickey as a professional Private Detective has Mickey encountering a foreign couple calling themselves Alucard who seem to have all vampire traits such as paleness and vulnerability to sunlight and garlic, while people are turning up sick in hospital with marks on their neck. The explanation to all this is that they are the descendants of the original Count Dracula and have caught a rare disease while visiting his castle. Ironically, the story builds an elaborate, even contrived explanation of how the myth of Dracula the vampire came about due to misunderstandings building around the historical and nice Count Dracula, when in the real world Dracula was an explicitly fictional creation named after a nasty historical figure. Anywho, there's a complicated story about how the original Dracula's wife caught a mysterious illness affecting twin glands in the throat that secrete a serum maintaining youth — making her prone to shrivel up in sunlight — and how the count found a cure but his sample of the disease fell in the drain and polluted the local water supply and, since he was already distrusted, he had to sneak into people's bedrooms to administer a cure using twin syringes that he put in his mouth to have both hands free... In the present, the "vampire" behind the attacks is simply a greedy doctor extracting the serum from young people's glands to give to his elderly patients, and the "Alucards" get a happy ending when they accidentally find that stuff used to preserve parchments protects their skin from sunlight (when Mickey makes some of it come out of the sprinklers to preserve a stolen parchment). Can't fault the writer for lack of imagination.
• The first part of the Muppet Mash arc of The Muppet Show Comic Book revolved around the other Muppets thinking that Gonzo has become a vampire due to returning from a vacation in Transylvania, wearing a suit and a cape, having a noticeably paler complexion, reacting negatively to the Swedish Chef preparing a garlic steak and demonstrating a strong craving for tomato juice, among other things. At the end of the issue, it turns out that Gonzo isn't a vampire and he explains all the supposed signs of his vampirism (e.g.: He was pale because he was wearing sun lotion, the tomato juice craving and aversion to the garlic steak were because he was on a vegetarian diet, etc.).
• Inverted in one of the Ninja Scroll comics. Once Jubei encounters a strange female monster, who wants to drink his blood and can turn into a bat or a wolf. It's obvious for the reader that she's a Western-style vampire, but Jubei doesn't know that and has to learn her weaknesses the hard way (with a little help from people of the village the vampire was preying on).
• Pathfinder (Dynamite Comics): Kyra's Origins Episode depicts her going out to a ratfolk village on a vampire hunt with Seelah the paladin and some Boxed Crooks they freed from the local prison as muscle. Unfortunately, they find their preparations of garlic and so forth are all for naught: the blood-drinking creatures attacking the village are chupacabras, not vampires.
• Ric Hochet: Alister Devill is the prime suspect to being a vampire, just like his ancestors Derek and Ferguson. In the end, it was all a scheme from his cousin, Austin Chapin, to kill him and inherit his vast fortune.
• Ruse: One of the stranger storylines involves an Uberwald-esque town seemingly empty by day but lively by night, and a nearby Gypsy caravan whose women are being kidnapped (and, eventually, Emma). Generations of inbreeding have induced a mutation causing the townspeople to be invisible in sunlight and extremely photophobic; they're kidnapping girls for outside blood to counter the mutation.
• One very unfunny stand-alone story in Trese was told from the point of view of a young boy who believed his mother's new boyfriend was a vampire, since that was how he interpreted the signs of the boyfriend molesting the boy's younger sister. When Trese investigates, she claims that the guy wasn't a vampire, but something worse.

Fan Works

• The Danny Phantom fanfic "Bloodsucker" has a rumor spread around Casper High that Danny is a vampire. He decides to let them believe it rather than leave them to keep guessing until they figure out he's a ghost.
• If one regards My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic changelings as vampire analogues, then The Changeling of the Guard has Topaz Showers; a pegasus entomologist who is so into bugs that not only does Shining Armor immediately leap to the conclusion that she is a changeling infiltrator after the events of his wedding, before Idol Hooves (the actual changeling infiltrator) corrects him, but she has been mistaken by actual changeling infiltrators as being one of them. More than once. When the young infiltrator nymph Cersus reveals how disguised changelings covertly identify themselves to each other (it plays into their Theme Naming), it shed a whole new light on some very odd encounters for Topaz... who is then chagrined that she didn't realize what was happening, and thus didn't play along so she could observe/study some "wild" changelings.
• Fate of the Clans: Despite a Servant being able to drink blood for energy, they're different from vampires. Tenkei uses the blood-sucking thing to argue it though.
• In the MLP fanfic Nosflutteratu, Pinkie Pie assumes that anypony with a name like Twilight Sparkle must be a vampire.
• Not the intended use (Zantetsuken Reverse): Soma hits just about every vampire-associated trope out there; he is hurt by Holy Water and blessed objects, can turn into a bat, summon bats, has Innate Night Vision, Vampiric Draining powers and can tell apart people's blood by scent. He is even the reincarnation of Dracula. However, he is not actually a vampire; he can walk in sunlight and needs food like anyone else. He still occasionally scares the crap out of other people thanks to this motif, and has difficulty convincing strangers that he's a human.
• Retrograde Motion: Upon meeting her for the first time, the younger Jason declares Kate to look like "an awesome vampire". He still thinks she's a vampire weeks later, because it was Tim that told him that she wasn't.
• Following on from the second Discworld example below, one of the fics in "Ten Alternate Universes: Havelock Vetinari" by Paul A includes the observation that if someone as subtle as Vetinari was a vampire, he wouldn't look so much like one.
• In Texts from Superheroes, Superman thanks Batman for a UV light generator designed to keep his sun-light powered abilities from weakening in winter, and suggests he installs them to improve the mood in Gotham, previously mentioned to be in the special Gotham Eternal Darkness Time zone, but apparently the citizens of Gotham are so sunlight-deprived UV radiation burns them.
  Superman: Are you sure everyone in Gotham isn't just a vampire?
  Batman: No, I'm not.
• The Seinfeld fanfic "The Vampire Boyfriend" has Kramer and Newman suspect this about Elaine's new boyfriend due to his not answering the door in the daytime and receiving boxes of soil from Europe. It turns out he's at work during the daytime and the soil is used for growing orchids. At the end of the story, this trope is then applied to Elaine herself.

Films — Live-Action

• In The Crime Doctor's Courage, Miguel and Delores Bragga go to considerable lengths to make it appear they are vampires: never appearing in daylight, having no mirrors in their home, and appearing to sleep in coffins. However, this is ultimately revealed to be a publicity stunt engineered by Jeff.
• Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred: Fred suspects that his neighbor and new music teacher, Mr. Devlin, is secretly a vampire: he's pale, wears lots of black, doesn't like garlic, likes his meat extra-rare, and butchers his own meat as a hobby. Kevin gets to know him and realizes Mr. Devlin is just an eccentric man with interesting hobbies... until he notices at the end that Mr. Devlin has no reflection in the mirror.
• Isle of the Dead was producer Val Lewton's contribution to the vampire genre. It features a group of expatriates quarantined on an island during the 1910s Balkan Wars. One of the locals starts spreading rumors about how a vrovrolakas (the film's version of vrykolakas, the Greek term for vampire) is responsible for The Plague. Paranoia sets in.
• In The Lost Boys, Sam and the Frog brothers try some vampire-detecting methods on Max when he comes over for supper, and are humiliated when all the tests fail. Subverted when it turns out Max is the leader of the vampires; the tests had merely been rendered ineffectual because he'd been invited into the house by Michael.
• The early George Romero film Martin follows the activities of a young man who is convinced he is a vampire. It's left ambiguous as to whether or not he really is a vampire, but only Martin and his uncle believe in his vampirism, and there aren't any specific signs of his being supernatural that are explicitly shown.
• The main character in My Best Friend is a Vampire actually is a vampire; however, throughout the movie, vampire hunters believe it's actually his best friend, Ralph, who is the vampire.
• In Once Bitten, the protagonist Mark develops a taste for raw meat (he'd previously only like extremely well-done burgers), a pale complexion, and a tendency to avoid sunlight. He even wins a costume contest (as a vampire) while constantly saying, "I'm not a vampire!" Turns out, he was right, but was on the way to becoming one by being the prey of the vampiress Countess, who periodically had to feed on the blood of virgins to retain her youth and power.
• In Transylvania 6-5000, it turns out that a young lady named Odette was only acting like a vampire (dressing up in a black leotard and a vampire cape) to get attention, because she'd been unattractive prior to her recent nose-job.
• Vampire's Kiss is about a man who thinks he's turning into a vampire, but he's actually losing his mind.

Literature

• When they first meet, Abraham Lincoln and Edgar Allan Poe both mistake the other for being a vampire in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
• In the first novel in The Adversary Cycle, The Keep, the main antagonist is an Atlantean sorcerer/antichrist, but he pretends to be a Wallachian nationalist vampire in order to persuade an old professor to help him, and fakes a set of weaknesses different from his real ones.
• In the A to Z Mysteries book The Vampire Vacation, the three main kids begin to suspect that a man named "Dr. A. Cula" is, in fact, a vampire. Turns out he's just an actor dressed as a vampire, preparing for his next role.
• Early in Aunt Dimity: Vampire Hunter, five-year-old twins Rob and Will see someone standing in the woods near their riding school who looks like a vampire they saw in a classmate's vampire comic book. Lori checks out their story, convinced they saw someone, and finds footprints and a scrap of red silk the riding instructor missed. It turns out to be Charlotte DuCaral, a neighbour who wears the cloak, along with zinc oxide sun block and red lipstick, who was in the woods brooding over her lost love, who had promised to elope with her years before but never arrived.
• Used two ways in Tanya Huff's Blood Price, neither remotely funny:
  • Toronto is hit with a series of murders in which all the blood is drained from the victims. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people think it's a vampire (including an actual vampire, for a while), but it's actually a demon. Not much of an improvement.
  • A night nurse is accosted by her drunken neighbors, who have gotten caught up in the vampire frenzy and decide that a woman they never see by day must be a vampire. They impale the poor woman with a sharpened hockey stick... and are horrified when the body doesn't turn to dust at dawn.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer did this in a tie-in novel; the creature was actually a demon masquerading as a vampire and known as the Daywalker.
• In The Count of Monte Cristo, some speculate that the eponymous Count is a vampire, on account of his jail-gained pallor. Obviously, averted in The Vampire Count of Monte Cristo.
• Dirk Gently is not a vampire, and as a student was at pains to point out that any rumours to the contrary were nonsense. His mother was not a Transylvanian immigrant and there's nothing weird about the expensive dental work she needs. There are no bats in his family tree whatsoever. He wears a black, flappy coat because he likes it, and is frequently found hanging upside down from an exercise machine because it's good for his back. He has no idea how any of these rumours got started. (Except, of course, that there were no rumours until he started denying them. This is how you build a Mystique.)
• Discworld:
  • In Making Money, Mister Bent is suspected of being a vampire due to his dark clothing, mysterious past, obsessive counting, staying at Mrs. Cake's boarding house, where supernatural creatures often reside, and always showing up at the bank before light and leaving after dark. It turns out he was born a clown. He's just very dedicated to his job.
  • Unseen Academicals, regarding Vetinari, whose other vampiric traits include being really pale, communicating with rats, and having an ambiguously romantic relationship with someone who actually is a vampire:
    Glenda looked at the skinny black figure and said, enunciating carefully, "When you say he does not drink wine, do you mean he does not drink wine, or he does not drink... wine?"
• The Morris Gleitzman short story "Dracila" is about a ten-year-old attempting to convince his kid brother that their sister's new boyfriend is not a vampire, despite a surprising amount of evidence cropping up to indicate that he is.
• The mysterious Mr A.R. Claud in Dracula, Go Home by Kin Platt. Of course, if he was seeking to avoid attention, he could have a chosen different alias.
• The title character in Eden Green initially thinks of her friend's infection with an immortal needle symbiote as vampire-like, and mocks the one who infected her as an 'Edward Cullen-wannabe'. By the end, she's dropped this idea in favor of treating the needles as an alien corruption that needs to be destroyed.
• The Goosebumps series had a short story where kids suspect their new classmate (who is very pale, Eastern European, and dresses all in black) is a vampire. She's not - they are vampires, and rapidly turn her into one.
• Played straight and subverted in the original novella I Am Legend. While the infected people technically could be considered vampires, Neville realises at the end that the reason most of them display the traditional weaknesses is actually psychological. As the virus spread the word "Vampire" started to be thrown around and the trauma of dying and then reviving drove most of those afflicted insane. He then understands why he once observed one Vampire climbing a telegraph pole only to leap to his death... he thought he would turn into a bat.
• In the first Kate Daniels book, a guy she meets and dates briefly is set up to be the Monster of the Week. He isn't. It's really, really awkward.
• The protagonist of The Lady of the Shroud (by none other than Bram Stoker himself) is woken in the middle of the night by a woman who's dressed in graveclothes, as pale and frozen as a corpse, and can't enter his room until he helps her over the threshold. She visits him on subsequent nights (only at night), and he soon concludes she's a vampire and concocts an elaborate fantasy in his head of how he'll save her and restore her humanity with The Power of Love... only to find out she's a 100% flesh-and-blood human, and while there is an elaborate plot going on that involves faking her own death to thwart the villains' plans, there is nothing supernatural going on. No vampire fantasy for you, sir, but he does get a great wife out of the deal.
• In The Legacy of Lehr by Katherine Kurtz, there's a killer on the loose who appears to have all the indicators of being a vampire, but it turns out he isn't and it's just a series of coincidences. (That doesn't mean he isn't a dangerous killer, though.)
• While regular vampires exist in Market of Monsters, there are also zannies — humans who feed on pain, who grow weak and sickly the longer go without feeding, and look younger, healthier, and more attractive after feeding, exactly like vampires with blood. At one point, the most prominent zannie in the story goes a long time without eating, and when the villainous character they'd planned to capture for him to feed on gets away, in desperation, he tortures an innocent guard for pain in a scene that mimics every time you've seen a vampire ravenous for blood.
• Ann Hodgman's My Babysitter Is a Vampire: Book #4, My Babysitter Flies By Night, introduces Voldar Constantin, an exchange student from Drazylvonia in Europe. For a while main protagonist Meg Swain thinks he's a vampire, since he looks like one, talks in a strange, formal way, and is far more interested in blood than a normal seventh-grader. It turns out he's just weird and really into scientific stuff, and he becomes one of Meg's best friends and allies, helping her out in both that book and its immediate sequel.
• In the short story My Bloody French Exchange by Anthony Horowitz, a young boy on a foreign exchange with a French family comes to believe their elderly uncle is a vampire. He isn't ... unfortunately, the boy only finds out after he's killed the poor old man with a wooden stake, and gets sent to a psychiatric institution.
• Exploited cleverly in the Richard Matheson short story "No Such Thing as a Vampire," where one character sets up the man who cuckolded him to look like a vampire, so the superstitious villagers will stake him to death.
• Rowley Jefferson's Awesome Friendly Spooky Stories: In story 4, The Biter, Lilli really likes to bite things and has sharp teeth. Her doctor says that she's a vampire, and that helps her make friends because vampires are cool. However, Lilli's doctor corrects herself days later that Lilli simply just likes biting things, but her parents treat her like a vampire anyways because she made friends from being a vampire.
• Sherlock Holmes - "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire". Their client, Mr. Robert Ferguson, tells them that his Peruvian second wife has been seen sucking their baby son's neck, and pinprick holes have been found at the site, making him think she's a vampire who was sucking his blood. It turns out his and his first wife's fifteen-year-old son Jack, who's been left with limited mobility since a childhood accident, is jealous of the baby and has been trying to murder him with poisoned darts - the infant's mother discovered this and was sucking the poison out.
• In the novel Twelve, one of the Vampire Vannabes isn't a vampire. This is a major surprise to the reader, the main character, and in the sequel, even to other vampires. Being able to pretend to be a blood-sucking torture-loving inhuman monster is not played for laughs.
• In Lensey Namioka's Village of the Vampire Cat, two ronin try to solve a mystery regarding the Japanese-style vampire. Apparently it's sneaking into girls' rooms at night, killing them with its claws, and also causing fainting spells. And there's a strange mewling sound that crops up now and again, and sometimes people get attacked by invisible claws while in the forest. Turns out it's a man thought dead, who was killing the beautiful women who robbed his grave... using a hook on a long cord as a weapon. And his mewling voice came from his mutilated throat.
• Wearing the Cape: Vampire-type breakthroughs are technically just delusional breakthroughs with an odd mix of abilities and weaknesses. They only react to traditional vampire weaknesses because they believed, when they first gained their powers, that that was how vampires worked. Ironically, this means that Jackie (who was turned by one of the unspeakably rare master vampires) is one of the only "real" vampires, despite the fact that she finds vampire culture ridiculous on a good day.

Live-Action TV

• 30 Rock: Jack and his kidnapped wife's mother, Dianna Jessup, went to visit the UN to ask for help getting Avery freed from her captor Kim Jong Un. When they visit the Transylvanian ambassador, he complains about everyone thinking he must be a vampire, since he's Transylvanian, is a night owl, and has a severe garlic allergy (also, his name is pronounced "Chocula", but is obscured with diacritics). He doesn't help matters when he makes a hand gesture and yells, "VAMPIRE PUSH!" at Jack and Dianna.
  • One of Liz's potential adoptions (mentioned, but not seen), is a Romanian boy named Dracul who has very pale skin and a sunlight allergy. As he is a one-off gag, his vampirism is unconfirmed.
• In Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode The Tale of the Nightly Neighbors, the kids believe their new neighbors are vampires. The two adults and kid are only wearing black clothing, never seen during the daytime, everyone in the neighborhood began getting that sickness outbreak after they moved in and they come from a part of Romania that is near Transylvania. The kids also find huge amount of blood packages in their basement. At the end, the kids find the adults during the day. It turns out the adults work in a hospital during the night, only recently their schedule changed and the blood in their basement is due to an overflow of blood in the hospital. It turns out that the parents are NOT vampires but their son is the vampire and they are the servants to him.
• In the Castle episode "Vampire Weekend", Morgan Lockerby, aka "Morlock", is the inspiration for the victim's vampire comics (the victim himself being a Sham Supernatural who is part of a vampire subculture) and a potential suspect. When Castle and the detectives first find him, he starts burning up on contact with sunlight. Lanie, however, diagnoses him as a simple homeless man with porphyria, which causes sensitivity to sunlight.
• In the Crossing Jordan episode "Revealed", Nigel suspects Alistair Dark aka Frank Jones of being a vampire and murdering a writer who was investigating him. Dr. Macy proves that Mr. Dark is just a particularly dedicated Vampire Vannabe and that the writer accidentally killed himself staging a vampire attack as a publicity stunt.
• One episode of CSI featured as its perp a woman who pureed people's livers into blood-rich protein shakes because she suffered from porphyria, a disease which causes photosensitivity, skin irritation, blisters, and excessive hair growth, along with mental changes... and which is believed to be one of the natural inspirations for the vampire myth.
• The Monster of the Week in one episode of Dark Angel is a transgenic named Marrow designed as a perfect blood donor, who leads a small gang/cult and gives his followers his Super-Empowering blood, claiming to be some kind of vampire.
• In an episode of the short-lived horror anthology Darkroom titled "The Bogey Man Will Get You" (from the Robert Bloch story of the same name) a young Helen Hunt believed her big sister's boyfriend was a vampire. He wasn't. He was actually a werewolf.
• Doctor Who: In "The Vampires of Venice", the "vampires" are actually alien Fish People who happen to exhibit a number of vampire-like traits, such as the Perception Filter they use to disguise their appearance (which can't hide their fangs because of the human survival instinct) having the side effect of blanking out their reflections, and changing people into more of their kind through a blood transfusion. The Doctor's delivery of the "fish from space" line makes it funny to boot. A later episode has him refer to them as "sexy fish vampires".
  The Doctor: They're not vampires. Fish from space.
  • However, actual vampires do exist in the Whoniverse, descended from the gigantic Great Vampires whom the Time Lords fought with bowships.
• On an episode of F Troop, Vincent Price makes an appearance as a spooky immigrant. They think he's a vampire, except of course Captain Parmenter. His reason? "They're not mentioned in the army manual." Of course, he's not a vampire.
• In the Get Smart episode "Weekend Vampire" the eponymous vampire isn't a vampire, he uses a musical blowgun to fire two small Poison Darts that he aims at his victim's neck. He also has a creepy castle and uses a coffin as a bed secret stairway to his underground lair, but these are just to scare off the curious.
• In an episode of Gilligan's Island, Gilligan gets bitten by a bat and has a dream that he is a vampire, Ginger is his vampire wife, Mary-Ann is the "ugly old lady" maid, the Professor and Skipper are Inspector Watney and assistant, and the Howells are his type of people (Type A and Type O). Turns out, it was a fruit bat.
• Harrow: The Victim of the Week in "Damnant Quod Non Intellegunt" ("They condemn what they do not understand"). Suffering from the rare blood disease porphyria, Simon Wells decided to embrace his condition by following the vampire lifestyle, including getting fangs implanted by a dentist and drinking animal blood to ease his symptoms. Unfortunately, his elderly neighbour was an immigrant from the countryside of Romania, who was raised on vampire folklore. When his wife was certified dead (she wasn't) after a snakebite to the throat, he avenged the murder of his wife by killing the vampire. When his wife regains consciousness and is returned home, Harrow is just in time to stop her weeping husband from killing his (he thinks) newly-turned wife.
• In Highlander: The Series, one episode features what appears to be a string of vampire attacks in Paris during the Renaisance. The victims in Paris all have missing blood and piercing wounds on their neck. There's even a Van Helsing type character hunting the vampire. He catches him too, only to be shocked when the vampire gets up from being staked. Turns out the vampire was an immortal faking vampire attacks so that he could kill his young bride and inherit her money.
• Parodied on How I Met Your Mother when Marshall believes that the bartender at MacLaren's is a vampire, based on his black clothing and tendency to come out at night.
  Robin: Hey! That does describe a vampire! Or, you know, a bartender.
• In season 1, episode 4, of The IT Crowd, Jen opens the red door in the basement and finds a rather strange character, who she assumes at first to be a vampire. It turns out he's (probably) just an unlucky goth, however.
• Murder, She Wrote: In "The Legacy of Borbey House", the Victim of the Week is an eccentric who paid cash for a large Victorian house, has no mirrors in the house, and is only ever seen outside in the evening. He is is killed by having a stake driven through his heart. His aversion to sunlight and mirrors turns out to be a case of genetic photophobia, and the killer chose a stake through the heart as a murder method to take advantage of the fact that several locals suspected him of being a vampire. Then the last scene reveals he looked very much like the last Borbey, whose grave is empty...
• Parodied on The Office (US) in the episode "Business School." Jim is attacked by a bat and spends the rest of the episode faking vampire symptoms (garlic aversion, repulsion at Karen's cross, etc.). A dangerous game, knowing Dwight. Hilariously, this episode was directed by Joss Whedon.
• In the Parker Lewis Can't Lose episode "Teens from a Mall", Frank Lemmer is shown avoiding sunlight and other things, prompting Shelly to think he's a vampire. This culminate with her splashing him with a bucket full of holy water.
• The Psych episode "This Episode Sucks" has a black-cloaked killer draining people's' blood, and Shawn and Gus think it's a vampire. It's actually a man with a rare disease who is stealing blood for transfusions since he lost his insurance and has a rare blood type.
• St. Elsewhere did an episode in which a young man thought he was a vampire. His creepy behavior makes some of the hospital staff wonder about this, but he's eventually diagnosed with porphyria.
• An episode of Supernatural features a Shapeshifter who impersonates a Classical Movie Vampire, a Werewolf, and a Mummy because he's a big fan of old horror movies.
• Ultraviolet (1998). Michael shoots a suspect who's been avoiding the sun — turns out he's a human with a skin condition that means he can't go out in sunlight.
• The Vampire Diaries used a series of Red Herrings to trick more observant audience members into thinking that the new history teacher Alaric Saltzman was a vampire - he wore a conspicuous ring, like the sunlight protection rings other vampires wore, and didn't step inside the Gilbert's house. He was actually a vampire hunter, and didn't step inside because he was being polite... while the ring was an entirely different kind of magical artifact.

Podcasts

• In Soylent Scrooge Scrooge thinks Christians are vampires and must be staked, preferably with holly. No one he attacks supports this description.

Radio

• An episode of Hamish and Dougal suggested that either the Laird was a vampire, or he was in the thrall of his ancestor Count Cardula, who was a vampire. It turned out there were plausible explanations for everything. We even heard some of them.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • 1st Edition AD&D had a whole set of monsters called "pseudo-undead", which had the physical appearance, hit dice and attacks of undead, but were living creatures with none of their special abilities. Pseudo-vampires were among the examples of this creature-type, all varieties of which existed mostly to be used by DMs as "ringers" for the real thing.
  • A long-ago Dragon article about how to keep savvy players guessing suggested that monsters in a D&D game might spread misinformation about themselves. One example it gave was a pit fiend going by the title of "Vampire Lord", so would-be heroes would load themselves down with useless garlic and stakes.
  • One of the villains of the Eberron adventure Shadows of the Last War is a changeling who pretends to be a vampire. It's a 2nd-level adventure, and vampires are traditionally powerful creatures, so the PCs will likely panic.
  • Werebats are bat-based werebeasts with a distinctive preference for blood over flesh, and as such are often mistaken for vampires at first, a confusion they frequently deliberately try to invoke or exploit, since it gives them the edge over their would-be hunter. The sourcebook "Children of the Night: Werebeasts" for Ravenloft naturally runs with this element; the sample werebat, Vladimir Nobriskov, deliberately plays up to all of the stereotypes of the "vampire disguising itself as a mortal", so as to trick would-be hunters.
  • Chelicera are Giant Spiders that drain blood from their victims, then stash the bodies in a different part of their hunting grounds than their lair. This can lead some adventurers to gear up with garlic and holy water, expecting to hunt vampires.
• Pathfinder: Baobhan Sith are a kind of malevolent, blood-drinking fey with a hypnotic dance, which in second edition are effectively described as being fey who just enjoy acting like vampires, drinking blood and living in gothic, cobweb-strewn castles simply because they adore the aesthetic.
• Vampire: The Requiem actually has a whole book dedicated to this — Night Horrors: The Wicked Dead, which outlines the various creatures of the night that have vampiric traits but aren't necessarily on the same tier as the Kindred that are the central focus of the line. Such things include ghuls, jiang shi, penanggalan, a parasite that requires blood and eventually overtakes its host (replacing their tongue in the process), and a machine that rejuvenates humans but gives them a thirst for blood.
• Vault of the Vampire sets up this situation with the final battle against Katarina Heydrich. The player will have just dispatched Katarina's brother Reiner — the actual vampire count of the title — probably by using collected stakes, garlic, mirrors and the like, and is offered the option to tackle Katarina in the same way. There are very subtle hints as to the truth of the matter if the player meets Katarina earlier on in the adventure, such as her drinking normal wine, but the confusion is sown deliberately.

Video Games

• Lord Lester DeRosso from Bravely Default is the bearer of the Vampire Asterisk, Archduke of Eternia & figurehead leader of the Duchy of Eternia. He was originally a clergyman of the Crystal Adventists 2400 years before the start of the game, before becoming a cardinal of the Crystal Orthodoxy. Due to the machinations of another vindictive cardinal, his entire noble house was slaughtered and his castle besieged with him and his people inside. After making a deal with an unknown entity (presumably him from another timeline), he became immortal. The Orthodoxy labelled him and his family as vampires after not finding his body, a rumour he actively fed, training himself in vampire-like abilities such as hypnotism, turning into a bat or draining the life force of others.
• Divinity: Original Sin II: Ryker is a reclusive Man of Wealth and Taste who lives alone in a mansion overlooking an eternally overcast cemetary, attended by undead thralls. Despite this, he's a living elf, albeit one who drains the souls of the dead to prolong his youth.
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion:
  • Played for Drama when three dead beggars with puncture wounds on their throats are found. A vampire hunter comes to town and kills a suspected vampire (he acts like one). It turns out to be all a lie. The two guys as well as a third man in a different town were partners in treasure hunting. They all had a key to a chest full of treasure (you need all three to open it), which was their retirement fund. One of them decided to accuse the other two of vampirism and thought killing them would be a good idea. If you don't catch up to him when he flees town in a game day, then he escapes, thus failing the mission.
  • There's also the Order of Virtuous Blood quest, where a real vampire, posing as a vampire hunter, frames an innocent poor sap and manipulates you to kill him.
• Ensemble Stars! has the Sakuma brothers Rei and Ritsu, who both exhibit vampiric traits like an aversion to daylight, superhuman agility (Rei) and a taste for blood (Ritsu). However, it's eventually revealed that while their family is something of a vampiric cult, none of them are actually vampires and they all just happen to have a hereditary medical condition that mimics vampirism.
• Fallout 3 has The Family, who drink blood, avoid sunlight, and (despite their dislike of the term) will identify themselves as vampires if asked. However, they aren't actually supernatural in any sense, instead being a group of cannibals whose leader has chosen to convince that they are actually vampires. This serves two purposes: it helps them curb their urge to consume human flesh by pushing them to non-lethally drain human blood instead, as well as binding them together as a group and making them feel like something more than just a bunch of cannibals. Their aversion to sunlight is also purely practical, using the night to hide from the people who would (understandably) attack them for being a cannibalistic cult.
• League of Legends
  • Vladimir, the Crimson Reaper, evokes the aesthetics and a handful of tropes surrounding vampires, but isn't one on account of "vampires" not existing Runeterra, either as a monster or even as a word. His supernatural nature comes from him being a "hemomancer" with power over Blood Magic, enabling him to drain life out of people and live for centuries (meaning he technically isn't undead) among other, more violent applications. He also poses as an aristocrat with opulent tastes, and is the center of a Cult of Personality of similarly fancy hemomancers, further evoking the idea of a Vampire Monarch in everything but name.
  • Briar, the Restrained Hunger, was another champion that the game's developers teased as a "vampire" champion, but once again, she isn't one within the rules of Runeterra. She has an insatiable hunger for blood and is explicitly based more on the indiscriminately violent Feral Vampires of Eastern European folklore, but her lore describes her as some kind of artificial being created from hemomancy, designed to be an assassin but proving far too unstable for the job.
• Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty: Vamp is explicitly shown to have superhuman speed and drinks a soldier's blood in his introductory cutscene. However, Plisskin explains over the radio that the reason he's called Vamp was because he was in a gay relationship. MGS 4 moves even further into this trope when it retcons his superhuman healing abilities, at the very least, are actually the result of nanomachines.
• In Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, Anton is believed to be a vampire by everybody in town—including Anton himself. However, he is actually an old man and everyone is high on illusion fumes.
• Resident Evil Village: Lady Alcina Dimitrescu and her daughters have vampire motifs, being blood-drinking Eastern European aristocrats who live in a sprawling Gothic castle. However, Alcina Dimitrescu herself falls under this. She's actually a mutant who was granted abnormally long life and certain shapeshifting abilities by Mother Miranda. The only reason she drinks blood is because her mutations interacted badly with her hereditary blood disease, forcing her to cannibalize people and drink their blood in order to stabilize her Healing Factor. Her daughters, meanwhile, are an extreme form of Our Vampires Are Different, being human-shaped swarms of carnivorous blowflies.
• The Tale of Food: Lotus Blood Duck is a dish made with blood, as such he's characterized as a Blood Knight general in a perpetual Roaring Rampage of Revenge who has quite the Blood Lust. He straight-up compares himself to vampires in his dialogues.
• Touken Ranbu: Matsui Gou wears a dress shirt with puffy sleeves, drapes his coat over his shoulders in a way that resembles Dracula's cape, has fangs and is infamously obsessed with spilling blood.
• Twisted Wonderland:
  • Lilia is a fairy, not a vampire, but he's very vampire-like; he's a Really 700 Years Old Elegant Gothic Lolita, belongs to the most gothic dorm and is associated with bats.
  • Diasomnia dorm's Halloween Episode costumes are stated to be based on the Eastern dragon in-universe, but out of universe they are clearly designed to resemble Chinese Vampire.
• Warcraft III's Dreadlords are pale, Undead-affiliated bat-Winged Humanoids with the ability to heal themselves in melee combat and can send bats to damage enemies, but they handle daylight just fine and are actually a type of demon.
• Scythe in Wild ARMs 4 likes to drink blood, and has power over space like other Crimson Nobles in that universe, though no aversion to sunlight. It turns out he simply enjoys drinking blood. The reason why he has powers over space is because his girlfriend Belial, whom he frequently drinks from, is a REAL Crimson Noble, whose powers far surpass Scythe's.

Visual Novels

• Diabolik Lovers is full of actual vampires, but as the worldbuilding in the series expands, it introduces characters that drink blood, are active at night, and have superhuman strength, but get offended and possibly enraged when they are mistaken for vampires. They belong to the First Blood demon clan, a.k.a. the Founders - a proud and isolationist group who are the progenitors of not only the vampires, but several other demon clans, and possess the powers of all of them combined.
• Dream Daddy: Damien gives off major vampire vibes. In the comics, Robert is convinced he's a vampire when Damien first moves in and is surprised to find out what the main character does in the game — that underneath all the Victorian trappings, Damien is really a human guy with normal interests.
  Damian: I must admit, I'm flattered. For my aesthetic sense to convince you of the supernatural can only be described as a testament to the years of hard work I've spent refining my personal style and sense of self.
• The Nasuverse enjoys playing with this trope, but to sum it up, every "vampire" is a "blood-sucker", but not every "blood-sucker" is a "vampire" (in the strictest sense of the word).
  • Tsukihime, being essentially a vampire novel, plays this straight: after encountering a bunch of actual, honest-to-gods vampires, Shiki begins suspecting that his own little sister Akiha is one, too, especially after witnessing her feeding on Kohaku's blood. It turns out that Akiha is not a vampire but a demon hybrid who must consume "bodily fluids" (including blood) of a very specific person (Kohaku or her twin Hisui) in order to maintain her sanity. The remake adds another case where Noel thinks that she is turning into a vampire after being bitten by Vlov Arkhangel, but it turns out that he didn't bite her in a way that would turn her into one, not to mention that she isn't even strong enough to become one in the first place. Unfortunately this gets dropped onto her when she is being turned into one through experiments.
  • Vlad the Impaler exists in several forms throughout the franchise, which play with this trope in various ways.
    • Melty Blood (a sequel to Tsukihime) mentions that Vlad the Impaler was not a vampire, despite the legend.
    • This comes up again in Fate/EXTRA, when an enemy Master has him as a Servant. He's not technically a vampire, but has vampiric traits anyway because of his legend claims he was one. When a Heroic Spirit gets summoned as a Servant, their abilities are influenced by what modern humans believe they were like.
    • And yet again in Fate/Apocrypha he's summoned as a Lancer and rather sore about the whole vampire reputation, and while he tries to be mature and ignore it, depictions of him in that state end up getting destroyed. His second Noble Phantasm, Legend of Dracula, embraces the vampire image and does devastating damage to his opponents, though he doesn't like using it since he believes it's not helping his case. Also of note is that his abilities in this state are much more like "the vampire modeled on him" than like any actual Nasuverse vampires.
    • And yet again in Fate/Grand Order Vlad can be summoned as a Berserker, and his second Noble Phantasm from Apocrypha is locked into an active state (though not as game-breaking here because he lacks the extra power boosts provided by one of his skills and from being summoned so near his home city in Apocrypha). Being summoned into this state intentionally is his Berserk Button and he'll gladly kill said Master for it, while in unintentional cases he will generously agree to work together with whoever summoned him.

Webcomics

• There are actual vampires in Eerie Cuties, but their bites are rarely viral. However, the humans in the comic's universe do believe in viral vampiricism. So when Layla bites the M.M.A.A.'s corpse (which wasn't really a corpse, because the sword was magical and harmless) the vampire slayer assumes that she has been revived by the vampire. She spends several pages wondering how to come out as a vampire to her parents.
• El Goonish Shive:
  • Raven has been portrayed as a vampire only for the next strip to feature him denying that he is one. He has also been shown to be suspected to be a vampire by other characters as a joke despite already being known to be an elf.
  • The French aberration was a creature that hypnotized woman to drink their blood, and looked like a well-dressed man with fangs and red eyes. It's not a vampire, just a member of an extremely varied group of monsters called "aberrations". Despite explaining all of this, Susan still calls it a vampire since Grace and Sarah are going to think it's a vampire no matter what she says. The vampire name sticks for other aberrations, none of which have any vampire traits other than feeding on humans.

Web Original

• Só Levando: Had a story arc where cats started disappearing. Because it started happening after a man named Eduardo arrived in town, a fan of the Twilight series assumed Eduardo to be a vampire who sucked blood out of the cats to avoid sucking it from humans. It was then revealed the cats were killed by a shopkeeper who tried to frame a competitor.
• The Whateley Universe has a character named Vamp, who is pale as an albino and sensitive to sunlight, with super-strength and the ability to draw some sort of energy from people, especially from Energizers. Vamp also has a lust aura she can throw at people, and she can cast a cloud of darkness about herself. She used to be in the monster-themed supervillain team The Children of the Night. In "Ayla and the Mad Scientist", Phase has to explain about the all of the half-dozen or so types of vampires running around their world at once, and why she isn't one of any of them, in order to keep THE CRIMSON COMET!!! from trying to stake her.

Web Videos

• Parodied in "The Six Monsters You'll Have as Roommates" CollegeHumor video. The "vampire" is a metaphor for the Handsome Lech who stays out all night partying and picking up young women (which is why he doesn't like sunlight). It doesn't help that this particular individual is a broody Goth type who doesn't like to eat garlic knots.
• TomSka's video "Let Me In" has a man with fangs repeatedly ask to come into Tom's house, while denying being a vampire. When Tom gets tricked into letting him in, it turns out he's not a vampire. He's a Jehovah's Witness.
• Comes up in the Puffin Forest series covering a run through the Curse of Strahd campaign. The Big Bad and most of his minions actually are vampires, but his Number Two man Rahadin is a mortal elf. The party didn't realize this (despite it not being a secret) until the Paladin had established a rivalry with him and learned the hard way that none of his anti-undead bonuses apply.
  "He's not supernaturally evil, he's just an asshole!"

Western Animation

• The Beatles (1965): "Baby's In Black" had a vampire girl trying to get married to Paul. When Paul's bandmates crash to the rescue, she reveals she's not a real vampire but a singer who wanted to join the Beatles' act. The scientist ("Professor Psycho—inventor of instant wolfbane and dietary witches' brew") who "brought" her to life was actually her manager.
• Doug has an episode where several people at school start to believe Skeeter is a vampire.
• The Fangface episode "Who Do The Voodoo?" had, as its villain of the weak, a caped character named Count Drako and his faithful servant Winston, who stalked London until our heroes catch them. Despite a lot of Dracula references and looking like a Classical Movie Vampire, however, Drako was only ever referred to as an evil wizard.
• Dingbat was a vampire dog that really doesn't exhibit vampire traits except talking like Dracula and adding an "L" as the second letter of words starting with "B." It was part of the Ruby-Spears Heathcliff show in 1980.
• Played Straight then subverted on Hey Arnold!, in the episode "Sid The Vampire Slayer". Sid spends the whole episode believing Stinky is a vampire and tries to get proof. When he confronts Stinky, he has a perfectly logical explanation for everything and Sid leaves feeling stupid. Cut to later that night, where we see Stinky, talking to a bat and looking suspiciously like a vampire!
• In one episode of The Magic Schoolbus, the kids suspect Miss Frizzle is a vampire. She's not, of course, but this is probably an Invoked Trope, as she seems to be actively encouraging the assumption as part of this week's lesson about bats.
• On Milo Murphy's Law, a Running Gag is that one of their teachers, Mr. Kyle Drako, certainly seems like a vampire (he's got the accent, never goes out in sunlight without a parasol, etc.), but it's never confirmed one way or another. Some of his strange traits get explanations, but others don't. If he is, he still seems pretty friendly.
  Mr. Murphy: Whoa. Was that teacher a vampire?
  Milo: We're looking into it.
• Monster Loving Maniacs: In the episode "Guess Whos' Coming to Dinner?", Arthur becomes convinced his neighbor Mrs. Anderson is a vampire after seeing her covering up all the mirrors in her home. She's actually trying to hide her Mirror Monster from him.
• Phineas and Ferb has an episode where Candace believes she's a vampire after she's bitten by a bat, including suddenly being able to levitate, possessing super strength, and not showing up in a mirror. Turns out all of her abilities were just the result of her brothers' various inventions that day. Subverted at the end when Phineas exposes her to the sun.. and she evaporates into a pile of dust.
• Stōked!: "Grommy the Vampire Slayer" is all about this as Reef becomes convinced that three VIP Eastern European guests are vampires.
• On Total Drama Presents: The Ridonculous Race, Josee starts carrying stakes around when she and Jacques are gunning for the Goths. Jacques, to his credit, realizes that she's acting nuts.
  • Jay and Mickey also scream "VAMPIRES!" when running into them in the Parisian catacombs, but calm down once they recognize them.
• Dr. Orpheus on The Venture Bros. is easily mistaken for "a dracula", when he's actually a warlock with a flair for the dramatic.
  • The vampire girls in the "The Silent Partners" episode turn out to be prostitutes to indulge Billy's fantasy from the movie Bram Stoker's Dracula. The same episode reveals that The Investors (the eponymous Silent Partners) aren't vampires either, despite being extremely sinster men in dark suits with inhuman powers who offer promises of power and "immortality". What exactly they are is never confirmed, but they're strongly hinted to be something much worse than vampires.
• The Wild Thornberrys used this plot in the episode "Blood Sisters", where the family met a man claiming to be an old friend of Marianne's who had several not-so-subtle hints of being a vampire. It eventually turns out that he's not only an impostor of Marianne's friend, but also not a real vampire, just simply a crazy guy who believed himself to be one because he watched too many American horror films and was unable to distinguish reality from fiction.

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