Vampire Hickey

Gives new meaning to the term "love bite".^{L-R, top-to-bottom} Marceline, Jonathan Harker, Charlie, Sadie, Wyatt, and Ari.

"The apparent cause of death was a severe neck wound that resembled, in the words of one bystander, 'a really gross hickey'".

— Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992 Film)

In a vampire story, someone will have the misfortune to be targeted and bitten. Typically this leaves them marked with two punctures on the neck, though shape, salience, and location may vary. This mark gives the social circle of the victim the chance to recognize that something is wrong and perchance save them before it is too late. Especially in traditional vampire stories, wherein vampires return to the same victim for feeding until the latter expires, the discovery of the vampire hickey is invaluable.

Conversely, a vampire could manage to complete their task in draining the blood out of their target and bringing them into the ranks of the undead, with the pinpricks still remaining where said victim was chomped on. This shows the audience the character's status as vampire and may also be used in-universe as an indicator of vampiredom. It reminds them they're under the undead curse (if it's curable or not depends on the story). Due to many stories having their own interpretation of how vampires work, bites post-turning don't always stick around after transformation, either due to the new healing factor closing it up or just acting as a indicator if the victim is still clinging to humanity, with its disappearance meaning it's too late.

Sister Trope of Vampire Bites Suck which is where a vampire goes really all out on the bites and leave a very messy and gory result that's unlikely to be survivable. As well as Kiss of the Vampire, which is the opposite with the added benefit of having an... erotic sensation from the bite.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Played for Laughs: In this Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercial the bite marks are left on milk chocolate.

Anime & Manga

• Dance in the Vampire Bund: Pops up from time to time since the series is full of vampires. One of the more notable moment uses it for dramatic effect when Akira comes across the young grandson of a politician that against Mina's attempt to colonized an island for vampire-kind. To show she's not one to be trifled with, she has the grandson kidnapped. Akira stumbles upon him while waiting for Mina to get back from a meeting, when he talks to him, said grandson complains about his neck hurting to which Akira notes the bandage, peeling it back, he indeed sees two puncture wounds on his neck. Granted the grandson isn't drained but being bitten in the series still a danger since the bite acts an infection and needs to be treated within a time limit or the victim will turn. This ends up causing friction between Akira and Mina for her tactics. Thankfully Mina isn't heartless and has the child treated and returned safely, having gotten her point across to the politician regardless and Akira and she manage to work it out.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders: Played with, at one point we see some women Dio fed on laid out on the floor, marks on their necks. But we find out that Dio doesn't bite his victims, rather digs his fingers into their necks and sucks the blood out that way.
• In Midnight Occult Civil Servants, officers with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police's Section Zero take on a case of vampires after they were able to see bite marks on a corpse. For officers who aren't blessed to see the supernatural, they can't see it and they think they're just a weird bunch.
• Monster Soul: Played with with the sole vampire character, Kirko, that the protagonists fight. She has a lip-shaped mark on her neck, but it's revealed that's where her fangs are and she can extend it to bite into others to take their blood.
• Shiki: Bite marks occur a few time in the story when more and more people start mysteriously turning ill and dying. The first example being Megumi, who had gotten bitten after visiting the Kirishiki estate with it stated they found the wound but didn't make the connection at the time when she had turned ill out of the blue and her health rapidly decreased.

Comic Books

• Kim Reaper: The second volume, Vampire Island, shows all post-turned vamps have very notable pinpricks marks on their necks to show they were all once human. It's even acts a plot point as when Kim takes Becka and Tyler to the island (to satisfy their curiosity about real vampires), she has them wears scarfs around their neck so no one can find out they're still human. Charlie, Kim's long lost friend, likewise has hers from the night Kim and she foolishly tried to hunt vampires that resulted in her being caught and turned.
  Kim: [after hearing what happened to her the last time they saw each other] Oh Charlie.
  Charlie: I'll get over it. I mean, I'll live forever. I'll have forever to get over it.
• Subverted in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where Mina's vampire bites left her neck a mass of scar tissue (she wears a ribbon to hide them, which slips when she and Allan sleep together). She flees from Allan, but he chases her and manages to explain that one of his previous wives had similar scars from a fire, and that it was the coincidence that surprised him.
  Mina: Not quite the two discreet puncture marks of legend, are they?

Comic Strips

• Garfield parodies this trope on November 2nd, 1995 during the eponymous cat's week as "Count Cat". He leaves his fang-marks on a burger, startling Jon because it looks like the top bun is looking at him.

Films — Live-Action

• In Blade, Karen Jenson is bitten early on by the vampire Quinn. She spends the rest of the film covering the bite marks with a bandage while working to cure herself before she turns; at one point Whistler examines them and remarks that she'll turn vampire within days.
• Bordello of Blood
  • Seen at the start of the movie when two hookers Caleb and his friend are given have puncture marks on their necks to show the two are unwittingly making out with undead women. Curiously, the first one has a dry and partially healed one, indicating she was turned a long while ago while the second's marks are red and swollen, showing she's a recent victim.
  • Used at the end when Rafe pulls up Catherine's skirt and finds the bite marks Lilith gave her on her thigh right before Catherine reveals her fangs.
• Bram Stoker's Dracula: We see Drac first bite Lucy in werewolf form earlier in the movie. Later when Lucy's suitors (Seward, Quincy and Holmwood) come to visit her and leave her to rest, she undoes the collar around her neck and we see the puncture wounds from where she was bitten.
• The Brides of Dracula:
  • Greta shows Marianne the corpse of Baroness Meinster after Marianne unwittingly frees the Baroness' son. The elderly woman is slumped in a chair with bite marks on her throat.
  • Van Helsing identifies a vampire is on the prowl in the village he arrives in when he sees the puncture marks on a recently deceased village girl during her funeral. And once more finds them after Gina is later found dead at the local charm school. When both women revive as vampires, the marks are still visible on their necks.
  • Van Helsing gets bitten by the Baron in the climax of the movie and find the marks after he wakes up from being choked out from their fight. However he manages to cure himself by burning it with a hot poker then splashing it with holy water.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The quote above comes from a news report after one of the L.A resident is found dead with marks on his throat. Merrick likewise mentions this to Buffy when the two of them go to a graveyard for him to show her proof that vampires are real, mentioning that the deceased of the grave they're visiting had "extensive tissue damage" around the neck.
• Count Yorga:
  • After Erica is bitten, she has two noticeable bite marks on her neck that Hayes notes when examining her the following day. Yorga comes to her the following night and re-opens the wound to finish draining her.
  • In The Return of Count Yorga, one character named Mitzi encounters Yorga before she's about enter an auditorium for a orphanage fundraiser. He takes some of her blood before going in himself with her stumbling in some time after. When the guests examine her, they see some slight puncture wounds on her neck but aren't sure what to make of it while Yorga quietly leaves as they tend to her. Unlike Erica, no one makes the connection of her being a victim of a vampire attack, allowing Yorga to claim her later easily.
• Dracula Has Risen from the Grave: The start of the film has a priest find the body of a dead woman stuffed inside the bell where we see two fresh puncture wounds on her neck, indicating Dracula claimed her.
• Horror of Dracula:
  • Harker finds the puncture wounds the following morning after an encounter with Dracula and his bride (the latter having bitten him), which in the movie, is bad as it means he'll turn if Dracula isn't killed. Unfortunately he doesn't get the chance to stake him as Dracula finishes him off before he can. When Helsing comes to the castle later, he finds Harker's turned body in Dracula's coffin, the count having exacerbated the wound and most of his neck is dried in blood from the marks where it drained out of.
  • Lucy reveals the mark on her neck to the audience when she waits for Dracula to visit her after she's left alone.
  • Mina has marks on her neck when Dracula attacks her a second time.
• In Once Bitten, The character played by Jim Carrey (in one of his first major film roles) is bitten by a vampire (played by Lauren Hutton). Fortunately for him, in this movie it takes three bites to fully turn someone into a vampire. Unfortunately for him, she didn't bite him in the usual spot on the neck, so all that his friends notice is that he's acting strangely. And even when they start to suspect what's actually going on, the bite mark is in a spot that's not easy to casually check (inner thigh, near the groin).

Literature

• A to Z Mysteries: Inverted in The Vampire's Vacation. When an actor who typically plays the role of vampires comes to town, several adults in the town decide to play a prank on the main characters. They paint puncture wounds on their necks with makeup, act strange, and call the actor Dr. A. Cula to try and scare the kids into thinking that there is a vampire loose in town.
• Carmilla: The doctor who examines Laura because of her deteriorating health is certain that she is being visited by a vampire when he discovers "a small blue spot, about the size of the tip of [a] little finger" on her upper chest, only a "little below [the] throat". Later we are told that a different doctor found a like "small livid mark" in the same spot on Bertha Rheinfeldt before she died. While these blue spots mark the points where the victim has been bitten by the vampire, the actual punctures left by the vampire's teeth are so small as to be almost invisible. Laura also one time mentions off-handedly that Carmilla has a "little mole on her throat"; it seems possible that the "mole" is actually the mark left by the vampire who killed her.
• Dracula:
  • When Mina finds Lucy outside after she sleepwalks from their bedroom. She barely catches a glimpse of Dracula hunched over her before he flees, not knowing what he is at the time. So when she retrieves Lucy and brings her back, she sees the marks on Lucy's neck and assumes she pricked her with a safety pin though Lucy notes she doesn't feel any pain. As she starts to fall ill from later attacks, Seward can't make the connection that the mark is related to her declining health and it's only till Van Helsing is brought in, that mark signal him of a vampire attack. Alas, when Lucy is drained too heavily a third and final time, the marks heal on their own, which Van Helsing cites is too late for her.
  • Mina gains her own when Dracula bites her after forcing her to drink his blood, this combination is so she'll turn regardless if she's alive or not as long as Dracula lives. The book downplays this though for the imprint wafer that's burned into her skin, but the bite marks are likewise noted to be a sign of if she's in danger of turning if they close.
• In the novel adaptation of Fiends of the Eastern Front, Sergei is bitten by one of the eponymous fiends. The squad treats it by bandaging his silver Star of David pendant against the fang wounds in an effort to burn out the infection. It results in Sergei becoming a Daywalking Vampire and the wounds mutating into tiny, monstrous mouths, complete with tongues.
• Twilight has a variant form of this. Vampires don't have fangs, though their teeth are strong and sharp. After Bella survives being bitten by James at the end of the first book, she's left with a silvery crescent-shaped scar on her wrist. It's noted that the scar always feels slightly colder than the rest of her body (vampires have lower temperatures than humans) and that it shimmers ever so slightly in the sun (a vampire's skin sparkles when exposed to sunlight).

Live-Action TV

• Are You Afraid of the Dark?: In "The Tale of the Night Shift", a vampire goes around biting the patients and staff of a hospital with only the two protagonists the remaining ones. Those affected by the vampire's power show visible bite marks on their throats.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • In ''Welcome to the Hellmouth", Willow and Xander are led into a trap by Luke and Darla, the latter of whom reveals their friend Jesse to them; he's holding his neck in pain and there's blood present as he stumbles towards them, proclaiming that Darla gave him a "Heck of a kiss", showing that Darla clearly bit him (which we find out later was against The Master's orders, but she couldn't help herself and wanted a little taste).
  • In Angel, Darla uses this to frame Angel and turn Buffy against him by tricking Buffy's mother, Joyce into letting Darla into their house, biting her, then leaving Angel holding Joyce as she leaves just as Buffy returns. Making her think Angel had bitten Joyce due to the bite wounds on Joyce's neck. At the hospital Joyce is told that she appears to have slipped and stabbed herself with a barbeque fork, to which she confusedly asks Buffy "Do we even own a barbeque fork?"
  • In Phases, Buffy finds out a former classmate of hers was attacked and killed, at first thinking it a werewolf attack. But when the way the classmate was killed doesn't stack up to how a werewolf would operate (as they don't normally leave bodies in pristine condition), she visits the funeral parlor during her wake and finds the bite marks on her neck confirming a vampire got her... right before said classmate turns and rises from her casket.
  • In "Helpless", Blair, one of the caretakers of Kralik, gets killed by him while trying to give him his medicine. When we cut back to the scene after Kralik does the deed, we see the bite marks on Blair's neck briefly before they suddenly close up as he transforms into a vampire.
  • Buffy herself gets a permanent scar on her neck from where Angel bit her in Season 3; she'd encouraged him to bite her to save his life (as he'd been poisoned and Slayer blood is the only cure), although Angel briefly loses control, giving Buffy not just two puncture wounds but a full-on bite mark. Much later in "Buffy vs Dracula", Dracula notices the scar and realizes she's already been bitten, remarking that the other vampire was "weak" for letting her go. After Dracula bites Buffy, she initially tries to hide the fresh puncture wound with a scarf.
• Supernatural: In "Monster Movie", a dead body shows up with two neat punctures on their neck, which confuses the monster-hunting brothers, who know that real vampires have many more fangs. The Monster of the Week turns out to be a shapeshifter who's impersonating his favourite horror-movie monsters as Escapism.

Tabletop Games

• One Night Ultimate Vampire introduced "marks" to the One Night Ultimate Werewolf series that can change a role's alliance. One of these is the Mark of the Vampire which changes a character to the Vampire team. The artwork of the Mark of the Vampire depicts a neck with two bleeding puncture wounds.
• This is traditionally not an issue in Vampire: The Masquerade and Vampire: The Requiem, because the Kiss that makes vampire bites usually feel so good also allows vampires to seal the wounds they create by licking them. However, there are exceptions, like the Eupraxus bloodline in Requiem, which gets the blissful experience of the Kiss but can't seal the wound by licking it. Which means the people they feed on will usually need triage, and anyone Embraced into the Eupraxus is gonna have a hickey that lasts all eternity.

Video Games

• Baldur's Gate III: Astarion has a bite mark on the right side of his neck from Cazador and, although it's covered by his default armor, it can be clearly seen if he's wearing other armors.
• The Sims:
  • The Sims 3's Late Night and Supernatural expansion packs include vampires that have these hickeys on their necks, and a Sim can be created with a hickey on their neck even if they're not a vampire (yet), as it's categorized as costume makeup in Create-a-Sim.
  • Likewise, Sims who have been turned by vampires in the Vampires DLC for The Sims 4 will also have bite marks on their necks while in the process of turning. However, the hickeys disappear when the transformation is complete, and there is no way to give them to Sims otherwise.

Webcomics

• Into the Midnight City: Vampires in the story are noticed by, not only the fangs, pointed ears and markings on their cheeks, but the faded bite marks on their necks. One of the characters, Wyatt, a recently turned vampire, has them on the right side of his neck.
• In Last Res0rt Daisy is left with a noticeable bite mark (seen here, complained about here) after Jigsaw feeds on her.
• Modern Mogal: Carmilla's the sole vampire in classroom of kids though a friendly (if emo) one. One strip had her accused of biting one of her schoolmates when bite marks show up on a boy's neck, but the father of a girl she befriended clears her name by noting the wound wasn't deep enough nor fit the size of fangs. Plus the boy would've shown abnormalities from the bite, concluding it's just a harmless rash or a bite from an insect.
• The Order of the Stick: After Durkon is vampirized, he is depicted with bite marks on the right side of his head. Since Durkon was turned by Malack, he has extra wounds because of the lizardfolk's naturally sharp teeth in addition to his vampire fangs. Belkar also gets two sets when he gets drained to near death by the both of them, but since he survives, the wounds are there to show that he's a One-Hit-Point Wonder. After the Art Shift, vampires aren't depicted with bite marks at all.
  Belkar: I have the bite marks to prove it, jackass! One set from each of them!
• Ozzie the Vampire: The day Ozzie became a vampire, she woke up with two puncture wounds on her neck.
• School Bites: Enforced by the Shadow Academy as one of their classes for newborn vampires. In order to avoid leaving bite marks, the new vampires are to leave clean shallow bites to get at the blood and frowning at methods that haphazardly rip into flesh.
• Total Undead Drama:
  • After meeting Storm and allowing Sadie to "get to know him better" first after losing a game of "Rock Paper Scissors". Katie later finds an initially life-less Sadie slumped on a rock. When Katie touches her to get her attention and Sadie's body falls over, Katie notes the swollen bite marks on neck where Storm bit her during their "make out". Later when Sadie turns and Storm and she corner Katie, Sadie showcases the now faded marks quite proudly signifying it as "the totes ultimate hickey". Katie follows suit after she likewise becomes a vampire.
  • Jo finds Sugar's body in the lower part of the manor with bite marks on her neck. Just as she starts to pity Sugar's fate, the marks suddenly fade and Sugar turns before her eyes.
  Jo: Tsk tsk, figured as much when Cody said you ran into the woods with Ella on your tail. I would say your deserved it. But even I wouldn't wish even you going out with those gaudy prinks on your neck.
  Sugar: (Suddenly turns her head to Jo) Ah know right? Dying from it just really, really.... (Fangs appear in her mouth, as her eyes glow and her ears grow pointed) sucks! HISSSS!
  • Sky finds said marks on Staci's body after Sky bumps into a cabinet Staci was stuffed into and falls out from the hit.
• Zelfia: Mayy gets bitten by a vampire fairy early in the story. While she doesn't turn (due to not having did a blood exchange), the bite marks never fully heal and she goes from that point onward with two faded marks on her neck.
• Zom Com: Ari has two pinprick marks on her neck, indicating she was formerly human and was bitten and turned at some point. The author ultimately confirmed it in an FAQ. The strip, "Origins", indeed showcased how she got bitten.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time: Marceline has two noticeable bite marks on her neck, giving the indication that she was turned some time in the past. The "Stakes" mini-series eventually reveals in a flashback, to when she was just a common half-demon (human mother, demon father), that this was from the vampire king who bit and turned her just as she was staking him. In the present day of the story, the bite mark goes away when Princess Bubblegum removes her vampire essence. When she regains the last of his vampire power, the vampire essence puts the marks back on her neck as she's absorbing the power.
• The Batman vs. Dracula: Most of those bitten by Dracula or his vampire victims have marks on their necks, which clues in Bruce on what exactly he's dealing with and taking steps to find out how to combat it.
• Fanboy and Chum Chum: Parodied in "Fangboy". Fanboy gets a mosquito bite on his neck and mistakes it for a vampire bite, leading to him believing that he has become a vampire. Later, Fanboy and Chum Chum meet a real vampire, Dr. Acula, who spends the rest of the episode trying to bite Chum Chum and ends up biting Fanboy's scalp by mistake. As it turns out, Dr. Acula had bitten Fanboy before, leaving bite marks on his neck on the side opposite from where the mosquito bite is. Fanboy asks himself how he missed the real vampire bite marks.
• The Simpsons: In the Treehouse of Horror IV story, Bart Simpson's Dracula, has some fun with this.
  • The start of the story has the family watching the news about a "peasant" found dead with teeth marks on their throat and drained of their blood. Despite there likewise being evidence of a black cape at the scene, the police can't make the connection of a vampire attack and Wiggum thinks they're dealing with a mummy to Lisa's frustration.
  • After Bart is captured by a vampire Burns in his crypt hideout, the two return to the dining hall to show Homer and Marge that everything is alright when Lisa tries to warn them... despite Burns having blood dripping from his fangs and the two obvious puncture wounds on Bart's neck. The fact that Bart is acting zombie-like doesn't help either.
    Lisa: Mom! Dad! Mr. Burns is a vampire! And he has Bart!
    Burns: [comes in with a clearly bitten Bart] Why, Bart's right here.
    Bart: [droning, having a blank expression] Hello mother, hello father, I missed you during my uneventful absence.

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