Hemo Erotic

Drugs, money, sex? Blood is where it's at.

"I am still finding orange chocolate bovine blood from the blood orgy in nooks and crannies of my body I didn’t know I had."

— Corin Deeth III, Kakos Industries

Sometimes, plain old vanilla-flavored sex just won't cut it. For some, it takes actual cutting, biting and drinking of the resultant flowing blood to get sexually turned on. When one or more characters enjoys Hemo Eroticism they need to "feed" on others, and probably enjoy being "fed upon" by their partner in a similar fashion. Characters with this Fetish aren't necessarily violent, they may look for willing partners rather than kidnap someone and strap them down. Nor are these characters all blood addicted vampires, though this group does make up a majority of this trope's examples. What unites all Hemo Erotic characters is that they can only be sexually aroused or satisfied when blood is involved, sometimes accompanied with ritualized cutting or biting.

That said, this trope is strongly connected with the Interplay of Sex and Violence involved in most sensual blood drinking, especially if vampires are involved. For them Hemo Eroticism is Better than Sex and often forms a part of their feeding habits. Between two vampires (or a vampire and their preferred mortal lover) feeding on and being fed from are the ultimate — and perhaps only — means to express physical love. It's important to make the distinction that while it's possible for a vampire to make the character they feed on enjoy it by employing the Kiss of the Vampire, the vampire may or may not enjoy Hemo Eroticism as well. Sure, the blood (probably) tastes good and it's easier to feed if the victim is having fun, but that doesn't mean they can only get off if it's involved. It may in fact be a sign that a vampire isn't friendly when the ennui of decadent immortality has led them to pursue Hemo Erotic feeding to begin with.

Even mortal characters who are into Hemo Eroticism can sink into The Dark Side of this fetish. What sometimes happens is they're such perverted hedonists that the pain is what they're going for. To that end they may use other wicked and sharp instruments like knives, razors, or Femme Fatalons to kink it up further. Especially deviant vampires may purposely abuse the fact that vampire bites can be painful to get sadistic kicks while they sink their fangs into a victim. Oh, and if they're also a Combat Sadomasochist? Best to run before they lick the blade.

Neutral pronouns are used in this description because gender rarely matters to the Hemo Erotic characters (though the name of this trope is a pun on "homoerotic"). The character in question may also fall into one of the following: Lesbian Vampire, Psycho Lesbian, Depraved Homosexual, and Depraved Bisexual. Compare In Love with Your Carnage and Consuming Passion. See also Bloodlust and Vampires Are Sex Gods. Contrast Afraid of Blood.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Used in a rather unintentionally hilarious way in Haou Airen. At some point Kurumi donates blood to Hakuron to save his life, and when he wakes up and finds out, he bites open the skin on his wrist and starts licking up his own blood, because even though they can't be a couple in real life, at least they can be together inside his bloodstream. W H A T.
  • Also, some of the sex scenes in this particularly Darker and Edgier Mayu Shinjo manga have blood (not real one obviously) splashed across them.
• Hellsing does this a fair bit in all 3 of its incarnations, the most obvious example being Integra slicing her own finger open and Seras licking the blood from it. Alucard lapping up Integra's blood when she's shot in his chamber also counts.
• Tsukuyomi from Negima! Magister Negi Magi gets a little too excited from wounding her opponents (especially Setsuna).
• It's described in Seraph of the End that while vampires don't feel sexual pleasure, drinking blood feels good for both the vampire and the one they are drinking from. This explains Krul and Mika blushing during their multiple bite scenes.
  • Other vampire/human bite scenes are Lacus/Tomoe, Crowley/Shinoa, Yuu/Mika, Chess/Mitsuba and Horn/Kimizuki
• Fai enthusiastically drinking Kurogane's blood from Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-. Works by CLAMP usually have this trope.
• Part of the confusion from fans as to whether Vassalord is a Boys' Love series or not stems from the fact that the blood-sucking scenes between the two main characters are so blatantly erotic that the blood drinking almost ceases to be a metaphor.

Comic Books

• Henry Preston and Pearl Jones from American Vampire have a very kinky sex life where Pearl feeds off of Henry mid-coitus.
• A Love Like Blood: Karkossa is seen engaging in an orgy with his concubines while bathing in the blood and body parts of humans.

Fanfiction

• A kinda common fanon among Hetalia: Axis Powers fans has Romania as one of these. Often tied to the fanon belief that either he's a vampire or poses as one to troll people.

Films — Live-Action

• The various vampire-club scenes in Blade Trilogy often involve the vampires being aroused while feeding. In fact, the series begins with a vampire-rave in which vamps are sprayed with blood, then start getting hot and heavy.
• In Bram Stoker's Dracula, when Dracula gives Mina some of his blood by slicing into his chest, boy howdy does she make it look sexy.
• Genji monogatari: After Genji is slashed on the upper arm by the sword of a would-be assassin, Awaji makes a show of sucking the blood. Sex follows.
• Used horrifyingly in Hostel Part II. A girl is hung upside down and slashed across the back with a scythe, while the woman doing it lies beneath her, bathing in her blood, and clearly getting off on it, till she finally slices the girl's throat, killing her, and then orgasms from it.
• In Once Bitten, the main character thinks he is going to have a night of great sex with the attractive female vampire. When he wakes the next morning, she says he was "wonderful." letting him think he's had sex, when she was really drinking his blood.
• In the song "Toucha Toucha Toucha Touch Me" from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Janet Weiss sings of her first time making love by saying, "I've tasted blood and I want more."
• This is one of the themes of Thirst (2009). The main character is a priest before he becomes a vampire; his affliction massively enhances his senses and desires, causing him to feel lust for the first time. When he is alone with his girl, he wants to have sex with her and wants to drink her blood—and does both, at the same time. She wonders out loud if it is weird that she enjoys it.
• The Velvet Vampire: Susan has an Erotic Dream in which Diane slices an X on her chest and sucks her blood. Diane, of course, is a vampire.
• Videodrome: When Max learns that Nicki is a masochist, she asks if he wants to try out something. He pierces her ear with a needle and licks off the blood.

Jokes

Q: What did one Lesbian Vampire say to the other?
A: See you next month!

Literature

• Works this way in Tanya Huff's Blood Books and Smoke and Shadows. Vampires definitely get off on feeding, especially violent feeding. Humans may or may not enjoy it too depending on their own nature and how the vampire goes about feeding from them.
• In the Anita Blake series, vampires of Belle Morte's line tend to do this, both between vampires and mutually between a vampire and a close human/therianthrope partner.
• The Bad Place has the villain Candy Pollard. Drinking blood is the closest thing he has to sexual release because thanks to Villainous Incest he was born with four testicles and no penis. This is the ultimate reason he murders Felina Karaghiosis; he came for her husband but Candy is aroused by a vitality he can sense within her, compelling him to drink her blood.
• Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla very much implies that the titular character derives erotic satisfaction from sucking blood. Particularly from other women.
• A rather vague passage in Bram Stoker's Dracula suggests that a new vampire can only be created if a bite victim somehow ingests vampire blood. Then again, the same book was criticized for its "sucking sounds" which many readers interpreted as suggestive of oral sex rather than blood drinking.
• Inverted in The Dresden Files, where Susan, a half-turned Red Court vampire, gets her hungers "confused" when it comes to her love interest. Their chosen method of artificially sating her hunger for blood should be obvious. Played straight with some of the White Court vampires, and various other depraved and/or monstrous characters.
• In Fledgling by Octavia Butler, feeding between Ina (vampires) and humans isn't necessarily erotic, but usually leads to erotic feelings between the human and the vampire.
• In The Hollows, the taking of blood by a vampire is very definitely akin to sex and is a turn-on for both the human and the vampire. Vampires will sometimes feed off each other as a pleasurable act.
• In New Watch by Sergey Lukyanenko it is hypothesized that this accidentally created the first vampire. Some Dark Other was getting off from sucking people's blood. Once he left a drugged victim to die in Twilight. Instead the victim lived long enough to be transformed by Twilight and the drug^note  into a creature that lives off negative emotions siphoned through Twilight, can transform itself and cast spells, but needs blood to repair its body and quench hunger. It's believed that werewolves started in a similar manner.
• The Lovers in China Miéville's The Scar are a couple who have matching scars all-over their bodies—with new ones appearing over time. At one point the scars are shown to be the result of (many) intense love-making sessions.
• Invoked in The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries as well as the TV series based on them, True Blood. A vampire's desire for blood is intrinsically tied to their sex drive; not only is biting/drinking de rigueur during sex, once during the books, when Bill is almost completely starved for blood, he attacks Sookie both physically and sexually until he's sated enough to come to his senses.
  • Being bitten/giving blood to a human is a massive turn on in both the books and the show, as well. At least in one instance, Eric literally gets off on having Sookie drink his blood.
• Vampires in The United States of Monsters by C.T. Phipps, particularly Straight Outta Fangton, gleefully indulge in this trope as they use a combination of Kiss of the Vampire with their natural sex appeal to indulge themselves with multiple partners. The link between blood and sex is stated numerous times even as the protagonist is rather off-put by it.
• In the Vampire Academy series, drinking someone's blood is seen as the ultimate domination. Doing it during sex is just plain kinky and weird. One of the series' Fantastic Slurs, "bloodwhore" revolves around that fact.
• Happens a lot in The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice. It's also shown as erotic between vampires and humans. It helps that vampires are no longer able to have sex (those organs simply won't function, no matter how much blood you pump into them), so all their pleasure comes from drinking blood. In one novel, Lestat temporarily becomes a human again. One of the things he ends up doing is having sex (with a nun, by the way).
• Jack and Bobbi from The Vampire Files put a lot of foreplay into their neck-nuzzling sessions, and Jack's more than willing to get her off in other ways after he's drunk as much of her blood as he dares for a given night.

Live-Action TV

• Mitchell and Lauren in series 1 of Being Human. Mitchell says at one point that he "has trouble separating" sex and blood-drinking.
  • The American version is the same. Yet Aiden has mostly avoided it because he does not drink blood except when he dated another vampire and even then he felt guilt about it.
• In Blood Ties (2007), Henry gets most of his blood by seducing girls (it's not difficult with his looks and charm, even without hypnosis) and biting them during sex. They just think he's being kinky. Given how Nikki's expression when Henry was feeding on her, the feeding is also pleasurable for the human. It's unclear what they thought about having two wounds on their necks in the morning.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Some humans pay vampires to suck their blood for the thrill of it (as a metaphor for prostitution).
  • Vampires also bite each other during sex.
  • A Season 2 flashback of Angel being sired by Darla.
• One time on Forever Knight when Nick couldn't repress his urges any more he called on Janette, his vampire friend. It was implied that this wasn't an unusual occurrence amongst vamps in general.
• Hemlock Grove:
  • Roman tends to cut himself during sex so he can lick up the blood. His partners aren't always up for this: some of them consider it kinky, but one of them was so freaked out that she ran away screaming (though with good reason, since he literally carved up his whole chest and was dripping blood on her face).
  • In season 3, Roman (after he's become a vampire) and Annie (also a vampire) break into a blood bank to feed on the stored supplies. They both end up dousing each other in blood while having sex. For added uncomfortableness, it's later revealed to be incestuous: Annie is Roman's much, much older vampire sister.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022):
  • Downplayed with Lestat de Lioncourt because he usually doesn't derive sexual pleasure from drinking blood, but the one big exception is when he feeds on Louis de Pointe du Lac, whom he's in love with. It's evident from Lestat's soft moans that tasting Louis' blood is a very sensual experience for him. Furthermore, when Louis consumes Lestat's blood as part of his transformation into a vampire, Lestat appears aroused with a slack jaw while panting, his gaze fixed on Louis. Lestat clearly enjoys both the sensation and the sight of Louis sucking on his blood. Lestat then collapses on to the floor while still breathing heavily in a manner which resembles a Post-Coital Collapse.
  • The same applies to his fledgling Claudia, who is only turned on when she's exsanguinating her boyfriend Charlie, as demonstrated by her pleased moans while they're making out in his carriage. However, because she lacks self-control, she ends up killing him unintentionally.
• Some vampires in Moonlight (2007) keep humans around to suck blood. Both find the act pleasurable. And yes, vampires can have sex with humans and each other.
• Episode "Blood Lust" of Murdoch Mysteries: The setting of the show is the late nineteenth century Toronto and Detective Murdoch must deal with a vampire craze created by the recent publication of Bram Stoker's Dracula while he investigates the death of a young schoolgirl. Three other girls claim they have regular romantic encounters with a vampire and they all bear mysterious vampire-like bite marks on their necks. The girls compete to be chosen for the "dates".
• Happens a few times in Penny Dreadful:
  • When Brona coughs up blood during sex with Dorian, he smiles and laps it up. He does the same thing to Lily after she's been shot by Victor.
  • During a sex scene between Vanessa and Dorian, he gives her a knife. She lacerates his torso and licks the blood.
  • Dorian, Lily, and Justine have a threesome soaked in the blood of a man Justine had just killed.
• Rome: While Mark Antony is left to keep in the peace in Rome while Caesar is away campaigning, he passes the time by having two prostitutes fight each other with swords. When one of them wounds the other, he licks up the blood.
• The X-Files:
  • Episode "3" in season 2 had the sexy vampire Kristen Kilar who licked her own blood and blood of other people, which was clearly sexual experience for her. She had some explicit scenes, including the one where she was shaving shirtless Mulder and offering him to taste her blood.
  • Discussed in the episode "Bad Blood" when Sheriff Hartwell asks whether there is some kind of disease that makes a person think they're a vampire. Agent Scully knows her stuff and answers that there is a psychological fixation called hematodipsia which causes the sufferer to gain erotic satisfaction from consuming human blood.

Music

• Referenced in Alesana's song "The Muderer."
  My thirst for blood turns me on, how sweet.
• The Cars: Likewise, the following lines probably are not to be taken literarily.
  I guess you're just what I needed (Just what I needed)
  I needed someone to bleed
• Killing Joke: Sorry, but their greatest hit "Love Like Blood" only sounds like this trope. If any at all, file under a highly metaphoric version of Blood Knight.
• Macabre: Peter Kürten, in "Vampire of Düsseldorf", slashes his victims throats so he can get off.
• PJ Harvey: The song "Happy and Bleeding" from the album Dry features the protagonist "happy and bleeding for you".
• Velvet Underground: The sado masochistic song "Venus in Furs" from The Velvet Underground & Nico closes with Lou Reed droning: "Now bleeeeeeed for me!"
• Music/Deftones: "Rocket Skates" is based on this, with heavy double-entendre.
• Butcher Babies: Their track "Lilith" is this in spades and seems to have been greatly inspired by Countess Bathory.

Tabletop Games

• In Vampire: The Masquerade, human blood is to animal blood like a premium steak is to Spam. The same applies for vampire blood in relation to human blood, making for quite a bit of vampire-on-vampire action involving blood. Oh, it's also addictive. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that it's possible to drain the other vampire's soul away which is as horrifying to vampires as cannibalism is to humans. Rumor has it that if you drink up a sufficiently old and powerful vampire, and they'll occasionally take the wheel.
  • Also vampires are (usually) incapable of enjoying sex very much without drinking their partner's blood during coitus.
• Drink another vampire's blood in Vampire: The Requiem and you risk becoming addicted to it. It is easy to mistake this addiction for love, which vampires are incapable of truly feeling.

Video Games

• In Bloodborne, the residents of Yharnam consider blood Better than Sex to the point where a High-Class Call Girl you can meet sometimes gets paid for her blood. She does still get hired for sex, judging by her line to a male Player Character "I'm off during hunts, so if that's what you're here for, I'll leave you to your own devices."

Visual Novels

• Akai Ito is a perfectly non-18+ Girls' Love Visual Novel, but all the blood-sucking scenes are treated like this. There is even an Attempted Blood-Sucking that, for all purpose, is an Attempted Rape.
• Aoi Shiro, its sort-of sequel, takes the same approach. And this time they even add Twin Threesome Fantasy to the Hemo Erotic.
• In Hakuouki, all but one of Chizuru's five potential love interests become furies and are thus plagued by cripplingly painful attacks of bloodlust, leaving her with the choice to feed them her blood or not. As everything is shown from Chizuru's perspective, the guys' feelings when they drink her blood aren't shown, but the scenes it occurs in range from vaguely sexualized in Heisuke's route to very sexualized in Hijikata's.
• In Slow Damage, Ikuina has a severe fetish for blood and wounds. His euphoric episode with Towa, who himself is very sado-masochistic and enjoys pain and blood during sex, shows him getting quite turned on from the amount of blood the two are losing.

Web Comics

• The fandom to the webcomic Homestuck has a large following who think of Kismessitude-leaning romance as extremely rough and highly hemo-erotic to show how both partners hate each other to an almost animalistic level.
• In Grrl Power, Tom can refill small amounts of liquids very quickly... including his own blood. Cue a fetish for being a Voluntary Vampire Victim
  Sydney: Still, there's got to be some incredibly scarce and valuable liquid.
  Tom: But then, sexy vampire ladies wouldn't be... fighting over me all the time.. and wooing me for suckling rights.
• Discussed in this strip of Keychain of Creation.

Web Original

• In The Gamer's Alliance, quite a few of the succubi from the Eastern Horde, such as Lust, are more than happy to bite the partner they're having sex with and suck their blood, thus mixing extreme pain and extreme pleasure together to create the ultimate sensation.
• A regular activity of Kakos Industries shareholders is something called a Blood Orgy in which all those associated with the company have sex while drenched in the blood of some sort of exotic animal.

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