Whitechapel - your preferred literary vampire

your preferred literary vampire

nick3pointone4 — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 19:20:24 -0800

well i figured in light of the humungously obnoxious twilight comming out recently. i was wondering which fictional incarnation of the fanged blooduckers do you prefer? vampires are awesome... when done right.

personally i always liked lumley's necroscope wamphyri, the guy is absolutely depraved and his vampires are cruel, petty, scheming, violent, and utterly irredemable. no sappy love stories of lonely jackasses who live for centuries and can't find a girlfriend so they hang out at high schools and pick up vapid 17 year olds. i also liked they way he didn't really go the fantasy route and stuck to more fantastical science fiction. and the sort of lovecraftian edge everything he wrote has.

faethor ferenczy is a bad motherfucker.

your preferred literary vampire

brycemidas — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 19:28:34 -0800

Matheson's "vampires" in I Am Legend are probably the scariest fucking things I can think of. Why does Will Smith insist on consistently ruining my childhood? Perhaps it's because he's now a parent and...Parents Just Don't Understand?

your preferred literary vampire

Jay Kay — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 19:35:13 -0800

The vampires in I Am Legend are pretty good.

Altogether, I think the best version I've read is the vamps in Charlie Huston's Joe Pitt Casebook.

your preferred literary vampire

joe.distort — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 19:37:19 -0800

Why does Will Smith insist on consistently ruining my childhood? Perhaps it's because he's now a parent and...Parents Just Don't Understand?

hahahahahaha, beautifuly done.

and this thread made me realize that i dont think i have a favorite depiction of a vampire. call me snobby, but i think the wide variety of representations is pretty interesting and i like most different takes.

your preferred literary vampire

graelignites — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 19:46:38 -0800

@Brycemidas
I agree, I was excited for years every time I heard they were getting closer to what they claimed was a "more faithful" adaptation of Matheson's original. It had the potential to be dark and gritty but with the kind of twisted heart the book had. I won't go as far as to say the movie sucked because it was better than much of the horrible drivel that chances upon film, but the ending did give a big "fuck you" to the entire moral point of the novel, and the film just missed on the horror angle. The Steve Niles adaptation was much better.

your preferred literary vampire

Jay Kay — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 19:55:50 -0800

Yeah, the movie was pretty good in and of itself (mostly from Smith's performance), but it did pretty much miss the point of the book. Though, I will say that the original ending they were going to have would have made it fairly close to that point, I think.

your preferred literary vampire

Rootfireember — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:12:55 -0800

I actually like Anne Rice's early vampire stuff, for fluffy before-bedtime reading. Never found them scary though. Just interesting. I liked the vampires in 30 days of Night -the book- but they seemed too 'loud' to me in their film incarnation. I like the idea of bloodsuckers sneaking up on you and SWOOSHSPLAT getting ya with hardly a sound more than creatures that scream a lot.

your preferred literary vampire

Justin Wrote This — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:20:10 -0800

Christopher Golden's Shadow Saga (Of Saints and Shadows, Angel Souls and Devil Hearts, Or Masques and Martyrs, The Gathering Dark - thought this last one drops the vampire theme a whole lot).

I can't really recommend them enough. They're bloody and violent, the vampires are interesting and compelling, and then it all goes bat-shit insane towards the end of the first book and just explodes over the course of the next two books. Let's just say this: Jesus Christ was a vampire. How else did he get Lazarus out of the tomb?

your preferred literary vampire

Rootfireember — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:28:14 -0800

@justineger I'll definitely have to find those!

your preferred literary vampire

COOP — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:29:23 -0800

Christopher Lee. All others pale (I know, I know) in comparison. Anne Rice and crap like The Lost Boys pretty much ruined vampires in movies. (I did like Coppola's Dracula, despite the fact that almost no one else did.)

Modern vampire movie cliches that need a stake through the ol' pumper:

1. All that gothy-lace doily-18th century decadent fop crap. Spare me.
2. The vampire "monster face". You know, they turn all ugly, grow klingon foreheads and their eyebrows fall off, when they are about to attack. I think that started with the aforementioned Lost Boys. Knock it off.
3. The obligatory Vampire Nightclub/Fetish Bar. Is that the first thing you want to do as a creature of the night, wear rubber and Doc Martens and listen to industrial/techno? Next.

Now that I think about it, the whole vampire thing is pretty played out. Time for a moratorium, until there's a new, original take on bloodsucking, one that can then be squeezed of every last drop of interest by the hollywood shit machine.

your preferred literary vampire

Wakefield — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:36:26 -0800

The Ash Tree by M.R. James. Actually, it's more of a giant spider, which is sort of like an ugly vampire with bad table manners.

And Guy de Maupassant's The Horla, which is an epistolary narrative and pretty good all in all so long as you can get over the narrator's bitching and moaning. It's allegedly one of Lovecraft's inspirations for Cthulu.

your preferred literary vampire

COOP — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:39:14 -0800

Thanks for the link to The Horla, that looks cool.

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allana — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:57:13 -0800

i keep bringing up Christopher Pike's The Last Vampire in response to any Twilight discussions. it's the same crap, right? a few vampires don't suck, try to reclaim their game from all the other vampires that still do suck, hilarity and teenage angst ensues.

your preferred literary vampire

Justin Wrote This — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:57:16 -0800

@rootfiremember: Good luck. Of Saints and Shadows was out of print for the better part of a decade (I asked dozens of bookstore clerks to order it for me, only to get the "what a crazy kid with the nonexistent book" looks). It got reprinted when I was in college, about ten years ago, when Golden got around to finishing the original trilogy, but has since gone out of print again. They were fucking great reads, and I even found myself pining for them the other day. Then this thread came along, and now it seems I have to go back and reread them.

To give you an idea, the first book followed a vampire P.I. who gets drawn into a Vatican conspiracy. As it turns out, Christ actually wrote a separate book of the Bible himself, dealing with the spells to control of all Shadow creatures, save for vampires, the Defiant Ones, and now the Vatican is using the Gospel of Shadows to summon demons and other nasty things to hunt down the vampires. Vampires decide to fight back, and things go crazy from there. So awesome...

your preferred literary vampire

CamyLuna — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 21:26:14 -0800

I'm partial to the Anne Rice and Poppy Z. Brite vampires, but then again I grew up in New Orleans and the city really paired well with the mythology. The vampires in the movie Near Dark were done quite well and had some elegance in their dust and violence. I guess I want my vampires to sweat a little bit.

your preferred literary vampire

orwellseyes — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 21:33:49 -0800

The version of the Dracula myth from "The Historian" really appealed to me. Dracula as mystery and historical puzzle. Most of the book is spent unlocking the folklore of Eastern Europe and the places where Muslim/Christian lore overlap. A good ripping yarn.

There was a British tv show about 10 years back "Ultraviolet" that tackled vampires with a scientific approach (and apocalyptic, as the undead were looking to bring about a 'dieback' of humanity) that was also very smart.

your preferred literary vampire

Lazarus99 — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 21:59:50 -0800

I know he's basically just Dracula, but Count Orloc's my favourite.

your preferred literary vampire

sacredchao — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:10:43 -0800

Shadow of the Vampire was really cool. I dig Interview with the Vampire vampires because they aren't satan's little monsters, and are capable of fighting the beast. But I played a lot of Vampire: The Masquerade in high school, so I'm pretty much done with vampires at the moment, though Let the Right One In looks awesome.

your preferred literary vampire

ZJVavrek — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:10:45 -0800

Dracula, by Bram Stoker.

The Count was mysterious. Wholly inhuman, upon close examination. Frighteningly intelligent, but with critical weaknesses to his way of thinking. I wish more vampire fiction showed them as unsympathetically as Stoker did. It was a startling change of pace when I first read Dracula. There's questions of who he is, what his motives are, sure, but they all serve to reinforce that he's a monster with infantile desires.

your preferred literary vampire

Ev — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:20:26 -0800

I agree with the general consensus on Matheson's "vampires". That book has left a permanent mark on my brain since my youth. I Am Legend-the movie- should be an example and learning exercise on how NOT to adapt a novel for the big screen. Unfortunately, the masses seemed to eat it and Twilight right up...
Which leads me to my opinion below, on how a Vampire movie was done correctly, and it's a fucking CRIME this movie is not playing everyfuckingwhere...

Let the Right One In is getting a lot of recognition as a sublime film, and rightly so. It is moving poetry and must be seen and taken in.

If you've not yet read it then consider John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel the extended, extra-detailed version. It gives you a very frank, unforgiving-like the stark, snowy landscapes-point-of-view into the vampire mythos, as well as dealing with life at the age of 12.
Oskar's(all the characters, in fact) inner dialogues are so heartbreaking and familiar. It stands on it's own and, in my opinion, adds a more compelling idea of Vampire than I think I've ever read. It's stripped down, fluid, visceral. It's, as Eli says so many times, just the way things are.

Having said that I will add that Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot is another book that left it's mark on me.

I will also stand by The Five of Cups, by Caitlin R. Kiernan. More dark and dingy than Poppy Z. Brite-though I did read her stuff too. Caitlin has made leaps and bounds as a writer since that novel.

your preferred literary vampire

stsparky — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:26:28 -0800

Chris Moore's vampires were silly fun. Saberhagen had a odd take on Dracula. I kinda like the Discworld take on them.

your preferred literary vampire

Dewey Decibel — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:49:13 -0800

I'd have to say that my most recent favorite was the Brucolac from China Mieville's The Scar.

your preferred literary vampire

johnjones — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:49:29 -0800

I rather enjoy Jim Butcher's take on them in his Dresden Files books series. He divides them into Black Court (the Dracula-style vamps who have all the traditional weaknesses), Red Court (who are sort of lizard-like creature under an illusion and who also have addictive saliva) and White Court (who are the most human-seeming and feed on emotions like lust, despair and fear. These guys can and will literally fuck you to death). It's a neatly considered vampire buffet, especially since the vampires are only one of the supernatural menaces within the series.

your preferred literary vampire

orwellseyes — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:58:54 -0800

@Ev:

Totally blanked on "Let the Right One In", which was adapted from a novel by the author. The book gets a bit more into detail (of course) including

The fact that Eli was castrated a century before and more on her "familiar", the man procuring her blood.

It's a great book and easily my favorite film of this year.

your preferred literary vampire

brycemidas — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 23:28:20 -0800

Oh!

Also

Cassidy from Preacher is right on up there. I especially love what he does to the fopgoth vampire in New Orleans.

your preferred literary vampire

GraceMaverick — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:28:10 -0800

I enjoyed Vampire Hunter D and Bloodlust later on. Castlevania:SotN had similar ideas involving Dracula's halfbreed son fighting the hunger and killing baddies. Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain had a pretty good story and interesting characters as well, though he was certainly an evil bastard.

The lead vampire in Lifeforce. Because she's almost always naked and has epic tits.

Matheson's creatures are one of my favorites.

your preferred literary vampire

nick3pointone4 — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:41:21 -0800

@ZJVavrek

lumley's vampires are completely and utterly unsympathetic, especially in his first 2 necroscope books, they are complete unadulterated evil. can't recommend lumley enough.

your preferred literary vampire

Mathias B — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:41:26 -0800

Agree with COOP on Christopher Lee being bad-ass. Unfortunately, he never really gets to do that much in the Hammer films, does he? It's a lot of lying around in coffins and letting henchmen do his biddings and in the end, he just gets his ass kicked by some old guy. Like in "Dracula - Prince of Darkness" (I think) where you hardly see him for an hour, and when he does show up, they kill him by THROWING HIM IN THE WATER? That's just not right.

your preferred literary vampire

Adam — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 01:48:35 -0800

I kinda liked Anton's neighbours in Dnevnoi Dozor, though I haven't had a chance to read the actual books yet - which I understand move on from the movie's story arc after the first book. Plus I was intrigued by the fact that ALL Others, no matter what their class or leaning, could gain ability-buffs from vampirism...

your preferred literary vampire

poor_boy — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 01:48:41 -0800

Lestat.

Yes I'm that fucking old.

your preferred literary vampire

city creed — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 05:41:27 -0800

ahh WAN ah... ah ah ah

seriously now, as per Thom Attic, the Brucolac in The Scar is the best vamp character I've read for ages. He broods, he plots, he organises a fair and socially acceptable system of taxation.

Despite the high camp and ludicrous overacting "Duuuude... I just like, totally decapitated the Prince of Darkness!" I do love Gary Oldman's Sad Vlad. Well, love's a bit strong actually... but I thought that film scored most of the genre goals. Sumptuous luxury and sinister elegance? Check. Reeking corruption and old world decadence? Yup. Balletic wireworked martial arts? Not so much.
Casting Tom Waits as Renfield was however a shot of purest undiluted genius. Ambiguity? Subtle characterisation? No thanks, give me a drooling, raddled, bug-eyed, bug-munching kitten fetishist slave to the forces of darkness and... cast him as Renfield. Glee.

Louis and Lestat from the Anne Rice books both started to annoy the hell out of me. The tension between them as whiny, inhibited, introspective loser and psychotic hedonist worked well in the first book but seemed to run out of steam. Lestat's subsequent journey to Vampire Rock God-hood and the continuous stream of vampires of steadily increasing ancientness felt like some sort of linear computer game progression through the levels. I liked the books when I first read them, long time ago now, but I think the film kind of poisoned the story for me. It worked better the way I had it in my head :P

Still, I love a good vampire yarn and it's kind of a shame that this very human monster that gives form to our fears about intimacy, sex and other juicy stuff has ended up being little more than just another hyperkinetic action-baddie punching bag.
Joss Whedon, mighty are your works yea, but you have drained the humanity from the vampire...
China Mieville, give our bloodsuckers back their awful dignity.

your preferred literary vampire

Jay Kay — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 06:24:56 -0800

Out of the Dracula movies, I actually have to give it to Gary Oldman. Lame-ass added love story with Mina aside, he was the epitome of the character I read in the novel. Plus that movie has my favorite version of Van Helsing EVER.

GUY: Are you going to give her an autopsy?
VAN HELSING: Oh, Heavens no--I'm just going to ram a stake through her heart and cut off her head.

your preferred literary vampire

BritMandelo — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 07:31:52 -0800

George R. R. Martin. "Fevre Dream."

That's all I really need to say.

your preferred literary vampire

ScottS — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 08:13:28 -0800

Tommy and Jody from Christopher Moore's "Bloodsucking Fiends" and "You Suck: A love story" are among my favorites.

Spike, from Buffy.

I tried reading some of the Necroscope stuff years back and just couldn't get into it. Perhaps I'll give it another try.

My wife really enjoys the Charlaine Harris "Susie Stackhouse" novels (of which the True Blood tv series is based). I started reading the first one but haven't got too far into it yet.

your preferred literary vampire

Cyman — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 08:25:33 -0800

Barring The Lost Boys for just a minute (if I may), I'd like to shout out to Benny Templesmith, with or without The Jets.

Other than that I think it's pretty clear that Gary Oldman's Dracula from '92 was pretty great. And I did like Willem Defoe in Shadow of the Vampire.

your preferred literary vampire

odarable — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 08:27:07 -0800

Dracula, by Bram Stoker. Definately.

I fell in love with the movie's young Dracula when I was a kid. I didn't get to see the movie until I was twelve, but by the age of six or something I found this comic book (of course) adaption of it and I read it to shreds. I still find Gary Oldman's young Dracula very very very attractive. Bite me. [insert girly giggle]

your preferred literary vampire

JimJonesEsquire — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 08:38:23 -0800

Demitri Maximoff from Dark Stalkers. Mostly because I played way to much Dark Stalkers growing up.

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harchangel — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:21:44 -0800

Dracula from Bram Stoker, obviously, but The Historian was an interesting take on the genre.

MIke Mignola and Christopher Golden's Blatimore was a really interesting Vampire tale as well though.

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Darkest — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 11:04:28 -0800

Alucard from Hellsing... I like how they are drawn in sillouette with shark like mouths.

Science vampire wise, Ultraviolet is preety good.

I have been kind of put off vampires by watching Underworld: Evolution. Darn marketing towards angsty kids.

The ones in the Dresden files seem interesting though.

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outlawpoet — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 11:15:17 -0800

what, no Strahd Von Zarovich? I thought we were NERDS up in here.

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RenThing — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:25:52 -0800

@outlawpoet

*hands you a bright, new Internet* For you, sir, for beating me to it.

your preferred literary vampire

orwellseyes — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:14:26 -0800

@outlawpoet:

You want nerd? I give you Sasha Vykos

John Bolton's illustrations for "Eternal Hearts" were a pre-net form of "2 Girls 1 cup" for my friends.

That may be the nerdiest thing I've ever written.

your preferred literary vampire

nick3pointone4 — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 15:21:31 -0800

i strahd kicked ass

your preferred literary vampire

dswood — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 15:32:23 -0800

Sonja Blue.

your preferred literary vampire

outlawpoet — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 15:49:58 -0800

@orwellseyes

Ah, Sasha Vykos, I admit, I know her.

I was quite a bit disappointed that the Tzimisce and the Tremere didn't make it into the new WoD setting properly. They had such great backstories.

your preferred literary vampire

Josh T. — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 16:01:12 -0800

@DarkKnightJRK

Seconded on The Joe Pitt Casebook. Charlie Huston's vampires are certainly the most interesting to watch. Ideological gangs of vampires, Jewish Van Helsings and insane carnival mutilation; all in a days work for a vampire detective.

your preferred literary vampire

krushdbug — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 16:48:07 -0800

Eli from "Let The Right One In" (both movie and novel) is the friend I wished I had around the time I was 11 & reading & loving Bram Stokers "Dracula". Oh, and "The Little Vampire" too. I guess Eli is the perfect amalgamation of those two characters. So, yeah. Eli.

your preferred literary vampire

nick3pointone4 — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 19:58:54 -0800

@outlaw that's unfortunate, the tzimisce were my favorite clan, them and the giovanni. i thoroughly enjoyed rp-ing a batshit crazy sabbat tzimisce who enjoyed fleshmolding punkass camarilla faces into charicatures of cabbage patch kid dolls. my gm was not a fan.

your preferred literary vampire

odarable — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 20:08:29 -0800

Oooh, I just remembered... Not a faourite, but nostalgia nonetheless: The ones I read about in Judge Dredd as a kid! I don't remember which story, but there were robot vampires, draining cillagers of blood and using it to keep an evil old president alive. But they were really kind and all, and after the judges arrest the old president they make a new life growing vegetables. Awww. Okay, I know JD sucks. But they were still a new take on the whole vampire thing. At least for a ten-year-old Oda.

When I was a kid I'd also read a House of Mystery thing called "I...Vampire". It was terribly sad.

your preferred literary vampire

RandomEntity — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 22:03:48 -0800

@orwellseyes
Tzimisce for the winnnnnn geezus they are everything i ever considered amazing about vampires. I hate all of the foo foo nancy BS that is common in vampire lore.
They are monsters, they are undead, they destroy the living to continue their own horrible, wretched existence, AND LOVE IT.
my girlfriend dragged me to twilight, and i could not believe that shit, SPARKLES!!???? they sparkle in sunlight!?? what the shit.
I don't think I've ever seen a movie depict vampires in the way i believe in them other than 30 Days of Night, as pure monsters.

your preferred literary vampire

johnjones — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:51:50 -0800

I was quite a bit disappointed that the Tzimisce and the Tremere didn't make it into the new WoD setting properly. They had such great backstories.

The Tremere actually did make it into the new setting, but as soul-devouring mages. Some of the vamps they did for the various Bloodlines books were pretty damned creepy. I remember one line of flesh-eating vamps who could vomit half-digested acidic meals onto their enemies (or other victims). Also, I give the NWoD props for exploring Ancient Rome (in Requiem for Rome) as a setting. Four words. Titus Pullo, Gangrel Vampire.

I can't believe nobody's ever thought to do something like that as a comic or horror movie. Rome, but with vampires.

your preferred literary vampire

doclivingston — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 01:19:51 -0800

I can't believe nobody's ever thought to do something like that as a comic or horror movie. Rome, but with vampires.

But they have to work backward chronologically, so Rome with vampires has to wait. First up, WWII with zombies, obviously.

your preferred literary vampire

johnjones — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 01:48:32 -0800

I'd rather to see the full version of Rob Zombie's Werewolf Women of the SS

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Audley Strange — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 03:00:15 -0800

The Count from Sesame Street wins by a mile.

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BrianKellett — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 04:13:27 -0800

No love for the 'Anno Dracula' books by Kim Newman? Although to be fair they are less about vampires perhaps and more about the sort of territory of 'Aetheric Mechanics'.

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DC — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 13:42:35 -0800

When I was a kid I'd also read a House of Mystery thing called "I...Vampire". It was terribly sad.

Ah, I'm trying to buy those books. For those interested, it's from Eduardo Risso and Carlos Trillo (before Risso becoming the arrogant prick he is now).

As for my preferred vampires: Blade!

Ok, just kidding, don't need to throw that rock! Seriously, put that down!
Loved those monsters on 30 Days of Night, enjoyed a lot Interview with a Vampire and that's it. But I think I'll read some of those books you recommend.
Hellsing has potential but, has always, they rather do bloody action with little story in it. And that ending... Why ALL the damn anime have lousy endings?

your preferred literary vampire

dispophoto — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 15:48:51 -0800

gonna try & find this film: Frostbiten
another sweden vampire film.

i read the anne rice books through high school, but barely remember the characters much now. the 'interview' film was a fun watch visually but couldn't stand some of the casting choices. antonio banderas as armand? eesh...
personally, i feel vampires are better represented visually rather than in text. those were possibly the only vampire books i've read, with the exception of comics (30 days, etc...)

your preferred literary vampire

Justin Wrote This — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:28:04 -0800

@outlaw poet - Never was a Strahd fan. You want Ravenloft, you go talk to Lord Soth... before the setting got ruined, anyway.

@dswood - A second for Sonja Blue. She came to me as I started kicking around through the posts again. The Mirror-Eyed Bitch was pretty hardcore, and I actually just picked up a first printing of Sunglasses After Dark at a library sale a few months ago.

your preferred literary vampire

Stranger Dan — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:51:46 -0800

Bunnicula

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oga — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:50:00 -0800

What about Stephen King's Salem's Lot? I read that when I was 12 and I sellotaped a cross to the cover to keep the vampires inside the book, I was that scared. But hey, I was 12.

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bschory — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 23:11:07 -0800

@ Stranger Dan

Oh! My! God! I had completely forgotten about that series! I just had a total nostalgia trip about it coming out and me reading it as a kid!

I totally have to second that now.

your preferred literary vampire

orwellseyes — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 23:20:13 -0800

@randomentity/@Johnjones:

Tzmisce were my favorite bit of playing vampire. My friends and I came up with a pack concept so disturbing that the Storyteller at the larp pulled us aside and asked us to change characters or leave. Funny thing was, we weren't going for the gross out or being gorehounds. Just playing up the androgyny. You see, we were angels. Pure, genderless angels. That and the fact I was walking my friend on a leash because he'd been "bad" was a bit much. The Tzmisce concept of transcending the flesh, a biological apotheosis, was just too much fun.

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Pooka — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 05:19:29 -0800

I liked stephen king's vampires....heh
but my absolute favorite is Dracula...I like the supernatural aspect of vampires...
but I also like a biological bend to em...um..i just like vampires all around...

soooo...when I started my fantasy world project i created a vampire race that combined alot of the pop culture aspects into a workable type of creature...we even through in some of the Nosgoth vampire characteristics...cause I love me some LoK...

your preferred literary vampire

Lazarus2009 — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 06:10:05 -0800

im too late for this one, as all the classics are covered

Gary oldman as Vlad - brought humanity to evil.
Christoper lee in the 60's ( and a shout out to "vampire circus" by hammer films as an honoury mention)sheer bad ass, unstoppable killer - like the terminator with charm.
Angelus and Spike for bringing it up to date. loved their put downs of drac too.

Sonja Blue from sunglasses after dark.
and of course tales from the crypt with bordello of blood. blade gets a vote too.

cassidy pops up for sheer long term value, and Kain/ Raziel too
down with Annie rice, and the necrocomnithingy. for being too dull
i take what i want from them all.

but have to put my final mention in for this. the single greatest vampire in current fiction:
DUCKULA.("count Duckula") and for the cousins- but the theme music of
"in the wilds of translyvania, from the vampire halls of fame
there lived a funky duck called
DUCKULA.

love it, love it love IT.

your preferred literary vampire

RenThing — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 09:09:50 -0800

@Stranger Dan & bschory

I still have my coppies of the Celery Stalks at Midnight and the sequel.

I'm planning on giving them to one of my nephews at some point.

your preferred literary vampire

RenThing — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 09:10:14 -0800

Count Chocula.

Damn that guy could make some fine breakfast for a five year-old.

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fluffpot — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 12:31:56 -0800

Seconding Bunnicula. I'm also fond of the highly bureaucratic vampires of the Night Watch series.

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acacia — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 12:48:19 -0800

I like pretty much any vampire that isn't invulnerable, and who doesn't whine all the time and refuse to drink blood.

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sacredchao — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 15:33:47 -0800

@JohnJones
Anne Rice did a Vampires in Rome thing. It mostly involved the main vampire wishing he could get a hard on so he could fuck little boys. I got sick of it about half way through.

your preferred literary vampire

CDoring — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 19:33:08 -0800

When I was in my teens, I was really into the Anne Rice books and the vision of the romantic immortal being, blah, blah, blah.

In my 20's, I got sick of most of that and preferred a more brutal aspect, with all the weakness and viciousness us mortals possess, just in a functionally immortal package, such as Cassiday in Preacher.

Now, in my 30's, I find I prefer the utterly disgusting, bloodthirsty monsters that must be destroyed. Not interested in all that romantic, existential bullshit. All that, "Oh I'm trying so hard to be good, but I NEED the blood. Just a nip, I promise I won't kill you." "retch"

I prefer if my bloodsuckers barely even speak, such as in the cheesy but beautiful "John Carpenter's Vampires."

But I also like the monstrous leeches in "30 Days of Night" . Or the evil, aristocratic bloodsuckers in the "Blade" stories. Just give me lot's of completely amoral monsters that get destroyed in entertaining ways.

-Chris D.

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roque — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:54:23 -0800

I've enjoyed a lot of vampire-related entertainment, but my favorite-ever depiction of one is "Shambleau" by C. L. Moore. just... eeeeeeuuuuuuccchhhh.

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mlpeters — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:24:23 -0800

I've never read Sunglasses After Dark -- any good?

I've read Dracula and the first 4 Anne Rice vampire books (I liked them at the time... less so, now, though I still like some aspects)... a few others, but generally prefer folklore versions of vampires -- the actual lore is much more varied and creepy.

I'm not a fan of "science vampires"(though some are in good stories), because to me a "science vampire" may be vampiric, but isn't a vampire. I'm also not fond of the whole repelled by crosses and religious symbols bit -- too much an implied endorsement of Christianity.

I'm a fan of Whedon and Buffy, so I make exceptions... though I read somewhere that crosses and the like work in Buffy because of a spell or some-such - -not their intrinsic power.

Favorite vampire...? The Count, from Sesame Street:)

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acacia — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:44:53 -0800

Those 'vicious, animalized' takes on vampires as inhuman killing machines are pretty interesting, though I'm a traditionalist in the end and really didn't like the 'vampire as Scrappy Doo' version in Let Me In/Let the Right One In. But David Wellington's Nosferatu-esque vampires are pretty crazy that way, he describes them well in their implacable brutality.

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Lazarus2009 — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 01:16:10 -0800

@ MI
singlasses is a slightly different take, and its a bit dated now. but it does give some glimpses into an integrated non human (good and bad) presence in and behind the scenes of the mortal world that could really be expanded on and taken forwards. some real glimpses of an interesting concept that i would be interested in.

not so much traditional vampires, but if you can imagine angelina jolie playing Blade as the punisher, then that seems to be the best description i can cobble together.
better than bloodrayne, anyways.

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stsparky — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:36:43 -0800

There was the various Blood mangas/anime/live action stuff.

I'm not a giant fan of serious vampire stuff - it makes me giggle at the bad science.

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outlawpoet — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:15:26 -0800

@stsparky:

did you ever see this one? amusing presentation of hypothetical genetic vampirism:

http://www.rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm

your preferred literary vampire

mlpeters — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:41:59 -0800

I plan to include vampires in CRESCENT CITY MAGICK and already have them making a cameo in issue/chapter 3, as a foreshadowing... but I want to make sure it's not too trite. I'm mostly sticking to the actual lore, but that tends more toward almost "revenant type" vampires - - basically life-force or blood eating machines, viscous, animal and barely capable of being confused with a human, closer almost to the fast moving zombies of recent films, crossed with Nosferatu - -clearly a reanimated corpse... but I don't want it quite so inhuman, because villains with no characterization are pretty boring 90% of the time, no matter how horrible.

Even Dracula, in Stoker's book, is fairly one-dimensional -- though maybe the Coppola film took the romantic angle a bit far... still, that was a valid choice and gave the villain some personality. Lugosi gave Dracula personality through his acting, his accent and the intensity of his gaze.

I actually like the morphing from human looking, to more animal and even Nosferatu-esque. I tend to think of the more monstrous appearance being real, with the normal human face being a glamor.

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johnjones — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 18:03:48 -0800

@ mlpeters

Have one type as a subset of the other type. Assume that most vampires are the feral, animalistic type. They may have flashes of human memory that let them open doors, remember where "home" used to be. Maybe some can even gruntingly speak a name or two that used to be important to them. But they're still animalistic blood-addicts.

Then you have a subset of that group which manages to retain (or even surpass) human intelligence. They can commmunicate, perhaps even be charming and seductive. Still and all, their main goal will be to drink the blood of the uninfected.

In druggie terms, the first group would be a pack of homeless crank addicts who'd chase down and kill a person for the money they had so they could go get more crank. The subset would be those semi-functional addicts who will lie, cheat and still you blind to get their crank. And, of course, the first group could easily be controlled minions of the second group.

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mlpeters — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 18:26:28 -0800

@johnjones
Yeah, I was thinking of making newly made vampires essentially animalistic/near zombie blood-addicts and easy minions... with older vampires slowly recovering their memories and maybe even growing and adapting in unusual way -- gaining the telepathic and telekinetic powers vampires sometimes have as well as growing resistance to the damaging effects of sunlight...

Possibly above your "type two" example, would be vampires who do not seek out their kill, but have minions deliver them take-out, but they'd be extremely rare.

I wasn't going to spill this much, but, THANKS TO YOU... (kidding) I'm sure this take isn't all that fresh - - it'll be the characterization - -both the unrelenting predatory nature of the newer vamps and the personality of the older ones that'll make or break the portrayal.

I'm also going to use some of the idiosyncratic bits from folklore, suggesting that not all vampires are alike, since they're a supernatural creature, rather than a species (like I said -- not into "science vampires" ). I remember one folklore story where a vampire was thrown on a fire to kill him, but he transformed into a mass of snakes and bugs -- the vampire killers had to catch every little one of the the creatures. There are numerous others that don't fit the usual vampire stereotype.

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johnjones — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 18:48:36 -0800

I wasn't going to spill this much, but, THANKS TO YOU... (kidding) I'm sure this take isn't all that fresh - - it'll be the characterization - -both the unrelenting predatory nature of the newer vamps and the personality of the older ones that'll make or break the portrayal.

Guilty. I've been reviewing some of my old AD&D stuff to see if I can translate some of the older modules into the new Fourth edition (looks like it'll be a massive pain the ass, but still doable) and I just read through the Vampire entry in the Monster Manual, which divide the creatures into Vampire Spawn (creatures who rise from being bitten and killed by a vampire) and Vampire Lords (the full versions of the creatures who come about by a specialized ritual covenant involving blood excahnge).

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dswood — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:11:41 -0800

I haven't read any of the Sonja Blue books in a very long time, so I can't really speak to how dated they are now, but I do remember them being a lot of fun. It felt kind of like "vampire punk" to me at the time.

Incidentally, Sonja Blue was also my introduction to the World of Darkness vampires - that crossover novel ... A Dozen Black Roses, I believe it was called. For a long time I thought the worlds were one and the same, so it was an interesting surprise when I discovered otherwise. I still miss playing Vampire: the Masquerade.

I have yet to really delve into the New World of Darkness material. Read a bit about it when it first came out, but I was not really playing much anymore by that point.

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poor_boy — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:56:47 -0800

Nobody mentioned Morbius yet? I loved that shit when I was a little kid...

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Oddcult — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 02:07:16 -0800

Incidentally, Sonja Blue was also my introduction to the World of Darkness vampires - that crossover novel ... A Dozen Black Roses, I believe it was called. For a long time I thought the worlds were one and the same, so it was an interesting surprise when I discovered otherwise.

It's been speculated that the whole of the White Wolf roleplaying thing was ripped off wholesale from Sunglasses After Dark, but when it came to suing, Nancy Collins had to take the attitude that she couldn't beat them, so she'd profit by joining them instead.

I'd say that even more than Anne Rice's stuff, the Sonja Blue books are responsible for the whole hideous 'Paranormal Romance' genre that's blighting the genre market at the moment, but in themselves they're extremely enjoyably nasty little pieces of work. Nancy Collins' stuff really does have a quite disturbed streak running through it, where most of the imitators that I've tried (and mostly thrown at the wall in disgust) have been little more than Mills & Boon with fangs.

I predisposed to giving horror type stuff a chance as comfort reading, but it's all pretty damn awful these days, and isn't written for me, but for middle aged women who want their 'other' as tamed safe escapism.

I wonder what it says about me that I find proper splatterpunk and the really twisted stuff far more comforting?

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Pooka — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 04:50:34 -0800

i really like the idea that a vampire will evolve depending on the blood they drink...
it would allow for rat like nosferatu, and animalistic type vamps, as well as the more civilized human like vamps...

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RenThing — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 08:47:01 -0800

@Oddcult

Oh, come on, Sonja Blue isn't all to blame.

There's Laurel K. Hamilton and her Mary Sue Anita Blake to cast derision at as well.

@all

Since this is the vampire thread I need some help.

Years and years ago, probably close to fifteen to twenty, I saw a vampire movie on television and I can't remember it's name (I think it had the word "doctor" in the title). I remember that the main character is a vampire-hunting doctor who, at one point, takes an iron cross out of a graveyard or cemetary and forges it into a sword as vampires could only be hurt be "blessed weapons." The time period of the movie was around Victorian (I think) and it was live action, not an animation.

Help me out?

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acacia — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 10:49:24 -0800

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Kronos,_Vampire_Hunter

I Googled 'vampire doctor sword forged cross' and got that entry. ^_^

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ScottS — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 10:55:01 -0800

I tried to read a Laurel K. Hamilton "Anita Blake" novel... I think it was called Obsidian Butterfly. The fact I can't even remember the title should give some clue as to how engrossing it was (or wasn't as the case may be).

I read some of the Sonja Blue stuff and thought it was decent.

My wife is a big fan of the Saint Germaine novels by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, but I haven't tried reading any of those. From what she tells me they are more "historical" novels than horror novels.

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Indigo Rose — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 11:14:56 -0800

Okay, so my favorite vampire book is actually Agyar by Steven Brust (since he never says the word vampire, mentions drinking blood, or anything of the sort, but he's been around a long time, can't go out in daylight, preys upon humans in some unnamed way, and can't be easily killed...) but it's not anything like your typical vampire book.

Someone HAD to bring up VtM and Vykos... oh no. I have played/run that game for a long time now. I'm shocked by how many of you think the Tremere were a good thing, since they were a twink developer's pet character made into a brood. (plus they destroyed the awesomeness of the Salubri) As for the Tzimisce, I can't say I liked them more or less than others. When they were done right, they could be fantastic, but they had a tendancy to go very wrong. I did fancy the Gehenna plot that had Tzimisce as the big win (unless stopped by Saulot), but that's beside the point.

I had been playing Vampire for a while before Buffy became popular and could not handle that show's treatment of vampire characters, I thought it rather pansified them, but that may just be me. (sorry Joss, I think you're a genius, but I couldn't handle Buffy)

I guess my favorite vampires are always well made VtM characters (and Fatima is way more awesome than the thing that calls itself Vykos... Anatole has them all beat for amazing) I read some of Anne Rice's and liked a few of the beginning books, same with the Anita Blake series (until about book 4 or 5), I am Legend was an interesting little short story, and so on...

Oh, and Twilight vampires sparkling in the sun For The Lose.

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nick3pointone4 — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 11:22:58 -0800

lots of people mentioning V:tm but no one mentioning robert weinberg? i thought his two trilogies were the best out of all the world of darkness fiction.

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RenThing — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 12:22:54 -0800

@acacia

Thank you!

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ZJVavrek — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 13:56:59 -0800

@ScottS
Obsidian Butterfly is, as you have already determined, not a good Anita Blake novel to start with. (The argument could of course be made that none of them are.) I've always interpreted it as the last half-decent novel before the main focus is simply sex. Previous novels have, you know, more stuff than just sex.

If you're ever motivated into giving the series a second change, I recommend just reading the first three.

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Brandon Seifert — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 15:59:04 -0800

One of the things I find most interesting about vampires in historical fiction is that they're inevitably from the upper class. We're talking about human-looking creatures that suck our blood to live -- which is a great metaphor for old-school aristocracies when you're a peasant. Whereas, say, zombies, they're invariable the common people.

I like that metaphor, and I feel like it's been lost along the way. I'm all for rethinking and reinventing classic concepts, but I think that's one of the stronger parts of the quintessential vampires codified in the 19th century. (Although I'm just as guilty as anyone for making middle-class and working-class vampires in my stories -- although now that I've had the "society's parasites" metaphor pointed out to me, I'll definitely be using it.)

I have trouble pointing to my favorite take on vampires -- apart from Dracula, which is a classic for a reason. I can, however, point to my least favorite take on vampires: 30 Days of Night. Unstoppable juggernauts who engage in wholesale slaughter are not what I'm interested in when I read a vampire story.

(Plus, just staying focused on my problems with the vampires themselves and not the problems I, as an Alaskan, have with the story as a whole: I can't get past the algor mortis problem. One of the stages of death is that your body cools to the temperature of the place it's in -- so if you're a vampire in Barrow, no quantity of warm clothing will keep you from freezing like a side of beef if you're outside at -60 F. Even drinking hot blood isn't going to help -- I know just how quickly your cup of coffee freezes solid on a really cold day in Alaska.)

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mlpeters — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 16:34:20 -0800

@Brandon Cyphered
"One of the things I find most interesting about vampires in historical fiction is that they're inevitably from the upper class. We're talking about human-looking creatures that suck our blood to live -- which is a great metaphor for old-school aristocracies when you're a peasant. Whereas, say, zombies, they're invariable the common people."

Good point -- though in much of the actual folklore there isn't such a distinction.

I would guess, any vampire who lived long enough and who kept the cash found on it's prey, would become "upper class", whatever their humble origins. Maybe that's why the flaunt their fancy lace -- a case of "nouveau riche" ostentation:) Besides it's hard for a vampire to maintain a working class attitude, of being honest and hard-working... they either have to be a scavenger on the bottom, or a predator at the top.

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dswood — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 00:48:43 -0800

@Oddcult

It's been speculated that the whole of the White Wolf roleplaying thing was ripped off wholesale from Sunglasses After Dark, but when it came to suing, Nancy Collins had to take the attitude that she couldn't beat them, so she'd profit by joining them instead.

Which is interesting, because didn't White Wolf AND Collins try to sue over that relatively recent vampire/werewolf movie (the name of which I seem to be blanking on at the moment - Kate Beckinsale was in it)?

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dswood — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 00:49:44 -0800

Underworld. That's the name I was blanking on...

(Should have figured it would come to me 10 seconds after hitting "add comment.")

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JamesMacDonald — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 07:19:05 -0800

Yup, and their logo was on the sequel's credits.

Underworld's plot and elements were far from unique, but were aparently close enough to a Whitewolf published short story set in their World of Darkness that a judge sided with them.

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Justin Wrote This — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 08:47:48 -0800

Despite links to the long-disliked World of Darkness, including the aforementioned A Dozen Black Roses, the Sonja Blue stuff was always enjoyable to me. A little dark and grim, a little blunt, but enjoyable.

Oddly enough, I also tried to start reading the Anita Blake books with Obsidian Butterfly, and immediately developed an irrational hatred of the series. That was an awful, terribly written book. Just awful. I tried reading the other series by the author, the fairy-realm...thing, and was just overwhelemd by the unnecessary sex. They're bloody erotica.

Anyone else less than interested in the new Underworld film, Rise of the Lycans? I liked the first two for entertainment, but doing a third... set in medieval times... without Kate Beckinsale... meh.

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Indigo Rose — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 09:12:48 -0800

@Justineger - I'm not one to defend Laurell K. Hamilton, since her books have gone so terribly wrong, but as ZJVavrek pointed out, Obsidian Butterfly was where it was starting to go downhill. I do often point people to the first three or four, but forewarn them that the rest are irredeemable crap. I did like the first ones when I read them, the character concept was enjoyable. Maybe I just found raising Zombies for a living to be far too amusing to not like the little Executioner. Also, out of curiosity, any particular reason why you dislike Word of Darkness so much?

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redex — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 10:33:34 -0800

I'll agree with all those putting forward The Historian, which I also thought was an lovely contrast to the popification of vampires - although it spends a lot of time on historical detail and scholarly activities, it still gave me the chills at certain key points (the waiter with the bite marks, anyone?), which is key for a story about being hunted by and hunting vampires.

Blood: The Last Vampire is also awesome (great art, plenty of fighting), although the spin-off series Blood+ was absolutely and hilariously awful. Interesting take on the science, but falling into the usual shojo anime series traps.

I notice Christopher Moore's You Suck hasn't been mentioned yet. Not as epic as Lamb, but a hilarious take on Vampires in the Modern World and a quick read.

Omae ga Sekai o Kowashitai Nara (If you wanna break out of this world) by Fujiwara Kaoru is also worth a read. She's well known for her often disturbing josei (adult women's) manga. This one has an almost identical storyline to Twilight in that normal girl develops crush on pretty vampire, but deals with it in a much more serious way. Her vampires aren't amoral psychopaths, but they don't really give a fuck about humans either, which I find more "realistic" than either extreme.

I have to admit, though, that the first handful of Anne Rice's vampires will remain my favourites, mostly just because they appeal to my melodramatic, romantic nature. I know they're ridiculous, but they're thorough and the interesting pseudo-history and homoeroticism gets me every time.

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nick3pointone4 — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 13:49:01 -0800

@justineger dude rhona mitra >>>>>>> kate beckinsale

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acacia — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 15:23:50 -0800

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Brandon Seifert — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 17:02:11 -0800

@mlpeters: Very true.

But likewise, I'd say about 50% of what we consider expected vampire traits -- from having fangs, to being killed by stakes, to being injured by sunlight, to infecting other people -- isn't from the folklore either. The vampires we read about today are the vampires that have survived a century and a half in the natural selection process of literature -- the elements of them that resonated with readers are the ones that've been passed down. And I think some of the most interesting subtleties and metaphors tend to get lost in the process, because pop culture doesn't necessarily reward those.

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ScottS — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 17:13:37 -0800

@redex

not to toot my own horn, but:

* ScottS
* CommentTime5 days ago

edit (4328.34)
Tommy and Jody from Christopher Moore's "Bloodsucking Fiends" and "You Suck: A love story" are among my favorites.

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mlpeters — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 17:19:11 -0800

@Brandon
"The vampires we read about today are the vampires that have survived a century and a half in the natural selection process of literature "

Natural selection, or boiling down to lowest common denominator... you say to-mah-to, I say to-may-to. Though I think we actually agree here, that it's time to reintroduce some more obscure bits and see if we can make them resonate, since the "typical vampire" is pretty much played out.

Like you suggested, you can take a bit of both -- older strains from both literature and folklore and mix with enough that fits expectation for the vampire to be recognizable.

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Brandon Seifert — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 18:18:35 -0800

@mlpeters: "Natural selection, or boiling down to lowest common denominator..." I think there's some of both. The paradigm of vampires spreading themselves like an infection, I think, is an example of natural selection of interesting ideas rather than a triumph of mediocrity -- it's far more interesting and has a lot more resonance today than the traditional idea that if you were unbaptized, born out of wedlock, or a cat jumped over your grave, you'd become a vampire. Meanwhile, I would argue the opposite of vampires as unsubtle killing machines in works like 30 Days, as well as endless vampire secret societies who wear leather.

But yeah, both the folklore and the old fiction have a lot of interesting ideas that can be mined. The idea that sunlight hurts vampires, and moonlight heals them? I like the symmetry of that.

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mlpeters — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 18:39:54 -0800

@Brandon
" or a cat jumped over your grave"

I just read in another thread that "cats are evil", so... yup, just being silly, now. But still, I'd like to pull back in some of the discarded stuff, give it a coat of polish and see if it catches on. I like idiosyncrasy and those weird, idiosyncratic, folkloric vampire tales are far more terrifying than any vampire fiction I've read... their very strangeness and unpredictability adds to the immediacy.

" The idea that sunlight hurts vampires, and moonlight heals them? I like the symmetry of that. "

Yeah - -that's pretty neat -- where'd you find that? I've read a lot of folklore, but never seen that spelled out (or forgot -- mind like a steel sieve, I have...)... could have implications far beyond vampires... werewolves spring to mind, but also anything involving Ghoulies and Ghosties and Long-leggedy Beasties of all stripes (or polka-dots...) - - maybe even involving a Moon goddess or two...

I've wondered though, from a... slight science angle, how a bright, full moon might effect a vampire... I mean moonlight is just reflected sunlight...

Then again, someone(maybe you?) up thread commented on vampires being "room temperature" and how in certain temperatures, they'd freeze solid and maybe break... I'm okay with saying, "it's MAGIC" and don't need science in every aspect... a little, here and there, though, helps suspend disbelief.

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Justin Wrote This — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 19:37:18 -0800

@ Indigo Rose

Also, out of curiosity, any particular reason why you dislike Word of Darkness so much?

It never settled with me, and we, in our oh so rural Pennsylvanian way, had some people who took it way too for their weekly games, going so far as to LARP at the mall. It was awful, and being the one kid in high school with long hair and a black trenchcoat, everyone just naturally assumed I was one of them. It was more of a personal thing than a dislike of the setting itself, which I found enjoyable when presented on its own, and though a lot of people didn't like it, I really liked the Kindred: The Embraced TV show that was based on the game. I've mellowed in my old age, and find the new World of Darkness core book and the new Hunter setting to be relatively interesting.

@nick3.14

dude rhona mitra >>>>>>> kate beckinsale

Dude, I want to ask what the fuck kind of crack are you smoking, but I am aware that my love of Kate Beckinsale is simply unmatched and irredeemable. She rocks my world.

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Brandon Seifert — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 19:58:01 -0800

@mlpeters - Yeah, the weird, OCD elements in a lot of folkloric creatures tend to get left out these days. But partially I think that's because monsters are less scary if you can distract them by throwing seeds on the ground, compelling them to stop and count them all...

The moonlight-healing-vampires thing isn't in folklore, but it was a standard trope in 19th century vampire fiction before Stoker's version eclipsed everything. (And Mike Mignola used it in Hellboy.) And it was indeed me who mentioned that vampires are at room temperature -- I personally think little things like that, little bits of basic scientific accuracy, add to folkloric monsters and stuff. But then, it's all Writer's Prerogative.

Anyway, I think we've wandered a ways away from the topic at hand...

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mlpeters — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 20:38:53 -0800

@Brandon
"monsters are less scary if you can distract them by through seeds on the ground"

True... but funny. And it explains "The Count" on Sesame Street...

"Anyway, I think we've wandered a ways away from the topic at hand... "

Point taken. I have a high thread drift tolerance (so long as things stay interesting), but others may not.

I like how Mignola has brought some obscure bits of lore (vampire and otherwise) back. I'd really like to see Mignola's reference book shelves - - Guillermo Del Toro and Neil Gaiman's too, for that matter. I wonder if there are any non-comics fictional equivalents, where obscure aspects of vampire lore, or forgotten tropes are used to refresh the sub-genre...? (and this brings things back OT)

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nick3pointone4 — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 23:59:59 -0800

@justineger i don't know man, i mean she's hot, dont' get me wrong but... rhona mitra's hotter, and i'm not even sure why.

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Brandon Seifert — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 01:37:18 -0800

@mlpeters - Yes, but Funny is the natural enemy of Scary. So it all depends on the tone you want to do.

Yeah, Mignola does great stuff with folklore. I think he was on a good track with his vampire Giurescu, but I felt like the Giurescu story got derailed. (And you know, I liked the ideas for Project: Vampir Sturm, Hitler's doomsday vampire onslaught, in B.P.R.D.: 1946, although I didn't care for the execution.)

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mlpeters — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 01:52:48 -0800

@Brandon
"Funny is the natural enemy of Scary"
That's debatable, their flip sides of the same coin, to an extent (both derive, in part from surprise, shock, the unexpected). It's hard to be funny and scary at the same time, but I think it's possible to flip that coin pretty fast. The 180 would provide the readers one hell of a shock - -of course it wouldn't be easy... like you said - -it all depends on the tone.

Joss Whedon (and/or the other writers he worked with on Buffy and Angel) does this at times -- but usually deflating a scary moment with funny, so maybe it's about the order you do them...

I haven't read enough BPRD - -but I know what you mean about the Giurescu story... which toward the end morphed into a Hecate story... Still great, though.

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Brandon Seifert — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 13:18:09 -0800

@mlpeters - While funny and scary can clearly be combined in a piece, I think it's really hard to keep a villain or a monster scary once the audience starts laughing at it. I think Joss knows that -- you'll notice there's not a single joke made about the Reavers at any point in Firefly or Serenity. Because if the characters aren't scared of them, it's unlikely we will be. (Which is the problem I think happened on Buffy and Angel with vampires -- once they started being the butt of too many jokes, neither the characters nor the writing team could treat them as serious objects of horror anymore.)

Yeah, the Hellboy story is a great story, but I think Giurescu, who I found a really interesting villain, got totally shafted before his plot even really began.

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Darkest — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 13:52:44 -0800

I found this article about Dhampir quite interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhampir

Also Lamia

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Brandon Seifert — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 15:43:56 -0800

@Darkest: I'm pretty intrigued about Dhampirs.

@mlpeters: I've got a bunch of more traditional, folkloric stuff mixed into my take on vampires in Witch Doctor... but none of that's happened yet, so I can't really talk about it much. (One of which is a pretty novel take on why dhampirs exist, that makes a lot of sense with the folklore around them. I'm looking forward to telling that story.)

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mlpeters — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 16:47:10 -0800

@Brandon
I suspect that Mignola wasn't entirely certain that he'd be able to do as much Hellboy as he wanted and crammed two stories into one -- it was only the second arc, the comics industry was imploding after the speculator bubble burst, so... I think he started with the vampire story, but halfway through got sidetracked by another idea... an idea that could have been developed into a full arc of it's own -- but hindsight is 20/20.

I don't think it was humor that hurt the vampire scariness in Buffy, but shear repetition - -you can only "dust" a few hundred vampires before they start to seem... business as usual. The Master from Buffy season one and "The Wish" in season three (and a couple of brief flashbacks in Angel) was always creepy, but hada number of funny lines... which is something very different from being the butt of jokes. I would think a more sophisticated and confident vampire should have some wit... unless you do the whole semi-mindless killing machine thing.

Joss' use of Reavers was a little different and depended on the limited exposure they had in the series and their being nearly mindlessly aggressive monsters, so characterization wasn't a factor. I'm not even sure they qualify as true "villains". There were a couple of dry quips around the Reavers... Jayne's reaction - - a tough guy like him, being so afraid of them, was at times both funny and chilling.

Grim humor, black humor, "whistlin' in the graveyard" ... there are plenty of humor possibilities that don't weaken horror. The EC comics are a good example... though the TV series based on them, "Tales From the Crypt" didn't pull it off so well.

You don't exactly avoid humor in Witch-Doctor, either, unless I'm mistaken (I haven't seen much of it -- liked what I saw, though).

I look forward to seeing what you do with vampires and I look forward to trying a few things myself. The more different takes, the better.

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Brandon Seifert — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 17:06:03 -0800

@mlpeters -- I'm not saying anything about humor in horror stories. Just monsters with funny traits, or monsters that are the butt of jokes.

One of my regrets about the first Witch Doctor story is that I wish I'd made the monster more scary and threatening, and less laughable and incompetent. (Thanks for the compliment, by the way.) It's a balance I think can be difficult to achieve, and I do think Buffy went off the deep-end in turning vampires into funny things instead of scary things. (Vampires in Hanson shirts? Really?) I think the writing staff may have written themselves into a corner where you *couldn't* have a big, scary vampire on the show anymore, without introducing a whole new breed of vampires like they did in the final season or vampires with a new set of powers in the Season Eight comics -- because they'd left the audience laughing at them for so long.

I think really the problem is when a you start compromising a villain or a monster's competence for the sake of a joke, or for something the audience is likely to laugh at -- vampires distracted by counting seeds or rice until the sun comes up and they fry, in the original example, or the whole institution of Chinese "hopping vampires," as seen from a Western point of view. (Where an animated corpse that wants to suck your life out just isn't that scary if its mode of locomotion seems totally ridiculous.) Neither of those were perceived as "funny" by historical audiences, but these days, they both would be. And there's a *lot* of that in folklore -- like the Kappa, man-eating turtle monsters in Japan, who you can defeat by getting them to bow to you so the water they hold in a divot in their skull falls out and they die of dehydration. (One of Hellboy's strengths, I think, is how he reacts to these bits of classic folklore.)

My only point here, really, is there are certain elements of the folklore that are fine if you're doing a more lighthearted take, but are just too hard for modern audiences to take seriously and detract from the scariness. Which is only a problem if you're going for scary. Likewise, I think there's also a natural tendency to try and make jokes at the expense of things that scare us -- which is why Dracula and the Universal Pictures version of Frankenstein went from being really disturbing for audiences to being a silly cliché in the course of only a couple of decades.

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dswood — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 17:13:02 -0800

The Dhampir idea is an interesting one, but one I kind of feel is overdone in fiction - the "all of their strengths, none of their weaknesses" gimmick. Granted, that same argument could be made of vampires in general I suppose - it's all about the right twist in pitch, right?

But what I found interesting in that Wikipedia link provided above, was the mention of the reverse occasionally being used in fiction as well - "all of their weaknesses, none of their strengths." Not something that I've seen much of, personally, and something I think I might have more fun with, were I to play in that sandbox.

Maybe LARP isn't just a form of gameplay - it's a gathering of half-breeds pretending to be daddy when the sun goes down.

Yeah, I'm going to bed now...

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mlpeters — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 17:41:49 -0800

@Brandon
" I think the writing staff may have written themselves into a corner where you *couldn't* have a big, scary vampire on the show anymore, without introducing a whole new breed of vampires like they did in the final season or vampires with a new set of powers in the Season Eight comics -- because they'd left the audience laughing at them for so long."

I think it could have been done... it's all about underestimating and the unexpected consequences. If the staff had made "re-scarry-ing" vampires a priority, have one of the core group get killed... and maybe turned. That'd do it. Imagine Giles as a vampire... (Watch -- they'll do it now and won't send me a dime, or even a free comic:) )

"which is why Dracula and the Universal Pictures version of Frankenstein went from being really disturbing for audiences to being a silly cliché in the course of only a couple of decades. "

Less than that, since it's hard to take anything seriously if proceeded by "Abbott and Costello meet..."

"I think there's also a natural tendency to try and make jokes at the expense of things that scare us "

Oddly there are also things that are supposed to be funny that can be terrifying... like clowns.

Please, don't take this as argument - - just a discussion with no winner or loser -- maybe a little food for thought -- and your mention of "healing moonlight" has already got me thinking of a way to use it... though not necessarily for a vampire story. I'm also suddenly intrigued by "hopping vampires" (though not in the specifically Chinese Jiang Shi), now that you brought it up.

Now Christopher Lee was scary as Dracula... for a while. I think the repetition and ease of killing him... and the lack of consequence, since everyone KNEW he'd be back, is what ruined much of the suspense. I think it shows even the supernatural equivalent of the Terminator can become boring, if consequences aren't actually consequential... then it's just the Energizer Bunny.

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Brandon Seifert — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 18:46:22 -0800

@dswood - The "all their strengths, none of their weaknesses" thing is pretty overdone, but not that accurate. In folklore, dhampirs were strong, fast, could sense vampires, and could cancel out vampires' invulnerabilities and kill them in ways they usually could die -- like shooting them with a single bullet. In some of the folklore dhampirs could control vampires, and in other legends they were afflicted by a bone disease that would turn their skeletons to gelatin over time, killing them at a young age. To my knowledge, not that many writers have done folklorically-accurate dhampirs, and I think they'd be interesting.

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dswood — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 20:34:38 -0800

They certainly would be...

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johnjones — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 22:06:44 -0800

@Brandon

I think the writing staff may have written themselves into a corner where you *couldn't* have a big, scary vampire on the show anymore, without introducing a whole new breed of vampires like they did in the final season or vampires with a new set of powers in the Season Eight comics -- because they'd left the audience laughing at them for so long.

I consider that to be a failure of imagination more than anything else. Vampires are just humans with the "vampire template" added to them. The simplest way to create decent, scary vampiric villains would be to research scary human criminals and psychopaths and then give them vampiric abilities. John Wayne Gacy as a vampire. Ted Bundy as a vampire. Idi Amin as a vampire. Just take the already horrible shit that humans do to each other and add vampirism.

Also regarding writers who use actual folklore, go check out Jonathan Maberry's Pine Deep Trilogy. It's really good and well-researched.

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mlpeters — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 23:04:18 -0800

@johnjones
"The simplest way to create decent, scary vampiric villains would be to research scary human criminals and psychopaths and then give them vampiric abilities. John Wayne Gacy as a vampire. Ted Bundy as a vampire. Idi Amin as a vampire. Just take the already horrible shit that humans do to each other and add vampirism"

No offense intended because we're just kind of brainstorming here and the more opinions, the merrier, but... you talk about a lack of imagination and give us redundancy -- take a scary, evil guy and... uh... make him scary...and evil.

IMO, the more frightening aspect is a normal, decent person, with the "vampire template added" makes them a cunning, vicious predator who would drain the life from their loved ones with little hesitation... and maybe a little joy. That's scary.

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johnjones — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 23:44:34 -0800

No offense intended because we're just kind of brainstorming here and the more opinions, the merrier, but... you talk about a lack of imagination and give us redundancy -- take a scary, evil guy and... uh... make him scary...and evil.

I suppose I didn't express myself as well as I wished. You don't actually have Idi Amin or Gacy as vampires. You take their histories and deeds and horrors, then use them as inspiration when building your own vicious creatures.

Speaking to the above ideas of RPG vampires, I really like the two-tiered system of character creation in the New World of Darkness. In it you build your character as a mortal and then apply the applicable supernatural template. You start with a person. And out of that person you create your monster.

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mlpeters — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 00:32:14 -0800

@johnjones
I didn't think you were being literal about those specific people...

The Gacy or Amin types are nasty enough as is, adding vampire to the mix adds very little - -they're already monsters. It just seems pointless.

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DC — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 14:18:39 -0800

This is a bit off-topic and I apologize but, what the hell is so special in Twilight?!
I keep hearing lots of people talking about it and when i read the synopsis I just keep thinking "can it be more lame? it almost pours sugar and fluffy stuff out of it with lots of love to offer to everyone". It looks like stuff I would read and daydream about it when I was what? 12? 13? not knowing what real life is? .
So, what makes a 19 year old boy I know who likes comics in general, Conan, Lovecraft and God knows what cool stuff, watch the movie and run to buy the freaking book and keeps bothering me with "you have to see it! it's perfect! don't listen to what they say on the internet! they are lying!buy the book, go watch it" ?!?

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mlpeters — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 15:57:00 -0800

@DC
I agree about Twilight - -it's "safe" vampires for teen girls who've grown up reading fan-fic, essentially.

I don't think this is off topic - -it's just the flip-side -- your least preferred literary vampire...

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Elohim — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 19:58:19 -0800

*On* topic
Cassidy, from Preacher? Does that count?
Otherwise... I don't really read much with vampires in. Mostly I just interact with them through the world I've built for V:tM, which is actually quite different to the actual WoD. Didn't like the nauseating, wrist-slitting whining about the eternal darkness.
Ultraviolet was a very good TV SERIES - the unrelated film was gobshite as far as I could see. Moonlight is fun enough, if a little frothy.

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stsparky — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 23:24:06 -0800

I forgot about the weirdest vampire from my youth - Barnabas Collins ...

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amp — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 04:01:53 -0800

"Two hundred years!"

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picaropicara — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 04:24:53 -0800

@stsparky: YES. Although not literary. But I do love what I've seen of Dark Shadows

My friend Chloe calls the Darren Shan vamps as her favourites. More balanced in terms of monster/realism, and I probably agree from what I remember.

On the other hand I like my vampires crude, cruel, vicious and slightly feral. None of this namby pamby foppish wussing.

Twilight is crap. I wouldn't use its pages to wipe my arse. It's perpetuating a terrible fantasy of the perfect relationship but trying to make it darker (and failing quite epicly) by making the characters vampires. If I remember right they don't actually have FANGS. How does that work exactly?

Or the Terry Pratchett vampires, subverting vamps in pop culture.

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poor_boy — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 04:51:08 -0800

[self edited]

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DC — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 09:56:13 -0800

I haven't seen Requiem: Chevalier Vampire (Pat Mills/Olivier Ledroit) mentioned here. The art is terrific and the synopsis caught my attention.
I'm ordering it when I have enough spare cash. The trade came on November's Preview and its published by Heavy Metal. Panini UK is going to print it someday.

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johnjones — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 10:25:06 -0800

The Gacy or Amin types are nasty enough as is, adding vampire to the mix adds very little - -they're already monsters. It just seems pointless.

What other models for truly compelling monsters do we have other than humans? Bestial monsters are ultimately boring. When all Something wants to do is eat or kill or fuck it's just an animal. Maybe a dangerous animal, but still an animal. An environmental hazard. We can't present a truly non-human intellect because we've never encountered one (anal-probed rednecks notwithstanding). Any intelligent nonhuman we present is by necessity a "human in a funny suit." So to my mind, the best place to turn to for inspiration to create a monster, especially a monster like a vampire, is human monsters.

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kimieye — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:07:57 -0800

I happen to like Twilight I also like most Pop music and Bands that have become Popular that I used be the only fan of. It is what it is.

Moving on, for me vampires have always been about sex. Hunger, seduction, older men, and ultimately Taboo. Ya know...fucking and dead/soulless people.

I like Terry Prattchett's recovering addict vampires. The 30 Days of night where a little Zombieish in the film but rather nice in the books. And as for Will Smith that book has been made into a movie three times in three different decades, our perception of the concept reflects our fears of the time. Dracula is a classic if a little out of touch (Gary Oldman non withstanding). Ann Rice, Suki, and the others are just like Twilight; Dina Steel with fangs.

As for the serial Killer as vampire is redundant, same psychology...hopefully less clown suit.

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Brandon Seifert — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 21:49:44 -0800

Okay, I'd like to know: What is it people like about the 30 Days of Night vampires? I'd like some opinions, because I've so far failed to get the appeal there. What is it about them that was different from other takes that resonated with people?

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stsparky — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 22:07:03 -0800

@picaropicara
He's in books (not fan fiction AFAIK), I had the Barnabas Collins Joke book as tween; And, there are books; There was even a daily comic strip.

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mlpeters — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 22:30:15 -0800

@Brandon
I haven't seen or read 30 Days of Night, but I gather from context, they're the unstoppable killing machine type vampires - -the terminator, but with actual predatory malice, instead of a "kill order" programmed in and with a very human enjoyment of the hunt, the sport and feelings of power upon success, instead of simply hunting for food Throw in a sharp, pointy set of choppers (a lot of pointy teeth, like a shark or a cannibal) and they're scary enough. I guess the plot also has elements of vampire politics... so their not mindless killing machines, but smart ones, which makes them more dangerous.

What's not to get? A stronger, faster, more vicious and possibly more cunning creature than man wants to eat you. Fear of the dark, fear of predators (man is used to being the top predator on the planet), fear of strangers, fear of skeletal, dead looking (or old looking) guys who show the opposite of expected frailty -- which ties into fear of mortality... which is two pronged with vampires - - you have the mortal fear of them killing you and the lure of them freeing you from mortal fear, but possibly cursing or damning you in the process -- if the creature that results is actually you at all -- plus you can forget about getting a tan.

From what little I know of the 30 Days vamps - -they're not special. They just have a very clever and novel plan.

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Admiral Neck — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 22:45:03 -0800

One of the vamps in the 30 Days of Night movie is played by Danny Huston. Specialness achieved automatically. Other than that excellence, as mlpeters says, they're just very brutal, though kind of alien, with their odd language and such. Also, the movie contains one of the greatest shots in recent horror history, as the vamps swarm the town and eat everyone outside, all displayed in a bravura overhead shot that tracks over everything.

As for preferred literary vamp, I honestly don't think I've read a vampire book my whole life. Not even Salem's Lot. In that case, my favourite would have to be Angel, from Buffy and Angel. Unimaginative, yes, and from a TV show and not a book (not counting comics and bad fanfic) but he was great. And he was a Fanilow.

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Brandon Seifert — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 02:01:40 -0800

I'm finding this thread very interesting. It's had me do some more research on vampire folklore and fiction (I rented the Ultraviolet TV show because of this thread, and though I ended up finding the show itself horrifyingly boring, the premise is certainly interesting), and I've got some more interesting ideas for the vampires in my own work because of it.

A couple specific comments:

@johnjones: Initially I didn't care for your suggestion that Buffy's writers should've looked to real-life serial killers and psychopaths to make scarier vampires, because I think the vampires in Buffy were too much in an action film mode rather than a psychological horror mode for that to work. But I've done some research on serial killers because of your suggestions, and I'm finding them interesting inspiration for my own work. Because really, a vampire in a contemporary urban environment would face a lot of the same problems a serial killer faces -- how to find victims? How to lure them somewhere you can prey on them? How to keep from being interrupted? How to dispose of the body and keep the death from being traced to you? How to avoid altercations with the police? So that's turning into some good story fodder. Thanks for that!

@mlpeters: I don't see the appeal of Mike Myers With Fangs -- because Mike Myers, and Jason Voorhees, and plenty of other implacable, unstoppable, Terminators Made Of Flesh exist already. But I think what I'm not getting is -- I'm not the barometer of taste, and some people may very well *want* to see Mike Myers With Fangs. The subtle, refined elements of vampires as villains may be less interesting to them than something that just slaughters wantonly.

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Oddcult — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 03:12:07 -0800

Brandon - make sure you got the original British version of Ultraviolet, not the US remake.

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Brandon Seifert — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 13:04:38 -0800

Oddcult: I did. So not only was I horrifically bored, I couldn't understand the lead mumbling in an accent the whole time.

It's evidently just not my cup of tea.

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Elohim — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 13:42:18 -0800

Oh dearie me!
My worldview is shaken! Someone dislikes Jack Davenport! So many people at my uni are obsessed with Coupling (BBC) that I thought it was impossible.

BTW, it's Idris Elba from The Wire playing Vaughn.

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Brandon Seifert — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 14:23:52 -0800

@Elohim - Really? I hated every surly, mumbling, fixed-affect minute of him in Ultraviolet. :-)

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Elohim — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 16:36:11 -0800

Elba or Davenport?
TBH, I liked Ultraviolet from a second-order point of view. The first circle of my brain found it profoundly irritating, since there's hardly anything going on, but the second circle was gobbling things up left-right-and-centre for my V:tM campaign. Even designed my own periscope pistols after watching the first episode. Would have used the video camera ones, but moblyfones were *very* prevalent in the first scenario, and if there's one thing that winds me up it's GM retcons. Little do my players know of the Horrors that await them. Bwahahaha etc.

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Brandon Seifert — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 17:08:33 -0800

@Elohim: Davenport, if he's the lead in the British version.

See, I was watching it primarily for research purposes, and even that couldn't get me past the second episode. Some very interesting ideas, but they came along so slowly... and there was NOTHING ELSE GOING ON, except characters I couldn't stand being unlikable to each other.

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Elohim — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 17:36:20 -0800

Ahahaha, yeah I see where you're coming from. Still, it builds up a little more from then on. Although I have to admit, by the end of the miniseries, it did seem as though it had been commissioned as a whole as a pilot to a long running series, what with the plot points left open by the end.

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XIbalba2012 — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 18:03:07 -0800

I prefer the decaying undead, obviously creatures of pure evil type, rather than the suave, sexual types they're now portrayed as.

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Brandon Seifert — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 22:40:21 -0800

(For those of you interested: I started a blog post about the research this has got me doing into vampire folklore, fiction, and vampire allegories in biology. The first one is about the problem vampire bats have storing energy when they have a diet poor in fat, and how they get around it.)

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Oddcult — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 02:51:11 -0800

it did seem as though it had been commissioned as a whole as a pilot to a long running series, what with the plot points left open by the end.

Yeah, it was commissioned as a British X-files and there was talk at the time of it turning into a longer-running franchise. I think scripts might even exist for a second season.

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Oddcult — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 02:56:35 -0800

And talking of Ultraviolet, the bloke wot wrote and directed it has a new supernatural thing on at the moment called 'Apparitions' apparently. Has anyone seen this? Any good?

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Randroid — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:30:37 -0800

Not sure if this was mentioned in the bowels of literary vampire endlessness, but you can't go wrong with the pure pulp featured in Charlie Huston's vampire meathead Joe Pitt. First book in the series is "Already Dead" and I recommend all of them for lazy day read-a-thons.

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Elohim — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 13:37:00 -0800

Of course, Kindred: The Embraced is worse than Ultraviolet by several orders of magnitude.

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Oddcult — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 13:52:07 -0800

Fuck that was awful. I was expecting pretty awful dodgy goffick wankgst, but I really wasn't expecting something like a vampire Danielle Steel mini-series.

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Elohim — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 14:29:58 -0800

Amen brother, amen.

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dswood — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:39:47 -0800

Anyone mentioned Toronto-set-and-shot Forever Knight yet?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forever_Knight

It only ran three seasons and has been off the air for quite a while, but I only just saw the final episode the other day, thanks to YouTube. I liked it - everything went wrong in all the right ways for the characters.

Never caught the original tv movie though ... maybe the next thing to hunt down...

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dswood — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:46:32 -0800

I also recall finding out (not nearly as recently) the one who plays the female lead in Forever Knight also voiced Jean Grey in that 90s X-Men cartoon and being fascinated by that, though I don't remember why I was fascinated by that. Easily amused? Probably.

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Elohim — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 01:46:43 -0800

I'm tracking down Forever Knight at the moment actually, going to have the first season in my hands fairly soon.

Oh cool.

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johnjones — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 08:44:58 -0800

@ dswood

Her name's Catherine Disher and she is still working. In the course of looking through her credits, I found that she also guest-starred on something called "Puppets Who Kill." And now I want to see "Puppets Who Kill" because that is the best title ever.

Forever Knight is kind of odd. The leads struck me as kind of bland except for Nigel Bennet who was goofily menacing as "The Nightcrawler" Lacroix. Still, the show did have the guts to provide a real ending to its storyline and I respect it for that.

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agentarsenic — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 08:55:15 -0800

Bram Stoker's Dracula, Cassidy, and our old pal D.

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JamesMacDonald — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 09:19:34 -0800

@johnjones

Puppets who kill had it's moments, it was funny more often then not. Back when I had no internet I watched most of the series in it's first run on the Canadian channel that produced it.

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oddbill — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 21:33:54 -0800

All of these vampires, and nobody has yet mentioned Peter Watts' hard science fiction take on them from his novel Blindsight. They are the scariest take on vampires I've read in a long time. A lost branch of hominids that evolved to prey on other hominids in the late stone age era, omnisavant natural sociopaths, reconstructed from dna traces and foolishly employed by the government/pharmaceutical industry.

Really surprisingly plausible. For instance, just watch this fake pharmaceutical industry slideshow he put together to describe the concept while still writing the book. It's about 20 minutes of brilliant, amusing and scary science fiction.

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Indigo Rose — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 10:39:34 -0800

Okay, so I just caught up to this thread, but have to respond to earlier comments.

@Justineger - LARP ruins V:tM for a lot of people, so that makes sense, I'm sorry it went that way for you. I find tabletop is more useful for actual storycrafting anyway, avoid LARP at all costs.

Forever Knight was one of my favorite shows growing up. I keep trying to get a copy of each season, but they're rather pricey. I loved Natalie in particular, but I doubt the show will hold up now that I'm an adult, oh well.

As for vampires folklore vs. "modern vampires" - I think what we really could use is the modern without the perfection. My favorite concept of vampire is the clever preditor with a human mind, animal instincts, and a few supernatural capabilities (not a lot, and not flashy). When people try to add sex appeal (other than the natural attraction to danger that some feel), things go bad, as with the angst and romanticism. I feel that the folklore was great for the time, because it was believed, I doubt it would feel right for a modern audience. Of course, vampires like in Twilight, Anita Blake, and many other modern series, are just a walking metaphor for the "dangerous guy", the bad boy, the guy from the "wrong side of the tracks". It has nothing to do with horror and everything to do with romance, forbidden love.

I really quite enjoyed the novel series that White Wolf published for V:tM, the Clan Novels, and the anthology at the end. In particular, the vampires who interacted with humans pretended to have a conscience, humanity, but in the end were nothing like that. Hesha Ruhadze, Follower of Set, hired a woman for a research project, romanced her, and in the end

turned her into a vampire, chained her up, and left her for the sun.

(slightly non-spoiler version: not only screwed her over, but in such a cold hearted way it was unbelievable, and awesome) It was so great to read because he was totally believable to her (most of the time) but you got to see inside his head and watch him when he wasn't with her. She was a useful tool.

I think what I'm getting at is Vampires should be disturbing characters, but not horror monsters, and NOT romantic objects. In my opinion.

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Oddcult — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 10:43:01 -0800

'Let the Right One In' was a damn fine film. Just seen it today. Proper classic vampire mythology, but utterly modern. Is the book worth a read, given that I've seen the film?

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mlpeters — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:21:30 -0800

@Indigo Rose
"Forever Knight was one of my favorite shows growing up."

A '90s show? Drive a stake through my ancient heart, why don'tcha?

When I were a lad of 5 or 6 years old, I remember pulling up the collar of my jacket, draped cape like over my shoulders, playing Barnabas Collins, the vampire protagonist from Dark Shadows, with a neighbor girl playing... I forget who Barnabas' love interest was. The show was actually slightly before my time (it ended the year I was born), but was re-run during the golden age of US TV syndication known as the mid-late '70s. I suspect that show has something to do with my interest in things Gothic and supernatural -- an early formative influence, for better or worse.

"but I doubt the show will hold up now that I'm an adult"

There's no way Dark Shadows holds up -- I haven't seen it since I dunno... 1978, or so.

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Brandon Seifert — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 17:40:25 -0800

@Oddcult: "Proper classic vampire mythology"" Does it have vampires with red faces who look like they're inflated with blood? Are they created from people who lived wicked lives, or who were unbaptized or born with teeth or a caul over their faces, rather than being infected by other vampires? Do they turn into animals, and to kill them you have to stake them, cut off their heads, stuff their mouths with garlic, and bury them face-down?

No?

Then it's not classic vampire mythology.

;-)

(Sorry. I'm a stickler for such things.)

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Oddcult — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 00:46:03 -0800

@Brandon.

Yes. Very good.

What I meant is that it have the 'forget everything you think you know about vampires' line, which so many films have, when trying to establish their 'rules' and without ever actually stating them outright it does stick to the rules everyone 'thinks they know'.

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poor_boy — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 02:40:02 -0800

I feel kind of silly bringing this up...has anybody mentioned The Hunger yet? Sorry for the lack of detail, but I haven't watched that for years.

I loved how the younger vampire had that little knife hidden in his necklace. His co-stars were impressive as well.

your preferred literary vampire

kimieye — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 11:03:33 -0800

@ Brandon

thank you , the Vampire mythology most of us grow up with is the Bram Stoker variety. But Vampirism is many different things to many different people all over the world, every culture has a different vampire.

@ Indigo Rose
I don't think anyone injects sexuality into vampires it's part of the myths, Incubi and succubi for example.

your preferred literary vampire

Indigo Rose — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 11:55:32 -0800

As Brandon was mentioning, the original vampires were men who became monsters, quite horrific and not sexy at all. It may not be a brand new addition to the vampire genre, but it also wasn't the original idea.

That said, I have no problem with the idea that a vampire can use desire as a tool, quite the opposite. My problem is with all the books out there that have the vampire-as-sex-object character turn out to be a good romantic fixation, instead of unhealthy to an extreme. Edward, Jean Claude, and their ilke drive me crazy. "I'm a monster, but I still love you, would never want to hurt you, you young fragile thing. I'll protect you, but I may accidentaly hurt you, oh the angst." -or the sexy bad boy, who ends up saving the lead female. Bah!

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Indigo Rose — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 12:01:29 -0800

Aren't Incubi and Succubi demons? Granted, Vampires are often considered demons, but I'm pretty sure they are different breeds, since the only thing they have in common is preying upon humans in some disturbing fashion. (and unnaturally cold lower appendages)

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Finagle — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 13:43:05 -0800

Reading through this whole thread made my hindbrain barf up Tujiro, the Kabuki vampire from Grendel - Devil's Legacy. Tujiro had some of the cold, shark-like animalism that some have been referring to as missing.

If the series were being done now undoubtedly there would have been a romantic subplot between him and Christine Spar. I miss the old Comico.

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Brandon Seifert — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 14:28:29 -0800

As far as vampires and desire goes, there were certain vampires "species" in folklore that were pretty damn horny, and others who would use sex appeal to lure you someplace secluded so they could kill you. But for the most part, they were just rotting corpses.

(And though incubi and succubi are frequently thrown in with vampires — that is, the blood-drinking undead — they were very different creatures. They weren't undead, they'd never been human, and they fed on your breath rather than your blood.)

@Oddcult: I figured that was what you meant — but I felt the need to be pedantic.

@kimieye: And here's me being pedantic again — technically, the vampires we grew up with were the Revised Bram Stoker kinds. Bram Stoker's actual story didn't have things like vampires being vulnerable to sunlight or turning into bats, and Dracula was a pretty unappealing guy with hair on the backs of his hands and fetid breath.

@Indigo Rose: That's exactly the problem I have with lustful vampires, too — the lionization of rotting corpses who'd rape their widows into tragic, good-hearted heroes. I'm not a fan of that trend.

your preferred literary vampire

Chris Noble — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 14:56:51 -0800

@ Stygmata
re: Tujiro:
You beat me. Tujiro scared me when he first appeared, and was even creepier when he came back later in the series. "Grendel" is still the best thing Matt Wagner has done.

I thought "Interview With the Vampire" was fun enough, and "The Vampire Lestat" was a blast... but then the Rice thing got pretty old pretty fast.
"'Salem's Lot" is hella fun. King spends the first third of the book setting up a small town soap opera... then the last 2/3 sending it straight to hell.
Dan Simmons has an interesting take in "Children of the Night".

I guess, to me, the vampire legend is so old and so big that it can contain several interpretations comfortably. I think the vampire is the receptacle of the "sins" that we secretly find a little attractive, all the things that human societies have found evil at one time or another, over thousands of years. What's interesting then is what that means in recent times, when some of those old sins- like sex- are not seen as necessarily evil... at least rationally. Not to get too Freudian about it. To me, the best vampire I've read (and seen, in the adaptation) is Hannibal Lecter. Not technically a vampire, but he really kind of is- a serial killing cannibal. And he's smart, cultured, charming... cool. We like him, even knowing what he is, and it disturbs us.
Finally, from earlier in the thread, I always liked the old vampire OCD. There was something very inhuman, very bizarre about that. I always found it a bit creepy.
Back to Lurkland.

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Finagle — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 14:57:40 -0800

@Brandon -

There's a lot to be said about the figuration of vampires and desire and how that's all evolved historically. My assumption always was that it had to do with the social anxiety around the rise of gay culture - as if Anne Rice didn't make this explicit. Pleasure and danger, linked through the blood. And now that trope has been so totally hollowed out and rendered toothless (heh) that the figuration has been brought around 180 degrees to represent chastity, fidelity and heterosexual union (Twilight). How can the beautiful immortal youth represent pleasure, danger and angst in an age of Will and Grace?

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Oddcult — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 15:05:24 -0800

Bram Stoker's actual story didn't have things like vampires being vulnerable to sunlight or turning into bats, and Dracula was a pretty unappealing guy with hair on the backs of his hands and fetid breath.

To be pedantic again, Dracula turned into both a wolf and a bat, and whilst not destroyed by sunlight, he was weakened by it. And he was only unappealing at the start. Before leaving Transylvania he stole a baby and drank its blood which is what made him appear younger.

In the first edition of the text, he takes Harker's suit and wears it when stealing the baby, then when its mother comes to the castle, she sees Harker in the suit and blames him instead of Dracula. Which is pretty retarded really. So I'm not sure if the version you may have read mentions the 'drinking babies blood to become young and good looking again' bit, as I know the 'nicking Harker's suit' bit was excised in later editions, but it was in there.

your preferred literary vampire

mlpeters — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 15:50:20 -0800

@ Brandon
Plenty of ancient vampire lore leaves out the actual blood drinking too, so the connection to incubi and succubi is perhaps more relevant than would first appear. Plenty of deaths where people just whithered and died (like from non-visible cancers) with no bite marks or anything like that, were blamed on vampires... and any strangers in town at such an unfortunate time would likely be denounced as the vampire.

There's no one accepted version of what constitutes a vampire, even if you confine the folklore to one region (like Eastern Europe, where many, but not all vampire legends originate), so I'm not sure how you can be a "stickler".

"...unappealing guy with hair on the backs of his hands "
Wait... you don't have any hair on the back of your hands? I think we might have a non-mammal on the board... thought I smelled something fishy...:) Might "Brandon Cyphered" be the screen name of one Abraham Sapien?

@Stygmata
I think the gay subtext is a Victorian (so relatively modern) invention -- and not really full fledged, but more a symbol of fashionable decadence and Byronic Romanticism. Vampire legends likely stem more from cancer and rabies than sexuality.

your preferred literary vampire

Finagle — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 15:59:27 -0800

@mlpeters

That's what I meant by the 'evolution' of the vampire figuration. It really illustrates how a cultural trope can be repeatedly reinterpreted to reflect current social interests/anxieties, regardless of the 'original' interpretation or origin of the myth. That's what makes /Twilight/ so interesting from a literary-critical standpoint - the dangerous, gay Rice vampire interpretation gets turned around and spit out through the lens of the Mormon heterosexual family unit.

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mlpeters — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 16:14:29 -0800

@Stygmata
The very idea of Mormon versions of vampires is either extremely fucked up or ripe for humor...

At least we aren't apt to see Amish vampires... all that "early to bed, early to rise" stuff doesn't lend itself to creatures of the night.

I liked Anne Rice's first vampire book and the others less and less -- and her imitators hardly at all. I did like her mythologizing of vampires(the whole Egyptian "Queen of the Damned" bit), but I'm a sucker for mythology.

I forgot to mention a minor take on vampires I found extremely amusing -- Alan Moore and Steve Parkhouse's Bojeffries Saga had a vampire who spoke in... I think a modified Cyrillic text to imply Transylvania or Eastern Europe... and who could be hurt by hot crossed buns, among other things.

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Brandon Seifert — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 16:27:33 -0800

@Oddcult — Hmm. A number of vampire scholars are under the impression that Dracula's winged form in the original story was described as bird- or lizard-like, and that bats weren't associated with Dracula in the public mind until the 1920s-30s theatrical production starring Bela Lugosi — but searching the 1897 edition of Dracula on Project Gutenberg shows a couple of references to bats that were evidently Dracula transformed. So it looks like I was wrong about that. I'll have to do more reading up on that.

(Maybe they were referring to theatrical and film adaptations that predated Lugosi's Dracula? I dunno.)

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Brandon Seifert — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 16:34:38 -0800

@mlpeters: I think we *have* to be sticklers, at least a little, when we use a word like "vampire." If we don't, how can the word have any meaning? How can any of us have any idea what the others are talking about?

When we all talk about vampires, I think the most basic definition of what we're talking about would be "bloodfeeding undead." That's an idea with a pretty global tradition, and by that definition, incubi and succubi aren't vampires (they aren't undead; they aren't bloodfeeders). You can have other terms that incorporate the word 'vampire' and mean different things — a "living vampire" or an "energy vampire" — but those are separate concepts from a straight-up "vampire". If they weren't separate concepts, well, we wouldn't have separate words for them would we? We'd just call them vampires.

Unfortunately, folklorists don't seem to agree with me. When a book on folklore calls something a "vampire," "fairy," "sprite," "shade," "wraith," "demon," "goblin," and "imp", you generally have NO CLUE what exactly the author means, because there's no consistent definition. (I've been reading a whole lot about global vampire folklore recently, and I've found books that give lists of "vampires"... and include sea monsters that don't drink blood on the lists!) But I think the most basic definition of the unmodified, un-compounded term "vampire" is "bloodfeeding undead." I'm not even going to say "obligate bloodfeeding undead," because there were plenty of vampire species that had optional bloodfeeding diets, and ate other things as well.

It's certainly true that wasting diseases were blamed on vampires, but even those cases, from what I've read, the belief was that the vampires were drawing the person's blood, even if there weren't visible marks. (And blood on an exhumed corpses was invariably a sign of vampirism, even in those cases.) That's not to say there weren't vampires who fed off people's lifeforces in addition to blood. (For instance, there are a number of vampire species found around Europe that, in the early period after they'd become undead, would start chewing on their own bodies and would somehow use that as a catalyst for drawing on the lifeforces of their relatives until they had enough power to leave the grave and go hunting.) But even those ate blood, too.

your preferred literary vampire

Brandon Seifert — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 16:39:21 -0800

@Stygmata: See, I think the tradition of vampires being ways to express the repression of sexuality means that there's very little different between the homoerotiism of Rice's vampires and the down-home ol' fashioned enforced chasitity of Twilight. Because everyone is repressed about different things, and when you're a Mormon housewife, addressing the fact that teenage sexuality exists is just as transgressive for you as addressing homosexual urges is in other, more liberal, parts of society.

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Finagle — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 16:53:39 -0800

@mlpeters - sadly, not a joke.

@Brandon - I don't think we're saying totally different things here - the trope-football of repression is just getting kicked from one side of the fence to the other. What's entertaining to me is watching the game, how the ball gets kicked around by the different ideological team-members. Repression for (the early) Rice was something sad and regrettable, if unavoidable - in /Twilight/, it becomes good and proper. So the attention for me is not "discovering" different aspects of repression, but how the trope of repression is actively manufactured and deployed in the service of different interests.

If I was a bit less sober, I'd start going on about Foucault, repression and sexuality, but thankfully I'm not and you all should be grateful.

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Brandon Seifert — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 17:39:31 -0800

@Stygmata — Hmm, nicely put. That *is* really interesting. I think I need to seek out more literary critiques of vam[ire stories — there's a lot of interesting metaphor they've lent themselves to, like the aforementioned "aristocrats feeding off the peasants" stuff in 19th century vampire fiction. I haven't been thinking about repression as much.

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mlpeters — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 18:06:42 -0800

@Brandon
"Unfortunately, folklorists don't seem to agree with me. When a book on folklore calls something a "vampire," "fairy," "sprite," "shade," "wraith," "demon," "goblin," and "imp", you generally have NO CLUE what exactly the author means, because there's no consistent definition."

Yeah, I know... but I actually LIKE that aspect of folklore. It rings more true, since it comes from subjective experience. I dislike accounts of monsters that read too much like a D&D monster manual, with everything neatly defined and categorized.

It's true that even when there were no tooth marks, it was assumed that vampires drained people's blood. Most wasting diseases cause the victim to appear pale and bloodless, maybe even have anemia(or the like) as a side-effect. A lot of older vampire legends are very unclear about how the blood was drained... magic, I guess.

@Stygmata
Twilight's Mormon-tinged vampires might not be a joke, but certainly ripe for a good making fun of... And that's not even the aspect of Meyer's philosophy I find the most fucked-up.

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Brandon Seifert — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 18:59:19 -0800

@mlpeters: "but I actually LIKE that aspect of folklore." Whereas I think it's a retarded waste of everyone's time. Po-TAY-to, Po-TAH-to. :-)

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Sasha_mak — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 20:48:15 -0800

Mine is Werner Herzog's version of Nosferatu. The sadness in Klaus Kinski's performance, the sadness in immortality. That's really what I think the vampire mythos should really enforce. The tragedy in wanting tragedy. In wanting death.

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munin218 — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 22:58:21 -0800

Recently read Let The Right One In.

*wonderful* vampire novel.

creepy as shit, and not over-romanticized.

Highly recommend it.

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Oddcult — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 05:12:04 -0800

Possible spoilers for Let the Right One In, obviously.

@Munin - does the book clarify whether Eli really is a girl or a boy? Watching the film, I really wasn't sure what was going on with the gender thing. Or whether the point was that it didn't matter.

Also, did the ending imply that Eli was going to make Oskar a vampire too, or was he just as doomed as the old guy that was killing people for Eli at the start?

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munin218 — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 09:46:55 -0800

@oddcult Yes, Eli's name is actually Elias. It's a boy. The end in the book doesnt really tell you whats going to happen, only that Eli saved his life, and now Oskar was going with him, and obviously gladly. I'd like to think that either way, it would work out. Oskar accepted Eli for who he was, and still loved him.

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mlpeters — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 16:04:14 -0800

@Sasha
I'm not sure if I ever saw the Herzog Nosferatu... if I did (and it seems like I saw it... or clips of it in some show about horror films...) it would have been when I was too young to appreciate it. Was it in English, dubbed, or subtitled? How does it stylistically compare with the original Nosferatu (aside from Kinski as Count Dracula/Orlok). I haven't actually seen the original Nosferatu either, but have seen enough clips to have a fairly clear idea of it.

I haven't seen Shadow of the Vampire either... the conceit of Max Schreck actually being the vampire bugs me, since the actually career of Max Schreck isn't in any doubt. Willem Defoe was perfect casting, though.

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kimieye — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 11:31:51 -0800

@Brandon Cyphered:
here is a workable definition from dictionary .com

vam?pire? ?[vam-pahyuhr] Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun
1. a preternatural being, commonly believed to be a reanimated corpse, that is said to suck the blood of sleeping persons at night.
2. (in Eastern European folklore) a corpse, animated by an undeparted soul or demon, that periodically leaves the grave and disturbs the living, until it is exhumed and impaled or burned.
3. a person who preys ruthlessly upon others; extortionist.
4. a woman who unscrupulously exploits, ruins, or degrades the men she seduces.
5. an actress noted for her roles as an unscrupulous seductress: the vampires of the silent movies.
Origin:
1725–35; (< F) < G Vampir < Serbo-Croatian vàmp?r, alter. of earlier upir (by confusion with doublets such as v?zd?h, ?zd?h air (< Slavic v?-), and with intrusive nasal, as in dùbrava, dumbr?va grove); akin to Czech upír, Pol upiór, ORuss upyr?, upir?, (Russ upýr?) < Slavic *u-pir? or *?-pir?, prob. a deverbal compound with *per- fly, rush (literal meaning variously interpreted)

Vampires are evil men and Demons. I think you go to far by saying those are mutually exclusive catigories...and that you are getting to tied down with one mode of thinking there are many cultures that lump all mythic creatures into the same catigorie an only differentiate by intention...Gods, Ghosts and Demons all the same as Fairies and elves. I was raised polytheistic and don't see the point in over categorizing.

Vampires Suck...that is their major characteristic, after that it is window dressing.

And I have read original Dracula, of course he was unpleasant but that Vampire Type gave birth to the new vampire. Many new Narratives also explain away Dracual as being the first and most powerful, with only his lesser offspring succumbing to daylight. Diluted blood another reference to nobility? And in old wives tales Hairy hands can also signify a masturbator.

@Stygmata
that is how I have always felt about recent(last 300 years) western stories about vampires. It's all about repression, this I also feels extends to slasher flicks, Sluts Die.

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Brandon Seifert — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 13:34:02 -0800

@kimlye

"1. a preternatural being, commonly believed to be a reanimated corpse, that is said to suck the blood of sleeping persons at night."

See, there's a problem with that one right there — there are *lots* of vampires with different feeding habits that don't involve attacking sleeping people, even just in Eastern Europe. (One of my favorite vampire species from Eastern Europe can control animals, and makes your family pet run away. Then the vampire brings your pet back, pretending to be a good samaritan. And when you welcome him into your house... he slaughters your family.)

It's really easy to get bogged down in semantics, but I feel like semantic arguments don't go anywhere, so I'm going to bow out. Suffice to say — I, personally, like my words to *mean* something, to have *definitions* so that two people using the same word have a fair idea of what the other person is talking about. Otherwise, I don't see the point in having a bunch of different words that may or may not mean the same thing.

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kimieye — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 14:31:52 -0800

Fair enough.. but just because a word can mean more than one thing dosen't mean all definitions are invalid.

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Brandon Seifert — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 14:48:21 -0800

@kimleye — It *does* make it a lot harder for us to talk about the same thing though, especially when we have multiple words that *might* mean the same thing or *might* mean something very different. And while I think that's fine most of the time, in the realm of scholarship and critical studies I find it flat-out unacceptable.

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mlpeters — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:29:15 -0800

@Brandon
I tend to think alternative or vague meanings gives a word broader context and richness of meaning... with more implications swirling below the surface of well understood meanings. I don't see how that conflicts with "scholarship".

Words depending on context to color their meanings is just an inescapable part of language.

I'm very interested in mythological and folkloric scholarship and from what I've seen, no two scholars ever are in complete agreement, so you always have to feel your way through, picking and choosing which aspects you wish to explore, while allowing for other interpretations.

Like I said earlier, when monsters are too well defined it feels less like folklore or tales or horror, than a Dungeons and Dragons rule book, or The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe -- utterly pedantic and so clearly defined that there's no mystery.

If you choose to use narrow definitions in your writing for consistencies sake - -that's fine - -whole 'nother issue.

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Brandon Seifert — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:18:17 -0800

@mlpeters — I think we understand each other's preferences fine at this point. And we still don't agree.

Shrug.

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mlpeters — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:54:43 -0800

I'm not arguing the point, just completely puzzled about your stance on high standards in folklore scholarship... in an area that's built on hear-say and stories passed by word of mouth on over generations, before any even thought to write anything down, with every tale having multiple versions and interpretations...There is no solid ground when dealing with folklore. You can pick and choose what seems consistent, but that's an aesthetic choice and not the same as saying there's one version... 'cause there isn't.

I'm frankly surprised at your insistence (unless I misunderstand your point...?) that there is a proper, fixed definition of what a vampire (or any other creature or figure in folklore or legend) is. That's all I meant -- has nothing to do with preferences.

No reason to get upset.

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Indigo Rose — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 21:20:04 -0800

I guess, since we are discussing the differences between various versions of vampires, it would be very nice to get at the first accounts of vampires. To be able to narrow it down to a few specific reports, throughout different areas, that led to what we have now. The desire to find an origin, thus the base model, for the subject is fully respectable. For that reason, and the need for a common vocabulary in any discussion, I can empathize with Brandon Cyphered. Personally, I would want to get back to the earliest definitions before remaking it for my own writing purposes.

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mlpeters — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 21:46:24 -0800

@Indigo
The trouble is there is no real base model -- vampire legends appear all over Europe and arguably, in Asia and Africa as well and they're all at least slightly different. Some variants are the "undead" version, but not all -- but they all feed on people in one way or another. The further back you go, the less the stories go into just what a vampire is, being more concerned with what a vampire does. There doesn't seem to have been such a impulse toward classification, just fear of malevolent forces.

The most common variations, the ones Dracula is derived from, are mostly from Eastern Europe (local to where Stoker pinched the name from Vlad), but the legends are hardly uniform, even there.

Editing to add that the earliest dating vampire legend source I could find was the Sumerian or Assyrian "Ekimmu" -- basically an evil ghost that drained life (either draining life force, blood, or in some cases ripping off flesh) in the form of a wind, could posses a dead or living body, but could be defeated with wooden weapons -- probably where the wooden stake bit comes from.

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Brandon Seifert — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 22:28:19 -0800

@mlpeters —

"No reason to get upset."

I thought my last post made it pretty clear that I wasn't upset — that you had your opinion, and I had mine, and that we both knew how the other felt, and that was that, and I wasn't overly concerned about it.

Now, however, I will admit to becoming somewhat frustrated, because while I've seen your point from the beginning, you fail to see mine and ascribe opinions to me that I find somewhat bizarre and unlikely. And I think my position is kind of obvious and intuitive, so all this is really pretty confusing to me.

I think a word is useless if it can be used to mean "undead creature that feeds on blood," "undead creature that doesn't feed on blood," "living creature that feeds on blood," "living creature that doesn't feed on blood," "demon, spirit or ghost who may or may not feed on blood," "demon, spirit, ghost, living or undead creature who absorbs life energy, fear, pain, sexual energy, entire souls, or some other intangible essence," and half a dozen other things as well. Do you see what I'm saying?

Nobody here is arguing that the word "vampire" has only one, true meaning.

All I'm saying is, words are far more useful as tools to clearly communicate concepts if they have consistent meanings — ideally a commonly-used, commonly-agreed-upon meaning, but failing that, a consistent meaning in each work using the term. And I'm also saying that folklorists are rather notorious for failing to do that, so it's hard to know what even one single folklorist means when they call something a "demon," "sprite," "vampire," or whatever.

Anyway. I think I've explained my viewpoint to the best of my ability. And certainly past the boundaries of my patience. So, let's move on, shall we? :-)

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mlpeters — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 22:37:40 -0800

@Brandon
If you think vampires are trouble - -try werewolves -- all sorts of vague and contradictory lycanthropy and shape-shifting legends -- add on that a werewolf who dies can supposedly come back as... you guessed it, a vampire.

Remember, the folklorists didn't invent the stories, they just wrote them down, collecting raw data, contradictions, maddeningly vague descriptions and all.

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RenThing — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 08:48:01 -0800

@Brandon

I have to agree with you. I was having pretty much that same argument with someone; at what point do the changes you make to something (such as going from undead thing that feeds on blood to a living creature that doesn't) mean that is, in fact, something new and should get a new name so as to not confuse it with the something else?

Personally, I'm very much tired of people trying to insist that the characters in Twilight are vampires because all evidence points to the fact that they're eternally mopey superhumans who like their steak a bit rare (they even sparkle in the sunlight, FFS).

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Brandon Seifert — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 13:30:55 -0800

@mlpeters: Yeah, werewolves are complicated too — but in most cases, they're humans who turn into wolves or wolf-men, just under different circumstances and for different reasons. Which is a pretty easy definition. (Although "lycanthrope", which means "wolf-man" in Greek, gets mis-applied to lots of therianthropes other than werewolves. But I think that's more ignorance than anything else.)

It's true that folklorists didn't invent the stories, but they *were* the ones who wrote them down, collected new data — and applied terms like "vampire" to creatures that nobody in native cultures had ever used the word for. We're talking about the people who first made this information available to the public and started the process of it becoming widely known — because it *wasn't* before. By and large, according to the research I've done, the folklorists and other scholars *were* the ones who used a lot of these terms in a slapdash manner — and no subsequent generation of folklorists seems to have gone back to try to narrow down and further define the body of scholarship in the way that most other scholarly traditions seem to.

If you want an example of a more scholarly approach to folklore, look at this. It's a system of classification of global folktales. (My point in showing you this isn't that I'm proposing it as a good model, or as a model you will necessarily like or agree with — just that it's very possible to take a body of work as varied as folktales and apply a rigorous scholarly method to it.)

@RenThing: Yeah, that's something I wonder about too — how different is *too* different? And when should a writer use a different term, because what he or she is describing is too far away from the expected usage of the term for the reader to easily follow? (I'm planning on using Middle Eastern ghouls, the kind who are a variety of djinn, in my WItch Doctor stories — but after doing a lot of reading about *other* creatures who people call ghouls around the world, I think I may use the original spelling ghul just to keep them straight)

Even in the example of Twilight, the "vampires" in it are close enough to the pop culture definition of vampires that I don't have a huge problem defining them as such (whether I think they're a dumb idea is another question entirely). But then, I also think of 28 Days Later as a zombie film, even though the Infected in it aren't undead. (But I think of them that way because they're closer to the Romero zombie tradition than the Romero zombie tradition is to the Voodoo tradition of zombis that the name comes from.)

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mlpeters — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:34:13 -0800

@Brandon
The Aarne-Thompson classifications appear to lump things together, rather than the reverse... Nearly all monsters would fall under " Supernatural Adversaries ". I don't see how it supports the position I thought you were taking... I'm starting to wonder if we haven't been agreeing on the macro in unrecognizable ways while arguing the micro...

I liked the movie 28 Days later, but it's only a nod toward zombies... and that's, as you said, the Romero zombies, which are only the barest nod toward actual zombie legends -- there, the control over the zombie is actually more important than the undead part -- as Wade Davis' "The Serpent and the Rainbow" points out, "real zombies" may not have been dead at all. There are also tales, pre- Davis to support this -- of people who eventually partly recovered from being a zombie. So, the whole mindlessly attacking "zombie" genre, whether undead like Romero's. or living, but diseased like in 28 Days Later, is built upon shaky foundations and miss the original point completely -- drifting more than even this thread:) Still, insisting that Romero never really made a zombie film is a lost etymological battle.

your preferred literary vampire

kimieye — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 10:10:45 -0800

I am glad we've discovered the Aarne-Thompson classification but it dose not define it gives type of tale not subject. Vampires there are also classified as Revenants(One who returns after death), but this is also the definition of ghosts and zombies...
As I said before there is no use in over categorizing . I think I would prefer to use Vampire as an archetype rather that a definite, here is a nice Jungian article about that.

um... Also the director of 28 days later said that they aren't Zombies but an homage to zombie and (unsurprisingly ) vampire films. He uses Last Man on Earth as a reference film. So 28 days later isn't a Zombie film it is an Homage film...different genre.

Also I would like to get back on topic and say my personal (and until recently forgotten) literary vampire may be

your preferred literary vampire

Brandon Seifert — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 13:11:11 -0800

*sigh*

My point was, "Rigorous scholarship *can* be applied to folklore! Look, here's an example!"
'
Nothing more. Nothing about vampires. Nothing about applying that specific example to vampires.

Anyway. This is where I bow out of this line of conversation on this thread. It's clearly just wasting all of our time, and pissing me off.

your preferred literary vampire

oddbill — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 14:59:25 -0800

Bunnicula!

I can't believe it took 206 responses for him to show up!

I always hoped that when Lestat got to the bottom of the Ur-vampire mystery, he'd pop open some tomb lid in Akkad or somewhere and it would be Bunnicula in there.

your preferred literary vampire

Oddcult — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 15:11:27 -0800

Bunnicula was actually fucking scary for a kids' book. He was really damn evil.

your preferred literary vampire

Blackfish — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 15:18:15 -0800

HAHA that is funny because I can totally see that thing ripping into some snot nosed kid that was banging on its cage

Here bunny...cute bunny...here bunAAARRRRHHHHGGGHHHAAAARRRRR!!!!!

your preferred literary vampire

oddbill — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 15:36:48 -0800

I don't remember him being that scary. He just sucked the juice out of vegetables.

your preferred literary vampire

kimieye — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 15:40:40 -0800

the dog thought he was scary, he actually helped solve mysteries.

your preferred literary vampire

mlpeters — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 16:24:15 -0800

Bunnicula?!!

WOW -- Never heard of it, or it surely wouldn't have waited 206 posts. I had to Google to see it's an actual thing and not a one-off joke image. It's been around since 1979?!

@Brandon
I'm just as irritated by the use of *sigh*, or *shrug*, or passive-aggression, in general.

I never argued against rigorous scholarship - -don't know where you got that - -I just don't see D&D monster manual, or OHOTMU levels of classification as scholarly... Go back far enough and vampires, revenants, ghosts and even some forms of fairies all start to blur, no matter the level of "scholarship"... "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means".

But seriously, man - -PEACE -- it's Christmas/Yule/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Saturnalia/Solstice (well, a couple days after...)... I'm not even sure what the BIG point of contention here, IS.

your preferred literary vampire

oddbill — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 16:29:18 -0800

Brandon is a taxonomist.

You know that physics thing where you can't know both the exact location and the velocity of a photon at the same time, because if you measure the location you stop it, but if you measure the velocity it blurs?

Brandon prefers to measure the locations. It sounds like you prefer to measure the velocities.

It's all still scholarship.

your preferred literary vampire

mlpeters — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 16:42:37 -0800

@oddbill
Thanks -- I figured Brandon and I were talking past each other, neither really grasping the other's point - -now I know why -- you hit the nail on the head, methinks.

your preferred literary vampire

kimieye — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 16:46:03 -0800

@mlpeters
What the fuck is "OHOTMU" ?
Actually disregard that I figured it out...sorry I'm a DC girl

@oddbill
I defiantly agree. I also believe that there is a point where we move out of the world of Folklore and into Psychology. We perhaps are asking the wrong question not "what is a Vampire defined as?" but rather " why do we recognize something as a vampire?"

for instance Bunnicula I recognize him as a vampire but would not use him as a defining vampire character.

your preferred literary vampire

mlpeters — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 16:52:50 -0800

@kimieye - -yeah, it's the Marvel version of "Who's Who". I always hated those books - -kind of the opposite of storytelling.

"...why do we recognize something as a vampire?"

That's a fascinating question and observation. To me, that seems the real question -- the one that needs answered before, "what is a Vampire defined as?" can be answered.

your preferred literary vampire

kimieye — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 17:11:40 -0800

thank you.

it took me a while to figure it out.

So here is the question why do you recognize a vampire in Literature?

What says Vampire to you? Cape? Coffin? Compulsion to confuse your V's and W's?

your preferred literary vampire

mlpeters — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 17:27:50 -0800

@kimieye

Above all, a vampire is a predator, who survives by draining human vitality. I think that's the main commonality across all variations.

Being "undead" is a big part of it, but some lore that has it's roots in malevolent fairies, demons, etc. are now classified as "vampire"... some tales having started out as one, have over centuries morphed into the other, so I'm not sure how essential the "undead" component is.

your preferred literary vampire

Brandon Seifert — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 17:35:27 -0800

@oddbill — You are exactly right. (In fact, I even *refer* to myself as a taxonomist.)

your preferred literary vampire

Brandon Seifert — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 18:19:27 -0800

@mlpeters: I think you've accidentally stumbled on the physical embodiment of our difference of viewpoint on this.

You hate the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.

Whereas I used to proofread them.

:-) Seriously.

And I mean, you'd read my comic — I've created a whole vocabulary of Latin and Greek 'scientific terms' for various traits of supernatural creatures for Dr. Morrow to use: "Pneumasynthesis" is the process of metabolizing the energy of living things (especially life force), "phobophagy" means feeding on fear, "latrivores" feed on worship, "esthesiovores" feed on the physical sensations of others (pain, sexual pleasure, etc)... Which is very much my thing, and probably not at all yours.

your preferred literary vampire

mlpeters — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 18:29:42 -0800

@Brandon
I thought the Latin stuff in your comic was a cool touch - didn't know it was more than that. I'd keep doing that, if I were you because it makes you special.

On a more self-interested mode, it also means we can share any cool research, because it's clear we'd use it to such different ends.

I actually think that's kind of cool -- you handle one end of the spectrum and I'll do the other... and readers can buy both:)

your preferred literary vampire

Brandon Seifert — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 18:38:33 -0800

@kimieye: "why do you recognize a vampire in Literature?"

That is, indeed, a really good question.

I feel like the Dracula idea has really defined what "vampire" means in contemporary culture, and to call something in literature a "vampire" it needs to be something that resembles Dracula and the folklore he was based on — an undead bloodfeeder, probably with at least a few of the strengths and weaknesses we commonly associate with post-Dracula vampires.

If something isn't a bloodfeeder, I have trouble calling it a vampire. But if something's a bloodfeeder but isn't "undead" — I'm still going to recognize it as a vampire if it has enough vampiric strengths and weaknesses, the same way I can go along with "zombies" in zombie movies who aren't undead, but look and act close enough to what I expect from a zombie movie.

How far can something go from that baseline, without me going "That's not a vampire?" I don't know.

your preferred literary vampire

Brandon Seifert — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 18:42:32 -0800

@mlpeters: Yeah, I like the faux-Latin stuff too (although all the terms used in First Incision are actual medical and biological terminology — the fake stuff is a recent development). And Witch Doctor is definitely a project it makes sense for.

I do find it interesting that, although we completely fail to see eye to eye on how specific we should be in our terms, this whole thread seems to have pushed both of us into getting better educated about the folklore. (And there's definitely been interesting folklore I've found that I thought I should share with you, because I thought you might appreciate it.) I think as long as we can avoid trying to explain our viewpoints to each other, we're fine. :-)

your preferred literary vampire

mlpeters — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 18:53:31 -0800

@Brandon and kimieye
To me, Dracula is late to the party, though that's from a folkloric perspective, rather than literary... Dracula is where Stoker picked and chose from various version, throwing out what didn't work for his story, emphasising things that did.

Dracula is the defining literary version of a vampire, so my natural instinct is to look elsewhere and dig deeper - -and if what I come up with doesn't fit standard ideas of what a vampire is... all the better:)

With all the mention of Bram Stoker's creation, we shouldn't forget that his is not the first literary vampire, even if it's the most popular... there was Varney the vampire... an early "penny dreadful" and Le Fanu's Carmilla -- the source for most sexy vamps, complete with veiled lesbian overtones...

your preferred literary vampire

mlpeters — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 19:08:33 -0800

@Brandon
"And there's definitely been interesting folklore I've found that I thought I should share with you, because I thought you might appreciate it."

Same here. Do you know my website (mlpeters.com)? A contact e-mail link is on the website. We'd come to different conclusions, but sharing of raw data might be interesting. We could swap reading lists. Currently I've been researching more mythology, witchcraft and faery-lore than monsters, but there's a lot of overlap.

your preferred literary vampire

kimieye — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 19:28:06 -0800

I may have to look you boys up online...faux latin comics and websites...

@mlpeters

I think that though he is the standard for "New" vampires Dracula has always been a bit of a "frankenstine creature" if you catch my meaning, especially seeing as we cannot exclude Hammer Horror's impact on his image.

He has I think supplanted poor Lillith as the birth place of vampire.

@Brandon

Good start... I think as I stated above we all live in the shadow of the good count...
but I'm personally flexible on the blood thing, truly old and powerful vampires sometimes no longer need it. Also Old Gods like Kali Ma and Sekmet where both blood drinkers and are scholastically associated with the vampire but I think it would be hard to recognize them as such or associate them more than superficially.

Also one of the great tragedies of my education is that I never learned to swear in latin, so good for you!

your preferred literary vampire

stsparky — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 19:37:52 -0800

Harlan Ellison had a short story which featured "emotional" vampires though I can't remember the title perhaps "Try A Dull Knife"? And Bunnicula and The Celery Stalks at Midnight were mentioned earlier up thread. I think Big Black Kiss made me think about vampires differently.

your preferred literary vampire

Brandon Seifert — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 20:13:43 -0800

@mlpeters: Cool. Your website is timing out on me, but I sent you a PM on Panel & Pixel.

@kimieye: I'd argue that even if some vampires eventually get to the point where they no longer need blood (and I was just reading about a Bosnian vampire that turns into a normal human after seven years... only to turn back into a vampire when it dies), the blood-feeding was still by and large an important stage in their development.

(And my comic is online here. The first, "demo" issue is, in fact, about vampires, and a different interpretation of vampires than I've personally ever seen. Though after all the reading this thread has got me doing, I've decided the idea that there's one, single species of vampires in the setting needs to go.)

your preferred literary vampire

oddbill — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 20:20:10 -0800

@Brandon Cyphered

I had never head about Witch Doctor until this discussion, but i just clicked through and read your online sample and, well, it's pretty awesome!

Your extradimensional parasite take on it is now my 2nd favorite variant, after the Peter Watts versions I linked to upthread.

Beyond that, it's really well written and the artwork is lovely!

your preferred literary vampire

kimieye — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 20:23:16 -0800

@stsparky
Big black Kiss looks amazing....

so dose he....

@Brandon Cyphered
some drink other fluids like semen...

your preferred literary vampire

mlpeters — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 20:34:52 -0800

@Brandon -- I'm not on P&P anymore. If my website's acting funny (possibly snow causing power disruptions near the server...? My site isn't very demanding -- dial-up friendly, with no flash or anything - -just standard html and jpegs...) you can try me on myspace, where I'm mlpetersartist.

I need to look at more of your comic. I've only looked at enough to know I like it and to plan on buying a print copy when there's opportunity... I have dial-up (myspace is hell on dial-up, but I manage -- it's more or less obligatory to have a myspace...).

your preferred literary vampire

mlpeters — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 20:37:52 -0800

@kimieye

I just had a horrible thought of a vampire bunny drinking semen -- yuck and EEEE -youch!

your preferred literary vampire

Brandon Seifert — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 20:39:11 -0800

@oddbill: Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed it! Sounds like you enjoy science-inspired rethinkings of monsters like I do. (And that's sort of the whole point of the series.)

@kimieye: As I said, I personally draw the line as bloodfeeding, because that's what I think of when I hear "vampire."

(Plus I've just spent a week and a half compiling global beliefs about creatures that drink blood or other bodily fluids, steal your breath, eat your soul, suck your breast milk, eat excrement, feed on sexual energy, or have otherwise been described by one person or another as 'vampires.' I've got over 200 entries, and not one of them so far is a corpse that rises from the grave to drink semen. Rising from the grave to eat cow dung, yes — but not semen. You asked about our personal views of what constitutes a vampire, and mine continues to be "undead bloodfeeder," no matter how many encyclopedias of monsters I comb.)

your preferred literary vampire

kimieye — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 20:41:28 -0800

trust me on the seman bunnies....

your preferred literary vampire

oddbill — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 20:44:47 -0800

This Captain's Wife could probably find a use for those.

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Brandon Seifert — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 20:51:12 -0800

(@mlpeters: Okay, I MySpaced you.)

your preferred literary vampire

Brandon Seifert — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 21:08:03 -0800

Huh. I just noticed something.

When both Dracula and Night of the Living Dead were first released, both creators neglected to copyright them properly, putting them both immediately in the public domain (or at least in the public domain in the U.S., in Dracula's case.)

I can't help but wonder if that's part of what led to both of their respective impacts in culture. It certainly made it easier to do works based on them.

your preferred literary vampire

kimieye — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 21:15:33 -0800

@oddbill
As a seamans granddaughter I appreciate that one immensely.

@ Brandon
Vampires By Bob Curran (on google books)
Says that semen drinking vampires where the cause of nocturnal emissions. but you need to go to Asia for that one.
nothing about bunnies though...

your preferred literary vampire

Brandon Seifert — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 21:42:13 -0800

@kimieye — One of the books on vampires I was reading recently talked about how Westerners studying folklore in different parts of the world have tended to not be very careful about what they call "vampires," "demons" etc. in other cultures. And that many of the beliefs that have been called such in books bear little resemblance to the usual Western usages of the word, and instead obscure the nature of the actual beliefs themselves.

I really wish I'd written the quote down, or at least made a note of which book it was in. I didn't realize it would end up coming up so often later. I'll definitely keep an eye out for that now.

I don't know about vampire rabbits, but the Rom/gypsies of Europe believed that most objects could turn into vampires, including garden implements and pumpkins.

your preferred literary vampire

stsparky — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 22:47:08 -0800

@ Brandon Cyphered You seen those movies with Chinese vampires who can't hop a short barrier? They always struck me as tragic monsters.

your preferred literary vampire

Brandon Seifert — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 23:07:59 -0800

@stsparky: I saw Mr. Vampire, which is one of the classics. I thought it was quite a good time. The mythology behind them is really interesting to me too — the idea that they were originally corpses that Taoist priests taught to 'hop' to make them easier to transport back to their families, but who somehow got loose.

A book I'm reading (the excellent Vampire Universe by Jonathan Maberry) claims that in some ways they're closer to the Dracula model than most folkloric vampires, in that they're afraid of daylight, they can't cross running water, and they can turn into wolves. And like most "vampires" worldwide, they're repelled or damaged by garlic.

your preferred literary vampire

johnjones — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 06:56:52 -0800

For me, the most basic definition of a vampire should be "humanoid being that drains the vitality of others to maintain its existence." I think "humanoid" has to be in the definition because otherwise you get ticks, leeches and pretty much any natural parasite defined as vampires.

Also, in case no one else has done it (and even if they have) I'd like to offer up Lance Henriksen's Jesse Hooker from "Near Dark" as a damn cool vampire. That movie was the first time I ever really thought about "lower class" vampires.

your preferred literary vampire

kimieye — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 08:08:40 -0800

@Brandon
the Vietnamese vampires I refer too actually suck blood as well, however they prefer semen.

And the Garlic thing comes from it being an antiseptic...if it kills invisible biting creatures (viruses, bacteria), why cant it kill fiends?

There is another Asian vampire that is a Giant Floating Head and actually is credited with the cultivation of root vegetables.

@Johnjones
ooo...dust bowl vampires I think I saw that one on SciFi late one night

your preferred literary vampire

mlpeters — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 16:24:00 -0800

@johnjones
I should re-watch Near Dark again sometime... it's been years... um... 18 years, I think. I hope the DVD rental place in town has it, but if not they might still have the VHS and my VCR still works...

your preferred literary vampire

Indigo Rose — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 09:54:29 -0800

I always figured the garlic was somehow connected to mosquitos being repelled by garlic... works on one type of bloodfeeder, right?

I'd have to say any creature, that was once human, and drains the life/strength of other creatures, in some form (bloodfeeding or otherwise), for it's own survival is a Vampire to me. I don't feel it has to be a bloodfeeding corpse for me to see it as a vampire, though those would fall into my requirements.

I know there are a lot of tales of vampires being demons, thus not formerly human, but I tend to just think of those as a type of demon, not its own race.

your preferred literary vampire

shining_lion — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 12:05:49 -0800

My favourite literary vampire is Jack Agyar in Steven Brust's book AGYAR. Which would make my preferred literary vampire archetype to be rather like Dracula. Agyar fed off blood, hypnotized, carried with him a piece of petrified wood and could change into mist. Although the reason why it's my favourite vampire novel of all time is that the word vampire is not mentioned once. The closest Brust comes is strigoi. Also Jim the Ghost was stolen from Huck Finn. Jim's always been one of my favourite characters, and it was nice to see him again.

AGYAR is the anti-Anne Rice vampire book, and all the better for it, IMO.

edited to add the bold part, because it's quite important.

your preferred literary vampire

Brandon Seifert — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 13:02:02 -0800

@ Indigo Rose: Hmm. repelling mosquitoes is a good point. Still, most folklorists seem to think it's garlic's blood-cleansing, medicinal properties that gave it its status as vampire-repellent. That's a common thing in folklore — things that repel disease also repel monsters. (All the Ancient Egyptian treatments for possession apparently involved honey, for instance — and honey is sterile, or antiseptic, or one o' them things.)

There's also a motif in world folklore about supernatural creatures being driven away by strong sensory stimuli — loud or unpleasant noises (firecrackers in China, banging pots and pans elsewhere), powerful smells, stuff like that. So maybe garlic helps in that way, too.

Also, I like your emphasis on vampires that were creatures that were once human. I think that, to me, is more important than them being "undead."

your preferred literary vampire

Indigo Rose — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 09:36:42 -0800

@shining lion - Thank you for bringing Agyar up! I love it when someone actually knows who Steven Brust is!

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stsparky — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 00:08:19 -0800

Aygar was a good book. Brust used to teach Tai Chi in the 80s near JPL Pasadena.

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shining_lion — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 09:41:37 -0800

Indigo Rose:

He's a local author, which I didn't know the first time I picked up JHEREG. He has since moved to Texas, but still visits here at least once a year, to see friends 'n' family at the MN RenFest. ...which is where I happened to be the last day of Fest, when I bumped into him. Trying to spot the "guy with long, dark hair, a goatee and wearing a funny hat?" Needle in a haystack!

But bump into him I did, and I thanked him for the beauty that is AGYAR, for NOT being Anne Rice, for writing a vampire I can totally believe, and for Jim. I love Jim. (And he confirmed that he is indeed Huck's Jim.)

His daughter gave me COWBOY FENG'S SPACE BAR AND GRILLE and I couldn't find him to sign it. So we made plans to get together at the next Fest this year and remedy the situation. I'm thinking of bringing my djembe along this time. :)

your preferred literary vampire

Lucifal — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 08:49:09 -0800

Not typical of the stories in Murky Depths but from the same publishing house.

Of this paperback Tanith Lee said: ‘A deceptively readable date with darkness – watch your step! This book is lit for the much more discerning chick (and cock) who like to walk in the shadows. Relax with it, but be prepared for sudden jewels and little masterpieces – and the rug to be pulled from under your feet.’

Black Static, the UK horror mag from TTAPress who produce Interzone, have also reveiewed it recently.

your preferred literary vampire

swampyankee — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:38:25 -0800

Meet Mercy Brown

She lived just up the road from me ( just over 100 years ago). A while after her death her family decided she might be one of the undead so they dug her up , cut out her heart , and burned it. This was all attended by a physician and a reporter from a local paper.
I know of 10 or 15 similar incidents that occured within a 20 mile radius of my town from the late 1700's to the late 1800's. For some reason eastern European mythology took root here even though most of the families around here then were colonial English or Scot-Irish.

your preferred literary vampire

mlpeters — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:03:08 -0800

@swampyankee
Though the word "vampire" is of Eastern European origin, the folklore about similar (sometimes in all but name - -and once the word vampire entered English...) creatures in wide spread.

your preferred literary vampire

Clarkthehomonculus — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:51:55 -0800

...though it was a small role...I loved the character of Khayman in the Queen of the Damned...imagine the things that dude has seen...and he gave us a scientific glimpse of the biological makeup of the vamp...like how he described his 6,ooo year old flesh to that of a wasp nest...how the blood has worked on him for that long...

ah, it was very brief, but it was enough to get the imagination bellows to blow...

your preferred literary vampire

Indigo Rose — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 10:21:16 -0800

@shining_lion - That's awesome, I would love to chat with him.

I also think there need to be more literary vampires like Agyar. Not only was it more subtle than the rest (not mentioning the word vampire, or blood drinking, or ever really telling you what he is... though there's no doubt) the main character had one of the personality types I like for that role. You like him, but you can't help feeling he's a parasite and oh so shady... in a likeable way. lol

your preferred literary vampire

johnjones — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 21:11:29 -0700

Bringing this thread back from the depths, I have to heartily recommend Cade from Blood Oath and The President's Vampire.

your preferred literary vampire

Talesin — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 00:19:44 -0700

"In the heart of Transylvania, in the vampire hall of fame yeah, theres not a vampire zanier then DUCKULA" ahem excuse me

Echo sentiments on Stoker, Z Brite et al. Forvever Knight I've been trying to track down on DVD for ages, can remember watching it late night I think back to back with Highlander.

Looking forward to the new Goon comic which features his response to Twilight:

(edited)

your preferred literary vampire

Kay Orchison — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 18:19:45 -0700

I've been enjoying Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan's The Strain books. I mean, if you took Stoker and Matheson and bred them, you'd get this. I hope del Toro films them one day.

Also, another vote here for Charlie Huston. Looking forward to reading the conclusion to that story arc, having followed it from the beginning.

your preferred literary vampire

Birds_Use_Stars — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 19:03:17 -0700

@swampyankee Hey! I got dragged out to Mercy Browns grave in the middle of the night by friends who wanted to look for ghosts. spoiler alert! We didn't find any.

END OF STORY.

your preferred literary vampire

government spy — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 05:07:02 -0700

I remember thinking the gang in Near Dark were pretty bad ass. Then I sat down with my girlfriend and watched it again (her first time seeing it) and realized it was awesome when I was like 12 or something, and it just doesn't hold up. I do like that nobody ever mentions the word "vampire" the entire film, though.

Oh yeah, but I guess that's not literary.

I was always a White-Wolf V:tM fan, Sabbat mostly, and have always been disappointed at the lack of decent vamps in film. Give me some old gothic-punk any day, seriously.

I'd say I'm a fan of Salem's Lot. One of the better modern vampire novels, imho, without getting too cheesy.

your preferred literary vampire

Mister Andersen — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 15:35:45 -0700

I quite like the take on vampires from the Skulduggery Pleasant books, where their humanity is literally a skin they shed at night and regrow in the morning

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Purple Wyrm — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 03:19:37 -0700

The classic, complete monster Dracula for me, in the original novel format. Itineris cito mortui!

Although in terms of the whole Vampiric milieu I quite enjoyed Kim Newman's Anno Dracula mashups.

your preferred literary vampire

BettyBoolean — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 03:23:55 -0700

Catherine whatsherface in 'the hunger'

or maybe the one in blade 3 with the vagina dentata

your preferred literary vampire

Fauxhammer — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 04:49:38 -0700

I love when vampires take over. Why wouldn't they? It seems like the ultimate destiny of a hypothetical vampire race is to rise up and keep we humans in bloodfarms.

VAE VICTUS

your preferred literary vampire

Aries Walker — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 17:29:57 -0700

Throw me on the classic Dracula bandwagon. I've not seen another vampire with whom I was at once fascinated with, repulsed from, and intimidated by. One that bears note, however, was not from a novel at all, but a classic RPG called Chill. In it, there was a powerful vampire in New England, who over the years was responsible for acts such as the Salem witch trials and the Pequot wars. His name was Ezra Cabot, and the writeup for him was presented as an investigative report (ostensibly for the game's players). It was very well done.

Cinematically, I'll admit to liking Chris Sarandon's portrayal of Jerry Dandridge from Fright Night, though part of that may be my weakness for the unapologetically cheesy.

your preferred literary vampire

Beamish — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 19:00:49 -0700

I don't read any vamp fic by my favorite vampire was Max Schreck as Nosferatu.

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Neila — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 20:24:04 -0700

Dracula's my fave, he's a classic. :D
Alucard from the comic/anime Hellsing is probably a close second to the original Dracula, since he's pretty much just Dracula but with guns and fewer weaknesses.
The vampires in "The Strain" were pretty neat, it seemed like a retelling of Dracula to me, (replace "boat" with "plane") but with creepy parasitic disease riddled vampires that looked kinda like the extra hingy jaw vampires in Blade 2 (no doubt because Guillmo Del Toro wanted to make them creepier in the movie and wasn't aloud to so he did so in the book with Chuck Hogan).

your preferred literary vampire

Lucifal — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 00:45:43 -0700

From Sam Stone's Vampire Gene series:-

your preferred literary vampire

Alan Tyson — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 16:06:59 -0700

I'm with govspy - Vampire: the Masquerade did a really nice job of tying several disparate vamp myths and pop-culture references together into a cohesive whole. I think I've played just about every Clan at least once.

Fuck Vampire: the Requiem, though. I just had no desire to dive into that world and dig through it at all.

For something a bit more recent, I'm loving the hell out of Scott Snyder's American Vampire series.

your preferred literary vampire

chenryhen — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 12:20:09 -0700

As with many gaming geeks, I hated the D&D vampires. Lose two levels every time you get hit? Come on!!

I do remember being fond of PN Elrod's Vampire Files series. The protagonist had what felt like a good mix of the traditional vampire traits, and the books were entertaining in junior high.

your preferred literary vampire

RenThing — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 13:23:00 -0700

Seconding (or third-ing) VtM for vampires. It has a little bit of everything no matter what your take on vampires you wanted. You could even have your Asian vampire myths if you decided to go with some of the side books (and some of those were just wrong...wrong wrong wrong).

your preferred literary vampire

vandalhandle — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 19:13:21 -0700

Stoker's 'Dracula', Still a very interesting read. The last vampire book i enjoyed was Victor Gischler's 'Vampire a go-go' and for movie vampires Park Chan Wook's 'Thirst'.

your preferred literary vampire

Purple Wyrm — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 20:06:47 -0700

I posted about Dracula as my favourite a while back, but chenryhen's comment about D&D reminded me of perhaps the ultimate non-D&D vampire - Sean Manchester's Highgate Vampire.

(Of course Manchester claims it's all true, but he's a complete maniac, so I reckon it's fair to consider his work as literature rather than factual reporting.)

The thing that Manchester claims to have encountered isn't a guy with fangs in a dinner suit - it's a force of pure, elemental evil which seems to possess and infect the entire cemetery and surrounds. It's a shape changing, slippery, non-physical entity that's almost impossible to track down and kill, and the whole account is creepy as fuck.

The Highgate entity makes most literary vampires look like complete pussies ;)

your preferred literary vampire

Oddcult — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 04:06:04 -0700

NOOOOOOOOO! If you say his name, he will come!

your preferred literary vampire

RenThing — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 14:12:26 -0700

@Oddcult

Dude, it's not like he's Slender Man.

What?

your preferred literary vampire

256 — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 19:00:57 -0700

Guys, you've got this all wrong. Candlejack is the one who will come if you accidentally mention his n

your preferred literary vampire

IsaacSher — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 08:10:27 -0700

I've always liked Jim Butcher's take on vampires, where you had different "courts" to represent different versions of vampirism.

Black Court vamps are the classic Dracula-style mystic/psychic powerhouses, but vulnerable to holy water, sunlight, wooden stakes in hearts, and so on.

Red Court vampires look human, but are wearing "flesh masks" over a true form of hideous bat monsters, have connections to Aztec mythology, have narcotic saliva, and can be killed if you rip open their blood-resevoir bellies.

White Court are succubi/incubi who look like Nagel paintings or pale manga prettyboys/girls, and while they relatively weaker than the other two courts physically, they're still much stronger than humans, can manipulate and feed on emotions rather than blood, and have NO weakness against the sun. Instead, they're vulnerable to (and cannot feed upon) people who have true love in their hearts.

There have also been references to a "Jade Court" in Asia, but they haven't show up directly in the books yet.

While the Black and Red Courts have never been presented as anything but total monsters undeserving of any sympathy, the White Court is trickier. An important supporting character in the books is the son of a major power in the White Court, and he often regrets his vampiric nature, and wishes he could be a normal human again -- although after a recent trauma, that's been suppressed and he's been eagerly indulging his inner monster again.

your preferred literary vampire

Purple Wyrm — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 18:06:58 -0700

Surely you're all thinking of the Bye-Bye Man and his servitor Gloomsinger? I mean if you even think about their names they'll turn up a

your preferred literary vampire

Brandon Seifert — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 01:41:36 -0700

IsaacSher — Any vampire fiction with "courts" or "elders" loses me the second I encounter the term (cf. The Strain). But then, The Dresden Files lost me almost immediately, as did The Strain.

Still. I'm all for fiction with multiple varieties of vampires. That's how it always was in folklore, after all — every country in Europe had its vampire myth, or three at the same time. And they varied wildly.

your preferred literary vampire

Oddcult — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 03:37:12 -0700

We're probably okay these days, but time was, if you mentioned Sean Manchester's name online, he must have been permanently ego-searching, and he (or a blatant sockpuppet) would turn up and threaten to sue or have a giant hissy fit over anything negative said about him.

The weird mad love affair between Manchester and David Farrant is by turns fascinating and pathetic. I've a small stack of the various pamphlets and self-published books they've both come out with over the decades. I'm sure there's some kind of meta-story to be created from it all, that doesn't have much to do with vampires, and maybe I'll have a go, when they're both dead.

your preferred literary vampire

johnjones — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 08:54:31 -0700

Maybe somebody should give them their own show, ala Ghost Hunters, in which they each investigate a haunting (perhaps at the same time) and just let the camera record the fun.

Regarding Vampire: The Masquerade, it was really well done for its time, but over all, I prefer the NWoD concepts over the original ones, especially the character creation process. The process is two-stage for supernaturals. First, you build a human, mortal person, then you add the supernatural template to it. First you build a person, then you turn him into a monster. I really like that.

your preferred literary vampire

Oddcult — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 09:09:29 -0700

As they're both clearly quite mental, that would be exploitative really.

your preferred literary vampire

johnjones — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 09:42:16 -0700

You say that as if it were a bad thing.

your preferred literary vampire

Alan Tyson — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 11:54:31 -0700

Not to derail the thread, but I'm with johnjones for the most part, but the "big three" titles don't seem to have the same life that the old ones did. New Mage is boring as a turd compared to old Mage. The new Changeling is DELICIOUS, though, and I wish I could con some people into playing a game of Promethean, just to see if it's as fun as it reads.

your preferred literary vampire

government spy — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 15:39:23 -0700

I really dug V:tR, but I thought the Mortal stuff was really wicked. So many options in a world where not EVERYTHING was written down in a sourcebook somewhere. Oh, this really deserves its own nerdery thread, doesn't it?

your preferred literary vampire

Indigo Rose — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 07:50:21 -0700

Vampire the masquerade was always my favorite. I have nothing but disdain for the new Vampire line, however, Changeling and Promethean are fantastic. Werewolf needed the reduction in power level they got in the new world, but I liked the plot better in the old.

@ Alan Tyson - We ran a Promethean game and it was one of the most emotionally intense and deeply involved games I've played. We kept it to a small group of players who were comfortable with each other, so that we could explore what it means to be a monster and what Humanity truly implies. It takes a lot of dedication, but if you can get a small group of players to do it, it's well worth it.

@government spy - Yes.

your preferred literary vampire

government spy — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 07:55:51 -0700

So here we are...

your preferred literary vampire

Gordon — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 10:18:41 -0700

Cassidy from Preacher would kick the fuck out of any other vampire without spilling his pint.