Chill of Undeath

"Do you feel... a chill?"

— Karthus, the Deathsinger, League of Legends

Vampires in fiction are almost always colder than they were before they turned. This most likely originates from the fact that vampires are essentially living corpses, or it may be due to evil being cold. Of course, having Friendly Neighborhood Vampires in the setting would probably mess with that analogy.

Another problem with this trope is that there's no reason a dead (or undead in this case) thing would be abnormally cold. When someone says a dead body is "cold," they really mean "colder than I know a human body should be." Without some extra bit of magic, dead (or undead) things should be room temperature at best. Sometimes they even heat up to higher than room temperature because of the energy released in the breakdown of the body during decomposition.

Please note that vampires aren't the only undead with Cold Blood, they're just the most commonly used examples. Any undead creature with an abnormally cold temperature counts as well.

Contrast My Blood Runs Hot. See its Sub-Trope, Ghostly Chill, for when a ghost drops the temperature around them. See also Undeathly Pallor. Often a form of Glamour Failure.

Sub-Trope of Elemental Zombie.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood, the vampire Dio Brando can freeze a person's blood with a touch. He apparently loses this power by the time Stardust Crusaders rolls around, having attached his head with his solar-powered Arch-Enemy's body.

Comic Books

• In The DCU, supervillain Kobra kills his brother Jason's girlfriend, then resurrects her as a zombie and sends her to kill him. Jason's last words are as he embraced her, remarking that her skin is as cold as ice. This sentence trails off as realization dawns on him just before the zombie stabs him in the back and throws him from the cable car.

Fan Works

• We Are All Pokémon Trainers: Ice-type sub-elements are particularly common amongst Aura Vampires.

Films — Live-Action

• In These Are the Damned, the children being held in the secret facility beneath a military base have skin that's cold to the touch, and one character freaks out and starts shouting that they're dead when he discovers this. Turns out they're an experiment to create children who are immune to radiation and therefore will survive a nuclear war. The children are radioactive themselves, and therefore will kill anyone who comes into contact with them who isn't wearing a hazmat suit.
• Vampires: Los Muertos actually shows the vampire's body as being blue through a heat sensing goggles-type thing.

Literature

• American Gods teaches us that while the undead may not be colder than room temperature, they feel so cold that experiencing any other sensation at all becomes a problem.
• In Bloodsucking Fiends, vampires' lack of body heat is a plot point: they can identify each other by sight with their heat-based Aura Vision, and one human singles Jody out as a supernatural entity by spying on her with infrared goggles.
• In "Cool Air", Dr Muñoz technically died 18 years before the story began, but has preserved a semblance of life in his body using various advanced medical techniques, and relies on an air-conditioning system to keep his apartment at a low temperature in order to prevent decay. When the air conditioner breaks, death catches up with him and he decomposes within several hours.
• The Archancellor's hat from Discworld seems to contain the souls (or shades) of all the previous archancellors. It can deliver a freezing chill from within because of it.
• The zombies in Galaxy of Fear: City of the Dead are very cold. Doctor Evazan has one of them hold a "patient" down to immobilize him, in lieu of conventional straps, and Zak finds his hands icy and impossibly strong.
• Inverted with the "vampires" of I Am Legend, who are humans with a disease that (among other things) sends the body into overdrive. They run a fever of about 103 Fahrenheit as a baseline.
• In the New Amsterdam Books, resident Spanish wampyr detective Sebastian is cold and doesn't have free-flowing blood in his body.
• Old Kingdom: Death appears to be an infinite river of frigid water; when Necromancers are projecting their spirits into Death, their bodies rapidly frost over. Not so much the Dead themselves, some of which are even on fire.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • The Others, undead and cold, to the point where the ambient temperature drops when they're around.
  • The wights, the reanimated corpses of the Others' victims are also ice-cold to the touch, though they don't drop the ambient temperature.
• Invoked in The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries (and by extension, True Blood). At one point in the books, Sookie becomes intimate with a non-vampire for the first time and notes how strange it is to have sex with a warm body.
• Inverted in The Strain, as vampires have an unusually high body temperature. This makes infrared vision a useful way to track their movements.
• The Twilight Saga's vampires are physically cold and "marble-like". The werewolves, by contrast, have a higher-than-average body temperature.

Live-Action TV

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Initiative discovers that a vampire (specifically Spike) is in Willow's dorm room because their Infrared X-Ray Camera reads him as only slightly above room temperature.
• As in the books, the temperature around the White Walkers drops notably in Game of Thrones, to the point that fires next to them are extinguished.
• Ghosts in Supernatural cause the temperature to drop.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Liches, undead spellcasters, have a touch that can inflict cold-based damage.
  • One particularly nasty Elite Zombie type are the bleakborns, also known as Moil zombies. They look like flash-frozen, frostbitten walking corpses that never thaw even in hot environments. That's because bleakborns have a heat-draining aura that deals cold damage to everything around them, while healing the zombie. If you try to burn them, they eat the flames.
  • The Libris Mortis sourcebook explains that as animated corpses, the undead lack metabolisms, and thus are as hot or cold as their environment. The "deathly chill" surrounding them is instead speculated to be caused by the negative energy that animates undead, so that their very existence siphons energy from the Material Plane to be consumed by the void of the Negative Energy Plane.
• The World of Darkness:
  • Vampire: The Masquerade actually warns players that they should keep this in mind while human hunters are around, especially in cold weather, as it will give them away. Additionally, the game has the Naga, weresnakes that can alter their physiology to go cold blooded, and grow their snake fangs, allowing them to pass for Vampires in some circumstances.
  • Vampires in Vampire: The Requiem don't have any body heat by default, although they can expend some of their blood reserve to fake a metabolism for a short time. It's mentioned that even though vampire blood is a potent Fantastic Drug, the sheer awfulness of drinking sludgy room-temperature blood is a serious obstacle to consumption at first.

Video Games

• Baldur's Gate III: Deconstructed in this promotional short. When the party trudges through the snow on a rescue mission, Astarion passes out from the cold.
• Most undead in Dominions are associated with cold and resistant to it, and some are even surrounded by chilling auras.
• Ethreain the Lich from Dota 2 is based on Kel'Thuzad from Warcraft (in the original Defense of the Ancients: All-Stars, he was him). He comes with ice spells... and plenty of ice puns.
• Zombies in EarthBound (1994) can use their arctic-cold breath to inflict the Cold status.
• Downplayed in Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse. Nanashi is undead, and looking at the flavor text for the thermometer Shop Fodder reveals that he has a body temperature of 35.3 C (95.5 F). That's above room temperature, but barely above hypothermia.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines: The Mandarin confirms that the Player Character is a vampire because they register as room-temperature on infrared scanners. A Vampire Hunter crew exploits this with explosive traps that target undead heat signatures but ignore living creatures — which you can hack to reverse the settings.
• Warcraft:
  • The Scourge are covered in frost and blue glow, and their spellcasters have entirely cold-based powers. It may have more to do with their origin than any law of the undead though - they hail from Northrend and their master The Lich King sits on The Frozen Throne. Unaffiliated undead are just as likely to use fire or lightning magic than they are to use frost.
  • Playable Death Knights in World of Warcraft can play this straight by building into Frost. However, their other talent trees, Blood and Unholy, mostly avert this.
  • When Bolvar Fordragon became the new Lich King, the Scourge remained frost-based. The Lich King himself gained some fiery abilities, however.

Webcomics

• In The Order of the Stick, when Malack is outed as a vampire, he says he rather thought that it was obvious, given his lack of body heat. Durkon responds that he just figured that Malack, as a lizard-folk,^note technically a snake-folk of some kind was cold-blooded. "Actually, when active, exothermic organisms like lizards have comparable body temperatures to—" "I dinnae want a science lesson right now!"

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