Vampire Bites Suck



"Grim: ...Dracula, hurry, I'm in terrible pain. You gotta suck out the poison! Dracula: Nuh-uh -- Dracula don't suck. Grim: You're a vampire! Vampires suck... blood! Dracula: Nah, see, that's a myth. Dracula scrape with his fangs and lick up the blood. Like this... [demonstrates] See, scrape and lick. Scrape and lick. like a kitten drinking milk."

- The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, "Fear and Loathing in Endsville"

Vampires need blood to survive. Some can survive on the blood of lesser creatures—rats, cats, dogs, etc. But their beverage of preference and choice is almost always human blood.

Humans who have encountered a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire may count themselves lucky, as the Kiss of the Vampire is at worst, a tolerable experience, and at best, as good as or Better Than Sex.

The vampires who aren't quite so humane or human-friendly, though, don't much care for whether their prey enjoys it. They likely won't survive the experience to care, as these vampires don't bother with table manners, let alone leaving two dainty, easily covered puncture wounds. They go for the jugular, and if the rest of the neck goes with it, c'est la mort.

The Gory Discretion Shot is seldom used with a violently hungry vampire, so the viewer is treated to seeing the High-Pressure Blood fountaining everywhere, and the police or intrepid meddling kids are treated to the messy aftermath. Where this can get really torturous is if the vampire is into Hemo Eroticism, because then they'll draw out the feeding process.

See Our Vampires Are Different, and Kiss of the Vampire for the flipside of this trope.

Anime and Manga

 * Vampire Knight skirts the line between this and Kiss of the Vampire, especially with Yuuki and Zero. Almost all cases of vampire bites in the show lean towards this trope, though.
 * Alucard of Hellsing tends to not bother with subtlety when feeding ever. Unless maybe it'll make the Mind Screw even worse. He's been told at before "It's not good to play with your food".
 * And what he does to Rip Van Winkle goes beyond the pale.
 * Actually, Alucard doesn't feed on humans. He just kills, often in absurdly brutal ways. It's implied that he feeds using blood packs.
 * He can just flat out absorb blood that's anywhere nearby, if so inclined- . But feeding or no, he'll make a mess of you because it's fun.
 * If you count the anime, he did feed on a human once. . Plus, keep in mind he's the one who turned Seras...
 * When he did turn the reporter, he took his time and the death itself seemed very sensual. The interesting part was that the reporter had blond hair, dark skin, and blue eyes, similar to Integra Hellsing, his master; also, his eyes were on her the entire time. One may infer that it may have been an indirect way of saying "This could be you".
 * JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is horrific when it comes to this; its vampires feed through their hands. In the first series, one feeds using his hair. It comes across like the vines from The Ruins.
 * Happened once to the titular Dark Magical Girl in the Vampire Princess Miyu OAV.  In a subversion,
 * Gantz has this trope in spades, to the point where we see a metal tub being filled with blood after a vampire cut a few womens' heads off. They don't care how they get the blood - they just want it.

Comic Books

 * The first installment of the Batman vs Dracula series, Red Rain has Dracula and his minions slashing the throats of their victims with their fangs after they're done to cover up the supernatural element of their attack and disguise the killing as a standard murder. one wonders why they bothered, what with Dracula flying around in his enormous, monstrous winged form in public.
 * Then again, one of Batman's villains is Man-Bat, a giant bat.
 * Bat shaped shadow in the night sky? Unusual? This is Gotham we're talking about...
 * Mina Murray from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen wears a red scarf to hide the scars from her attack by Dracula. Alan Moore decided that vampires would feed like vampire bats; i.e. grind the skin into hamburger with nasty serrated teeth, and lap up what comes out. So, Mina's scars are not the "pair of discreet puncture wounds" of legend, but massive and disfiguring. The Film of the Book goes with the traditional bite look, the way the book had it.
 * Vampires in Preacher (Comic Book) rip out the side of their victim's neck. The perils of not having fangs...
 * The vampires in the guro comic Elizabeth Bathory by "Raulo" are extremely violent, often partly eating their victims after drinking the blood or even mutilating each other just for fun and letting their Healing Factor take care of the aftermath.
 * The traditional bitemarks are Lampshaded in Joann Sfar's Vampire Loves- protagonist Ferdinand bites his sleeping victims with one fang, so that they think it's a mosquito bite.

Film

 * In The Lost Boys, David's crew descends on Make-Out Point to tear the roofs off cars and tear open the skulls of their victims.
 * The Movie version of 'Salem's Lot had messy, unpleasant vampires.
 * In the movie Innocent Blood, the vampire rips the victim's throat out like an animal, which is kind of a subversion because otherwise she's a cute, sexy Friendly Neighborhood Vampire.
 * In 30 Days of Night, the vampires are violent. And they don't even bother to wipe their mouths after feeding. Possibly justified, as their pillaging of the town was their equivalent of an all you can eat buffet. To be fair, the comic book has the vampires being similarly gory... but in private.
 * The vampires in the Blade movies are all savage and vicious.
 * From Dusk till Dawn is full of the vampires who bite hard and messy.
 * The vampires in Daybreakers are particularly violent, especially when starved. At one point a swarm of them rip a man's head off just to spill more claret.
 * I Am Legend has creatures purported to be violent and messy, but we never really get a good look at their feeding habits.
 * John Carpenter's Vampires features vampires who don't suck blood so much as tear a hole in your carotid and lap at the fountain.
 * While most of the vampire attacks in The Fearless Vampire Killers are on the jugular, at a certain point a man is brought in with vampire bites all over his body, and hardly any blood left.
 * In Near Dark the vampires, like Cassidy in Preacher (Comic Book), usually tear the neck open - Severen is shown to be the vampire equivalent of a messy eater - but it's not the only way to feed. Diamondback also cuts a woman's throat and drains the blood into a beer glass, proving that the vampires aren't fussy about how they get blood, as long as they get it.
 * In the Dracula-display segmfiancé's'Waxwork'', the vampires not only drink the fiance's blood, they.
 * The female vampires in Count Yorga are like this, biting their victims anywhere to drain their blood, leaving bite marks all over the body. Oddly though the title character, Yorga, when feeding on his female victims is nowhere near as messy, just leaving pinpricks on their necks.
 * The 2008 Lucy Liu vehicle Rise features vampires who don't have fangs, so they wear tiny blades around their necks just to tear huge gushing holes in the necks of their victims.
 * In Let the Right One In Eli has to snap the necks of her victims, drop them out of windows or otherwise end their suffering. Up until then they're still struggling around and twitching in agony. In fact, the process is so distressing to all concerned that she prefers to have her "Dad" drain her victims for her.
 * Indeed, the one victim that is bitten but not killed, ends up starting to turn into a vampire themself before they decide to commit suicide by sunlight (which drives their friend to seek vengeance against the little monster that attacked them).
 * In Nosferatu, Orlock's bite isn't too bad (twin puncture wounds), but Orlock's bites also spread the plague.
 * Played with in George Romero's Martin (1977), where the "vampire" is a demented young man. He doesn't bite his victims—just slashes their arms open with razor blades.
 * The segment "Midnight Mess" from the 1973 Vault of Horror movie adaptation. What sucks more than a vampire bite? Being hung by your ankles and having a beer tap jammed into your jugular!

Literature

 * In Brian Lumley's Necroscope series, the vampires are all savage and vicious, even to each other. More to the point, due to the fact that they can reshape their bodies, their feeding habits range from using oversized jaws to tear open human torsos, to forming tentacular siphons and draining their victims dry. And it gets worse when the vampire in question has the power of Necrmouthful
 * Vampires in the Laura Caxton series have a mouthfull of shark-like teeth sharp enough to bite through kevlar like it was butter. They use them for that, too.
 * Nancy A. Collins' Sonja Blue series is full of vampires who are uncaring of the state in which they leave their victims.
 * Feeding vampires in Twilight rip their victims to bloody shreds first.
 * Don't forget the excruciating pain if they don't kill you as the venom spreads.
 * Vampires in Kim Harrison's The Hollows series leave scars on the necks of their victims.
 * The bites may scar but the bite itself is euphoric due to highly addictive vampire venom that causes pleasure center reaction, so the victim craves being bitten again, even months after the bite. Worse, other vampires can re-trigger the bite scar. See Kiss of the Vampire.
 * Poppy Z. Brite's vampires in Lost Souls will also rip and tear a victim to shreds, and then devour them, marrow and all. Yummy.
 * In the Night World series, when vampires suck blood out of an unwilling and non-tranced victim, it is described as painful. One character compares it to your soul being sucked out of you. Willing, now...
 * In the Masters of Horror special "The V Word", the head vampire has no fangs to bite a victim's throat... so he tears out a hunk of flesh and laps up the blood. In another scene, a vampire slashes a man's throat with a piece of glass so his hungry friend can feed.
 * The Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series mostly employs the Kiss of the Vampire, but not all vampires bother; the title character has some nasty scar tissue where a vampire gnawed on her.
 * The Dresden Files is all over the place on this one. The White Court doesn't leave any marks on their prey, but feed on the lifeforce of their prey by inducing a specific emotion. The Red Court use elaborate disguises to get close to their prey, then use their narcotic saliva to render the prey insensible while they go at it like vampire bats. The Black Court sucks in the conventional sense (Dracula was actually written as a guide to dealing with the Black Court), but resemble rotting corpses, so how they come by their prey is another question entirely. The Jade Court has been alluded to, but haven't appeared yet; the character that mentions them says they're from Asia but otherwise very secretive, and it's probably a safe bet that the Chinese "hopping ghost" is at least marginally related.

Live Action TV

 * Buffy the Vampire Slayer has this, sort of. In order to feed, the vampire only needs to make you bleed to feed, so it's not as messy as most examples, however they don't leave the two neat puncture wounds common to Kiss of the Vampire. They leave behind an oval scar, as they bite with all their teeth. Note that this is all that have to do to feed. Most vampires are sadistic bastards and do much worse. Offscreen, but still.
 * The vampiric  on The League of Gentlemen leaves huge, gruesome puncture marks.
 * In The Vampire Diaries a full set of tooth marks is left on the victim, and when people are bitten there's the occasional sound like flesh being chewed. Though they can use their compulsion to make people ignore the pain, or at least forget about it afterward.
 * In a Doing In the Wizard variant, the villain of an early CSI episode was a porphyriac convinced she needed to consume human hemoglobin to suppress her illness. Being fangless, she trained her guard dog to maul her intended prey, then removed their livers and spleens (rich in blood) and left each body looking like an animal-attack victim.
 * Deadliest Warrior used a freakin' alligator as the basis for a vampire's bite in "Vampires vs. Zombies". When the resulting pressure reading was placed into a pneumatic jaw, the "vampire fangs" bit through a "zombie skull", and reached the center of the brain. By comparison, very few non-gunpowder weapons tested on the show have been able to penetrate that deeply into the skull.

Tabletop Games

 * In Vampire: The Masquerade, most vampires bring intense pleasure to those they feed on; this is referred to as "The Kiss". There are exceptions, however:
 * The Giovanni clan, on the other hand, have a bite that not only does more damage than your regular bite, it really freaking hurts. Fortunately, the Giovanni are a well-connected clan of few moral compunctions, so there's always a steady stream of not-quite-willing food... Or corpses, who are in no position to feel anything from it. Given that the clan is renown for their necromantic abilities and zombies have no need of blood anyway, the latter is basically killing two birds with one stone for them.
 * A vampire with the four-point Flaw of 'Grip of the Damned' gives the victims of his feeding absolutely no pleasure whatsoever—only terror and pain. The vampire is forced to grapple with their struggling victim for as long as he wishes to take their blood, which tends to pose a problem for those with a high Humanity.
 * In addition, there is the Nagaraja bloodline, whose members need to eat the flesh (major organs, mainly) as well as the blood of their victims, and a Flaw called 'Conspicuous Consumption' -- a delusion that causes the same effect to other vampires. Needless to say, "The Kiss" is not an option to these vampires unless they want to put down their victim painlessly by blood drain first.
 * The Kuei-jin or Cathayan, Asian vampires in Kindred of the East, lack fangs in their default form, so they need to draw blood using a blade or some other artificial means, or spend a point of Mana to manually grow fangs. (This assumes they're not enlightened enough to subsist on a victim's breath or simply draw upon the ambient energy of the universe, but are sufficiently enlightened that they no longer need to consume the flesh of their prey.)
 * In Vampire: The Requiem:
 * The Noctuku, a Nosferatu bloodline that has the irrestistable urge to devour the flesh of their prey. Of course, they can't digest it, which makes their dinners rather... unpleasant. For bonus points, they actually revel in this, and prefer hunting other vampires to anything else.
 * Then there's the Qedeshah, another bloodline: not only does their bite hurt, but any attempts to Embrace men end in screaming, painful agony.
 * The Norvegi bloodline, whose inherited flaw is that they lack fangs. That means that they have to use something sharp, and it hurts precisely as much as some bastard slitting your wrist with a knife then latching onto it and trying to suck your blood out does. Which is to say, a lot. On the other hand, their special power, Bloodworking, does mean that they can turn their hands into organic bone-knives which drain your blood when you're stabbed. Still hurts like hell, though.
 * While they still experience the pleasurable intoxication that most vampire bites cause, victims of the Eupraxus bloodline have a problem when it comes to being fed from - the vampire cannot lick the wound to close it. This often leads to the unfortunate situation of a human haemorrhaging to death while still moaning pleasureably, at least until the intoxication wears off. And because their bitemarks don't heal, being embraced by one of these vampires leads to an eternity of wearing scarves or roll neck jumpers just to cover the holes in your throat.
 * Dungeons & Dragons vampires don't generally feed like this—why let good blood spill all over? -- but Van Richten's Guide to Vampires briefly mentions how long a vampire can offset starvation by tearing up a fresh corpse to get at its blood. Just in case it overestimates the PCs' hardiness and scores a TPK, leaving nobody who's still breathing left for dinner.
 * The Monster Manuscript was a booklet giving D&D stats and painting instructions from some Grenadier miniatures from the early '80s. One of the listed monsters is a "velanmorg", an elven vampire that messily plays out this trope, ripping victims' throats out and greedily guzzling the fountaining blood. Their claws hold the struggling prey securely as it bleeds out.
 * Tabletop GameRifts Vampires have a "Killing Bite" that's powerful enough to penetrate armor. Wild Vampires don't bite any other way.
 * Vampires in the GURPS: Black Ops setting are fairly simple. In daytime, they sleep. At night, they hunt until they find a normal human, then tear it in half to eat the internal organs and slurp up the blood. Then they start hunting again, until sunrise. Then they sleep.

Video Games

 * In Tsukihime, assuming the vampire doesn't just eat you, the bite is actually pretty mild. Unfortunately, the vampire will also put a little of its own blood back into you, which is horribly painful as well as making it feel like you have mud in your veins, whatever that means.
 * You can get a good approximation by completely covering yourself in, preferably cold, mud. You become sluggish due to cold and the weight of the mud. You entire body becomes harder to move as the mud hardens and dries. But then again, this is just mud. You can brush it off. Not when it's inside you, though.
 * In Fate/stay night, Rider is for some reason vampiric. She doesn't tend to care much about what happens to the victim after being bitten and will drain a victim completely dry if she feels like it, as seen in at least one bad end and also referenced to at the beginning of Heavens Feel. And it feels just as pleasant as having your throat torn out by a normal person's teeth, as she is not in fact a vampire and lacks fangs/canines. Oddly enough,
 * Rayne's full body, arm-and-thigh-locking embrace appears to stun her victims with pleasure in BloodRayne. But if the Kiss is ever broken, Mooks can go right back to attacking without a lingering pause.
 * Kain has shown a preference for hoisting victims into the air with one hand and then gruesomely chowing down on their jugular—with crunching noises—when he isn't telekinetically vacuuming their blood from afar.

Webcomics

 * Charby the Vampirate has depicted vampire bites as extremely brutal and violent with increasing attention to making them the most grisly and disturbing element in a comic which has a fairly high amount of gore and violence in it.

Western Animation

 * The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy also nods to vampire bats in the episode "Fear And Loathing In Endsville", as quoted above.
 * Due to the Media Watchdogs, the 90's Animated Spider-Man series couldn't have its adaptation of Morbius the Living Vampire (a genetic researcher transformed into a vampire-like being through a failed experiment- in this case, being bitten by a vampire bat that drank some of Spider-man's blood Morbius was irradiating to examine how it was created) drink blood by biting necks, the way the comic version did. So, to get around this, they gave him a set of five sucking, rasping lamprey-like mouth/orifices in each hand. These usually were depicted as leaving bloody holes wherever Morbius had touched a victim to feed- and he tended to feed by clasping both hands onto a human's face.
 * Also he was always draining "plasma", not blood.
 * The writers must be fans of the above JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.