- They need blood. Mostly. Usually Vampires go insane/grow weak/die without it.
- You can also have a critter that sucks out someone's youth, or soul, or "will", or fear. It's a whole big sucking thing. Usually for a vampire, it is blood; whether or not they consume anything else varies between versions.
- Some are Vegetarian Vampires who get by on animals and blood banks, and sometimes all they require is a quick, easily healed swallow from humans from time to time. These can become Friendly Neighborhood Vampires. The ones who must drink live human blood in fatal amounts aren't so lucky. The ones who enjoy it and get off on it? Well... Kiss of the Vampire is the option for Friendly Neighborhood Vampires. Otherwise? Vampire Bites Suck.
Our Vampires Are Different
Subtrope of Our Monsters Are Different. This one deals with everyone's favorite undead bloodsuckers.
There are as many types of vampire as there are disease; some are virulent and deadly, and some just make you walk funny and avoid fruit.
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* Vampires are viral.
- Recently, the idea has arisen that vampires judge each other by how far removed they are from a "source". The highest social status belongs to someone who somehow became a vampire without being turned by one via bite.
- Of course, there can also be a fusion of "types". A vampire may create mindless undead slaves via simple feeding; (often referred to as "spawn") but to create a thinking vampire with the potential for the gambits of powers, the full process is needed.
- Or they create living servants like ghouls or blood-slaves who feed on their blood, get power from it some how, and protect their masters any way they can.
* Vampires are almost always inhumanly strong, fast, and durable, often to the point of being Immune to Bullets and most other mundane weapons. For some, especially more modern ones, this is where it ends, making them effectively little more than intelligent (and stylish) super-zombies.
- No reflection (often because the vampire has no soul, but see below). This sometimes extends to shadows. But it depends on the vampire apparently. In one medium there are several types of vamps who have various weaknesses. In more recent examples this has been 'modernised' in terms of the vampire not being able to be picked up by audio or video recording or transmitting equipment.
- No heartbeat/breath. Sometimes the no breath thing means they can't do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but if they can talk, they must be able to take air into their lungs and expel it intentionally. Little logic problem there, but we're talking about vampires so logic should take the day off. However Vampires do not need to breathe, it seems to be a reflex they have left over from being alive hence they can never drown, suffocate, or be poisoned.
- No brain activity, (making them easily recognized by telepaths).
- Physical features, such as being exceedingly pale, having unusual eyes (Glowing Eyes of Doom/Hellish Pupils/Animal Eyes), and, of course, Fangs Are Evil. In folklore, there were numerous physical telltales - eyebrows that met over the nose, fingers all the same length, hair in the center of the palms or backward-facing palms - that are mostly overlooked in modern versions. The original novel-version Dracula has practically all of them. If they can hide some or all of them, dropping the disguise constitutes using Game Face. Sometimes vampires will become more and more human-like in appearance as they consume more blood/live longer. Sometimes... not.
- Body temperature: Vampires, being dead, are almost always at room temperature or colder.
- Technically, they are dead. Pretty spry for a dead guy, though.
- Vampires don't age as we mortals do. Sometimes, this is genuine eternal youth. Sometimes long periods of time undead can result in a pretty inhuman-looking character. Sometimes, they age like us, just at a much slower rate.
- Related, they usually suffer from Creative Sterility in both the biological and artistic sense. They can not beget any children unless it's a male vampire and a live woman, in which case a Dhampyr is the result. They may however be capable of turning a child into a vampire, which results in an ageless Undead Child. If it's a "living" vampire species this is usually waived.
- Rarely, the vampire is immortal but must restore his/her youth by drinking blood. In abstinence, they "age", and immediately begin to grow young after they've fed. This originated with Dracula and with persistent stories about one Elizabeth Bathory's bathing habits.
A work will usually address these baseline rules even if they're not enforced. Sometimes an unused rule will be explained away as a Fake Weakness propagated by the vampires themselves.
Some folklore claim the only way to permanently kill a vampire is to hammer a stake through its heart, shove garlic in its mouth, cut off its head, tear off its ears, dismember it, burn the pieces in a fire, and then scatter the ashes across holy ground. This will also permanently kill most anything, including pale spooky goths who happen not to be vampires. A few old folklore suggest that even this only works until a full moon shines on the ash. All this on the theory that vampires were corpses animated by evil spirits. Doing all these things rendered the corpse unusable by the spirit. By contrast, the easiest supposed way to stop a vampire is finding his coffin and turning him face down to make him "bite the dust, not people".* Cannot be photographed or caught on video, often an extension of the "no reflection" rule. This may also be related to the silver rule; mirrors and photographic film are both (usually) made from silver.
- In Moonlight, Mick explains in a voiceover that he could not be photographed when silver was used in film, but digital cameras have changed all that.
- In the TV series Ultraviolet (unrelated to the film), the vampire hunters use sights that pretty much amount to video cameras strapped to their guns in order to tell vampire from non-vampire.
- In the anime Magical Pokaan, Pachira does not show up on a normal digital camera but is perfectly visible when viewed with an infrared camera.
- Cannot be heard over phone lines.
- If there are any actual Holy Relics, these things will kill a vampire even if they're just in close proximity. However, these are rarely used. Some variations have the relics only being effective when the faith of the wielder is strong. In other variations, the relic is only effective if the vampire believes that it can harm them.
- Can turn into bats, wolves, or wisps of smoke for travel. (Bats are by far the most common.) A rare transformation featuring prominently in early literature (such as Dracula) was the ability to turn into elemental dust in moonlight.
- A connection to bats isn't part of older vampire folklore because all vampire bats are native only to the New World.
- Can turn into other creatures that drink blood: vampire bats, mosquitoes, ticks. (Sometimes they become a single creature, more rarely a whole flock/swarm.)
- Unaided flight in human form.
- Wall Crawling.
- Have a hierarchy of strength or other powers based on age or generation. Older Vampires or those from a previous generation tend to be more powerful than the younger. For example, a Vampire's sire (the one who changed them) may be more powerful.
- Older Vampires may be more gothic and classic in depiction. Younger ones are more modern.
- Creating too many Vampires generally 'spreads the bloodline thin' and leads to too many weak or crazy vampires.
- Older and earlier generation vampires are often more powerful, but may be affected by sunlight etc whereas younger ones may not.
- Can pass through locked doors. Can sometimes alter their bodies to slip through impossibly small spaces.
- Cannot enter certain locations, especially homes, without invitation.
- Can mesmerize mortals into doing their bidding, most often by looking straight into their eyes.
- If killed, can be restored to unlife with the proper procedure. One early version of this, appearing in both pre-Dracula stories The Vampyre and Varney the Vampyre, is that a vampire will be revived and healed automatically if its corpse is bathed in moonlight.
- Animals react with fear or aggression towards them.
- Conversely vampires can sometimes command the loyalty of animals, particularly nocturnal ones such as wolves.
- Sometimes, vampires have two options of converting their prey a la The Virus. With some effort and rule-following, they can be changed into full, if younger, vampires. Sometimes, they have the option of just making either zombie-like or less powerful (often carnivorous) vampire slaves. Killing a vampire also kills any vampires that particular one created by the above means. Occasionally, it just restores them to non-vampiric life.
- Must sleep in the soil from their homeland/original grave.
- There are two social profiles for vampires. The first is a loner who may keep a cadre of vampire slaves and possibly a mate. Dracula fits this profile. The second is a "vampire society" where houses of vampiric lineages act and compete within a Masquerade.
- Level of "deadness" varies. On one side of the spectrum, it's just lack of heartbeat and skin that's cool to the touch. On the other, they're literally a moving, rotten animated corpse.
- Modern updates of the vampire legend may completely avoid using the word "vampire" to describe them; see the "Curse of Fenric", Ultraviolet, and Preacher examples below.
- Level of retained humanity also varies immensely, from being ravenous, soulless monsters incapable of passing for anything but the above, to being soulless monsters who are very good at pretending to be their former selves, to being basically normal folks Blessed with Suck (or Cursed with Awesome, depending on viewpoint) and either a desire to be human again or are dedicated to using their powers for good.
- Occasionally suffer from severe OCD. One folkloric method of dealing with Vampires was to drop thousands of grains of rice in their coffin, the theory being they'd be compelled to count them all when they awake, wasting the whole night instead of getting up and terrorizing people.
- The folklore version also is told with sesame seeds, and may also extend to any small, numerous nut or grain, if not any particulate (handfuls of sawdust?). Fairies also have this problem.
- Dropping a bunch where you stand is a known way to escape the OCD variant of vampire.
- A similar folklore variant involves hanging a sieve, colander, or other household item that's full of holes outside your front door. That way, the vampire will stop and count all the holes, leaving them vulnerable at sunrise. ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR! FOUR GRAINS OF SAND! AH-HA-HA-HA!
- Apparently poppy seeds were used to great effect in Greece, as they had the additional benefit of putting the vampire to "sleep".
- Also on the OCD theme, vampires will, like fairies, be obsessed with out of place and messily-tied knots, and must stop what they're doing to untie them.
- Act like Bela Lugosi's portrayal of Dracula.
- Sometimes use Vampire Vords.
- May or may not be at war with werewolves. If there are werewolves (or other supernatural beings such as The Fair Folk) around, attempting to mix the two (by 'converting' a werewolf into a vampire) may be impossible, dangerous, or simply against the rules of The Masquerade. In the case of Faeries, Demons or similar otherworldly beings, drinking their blood will generally cause the Mushroom Samba, possibly combined with strange random supernatural effects such as precognitive flashes or a delirious walk in daylight with no other ill effects. This differs in folklore, where vampires often have the ability to turn into wolfmen, and werewolves who are killed can return as vampires.
- Sometimes instantly turn to dust or dissipate completely when killed, an idea believed to have first turned up in Stoker's Dracula. This may ignore mass-energy conservation, as in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or release enough energy to cause serious damage to anything nearby, as in Ultraviolet and From Dusk till Dawn.
* Brainwashed: With a side order of Mind Control Eyes.
The purpose of vampires in the story varies quite widely. They serve as the Big Bad or as a metaphor for something (communicable diseases like plagues or STDs; alcoholism, drug addiction, denial of aging). There is some danger of the vampire character being too on-the-nose for the metaphor.
The "baseline rules" above are strongly influenced by Hollywood tradition, and not "real" vampire folklore, or even classic vampire fiction. For instance, as (properly) shown in the 1992 Dracula with Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder, and in 2003's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Dracula and other "folkloric" vampires were at the most inconvenienced by sunlight, not killed instantly.
In Stoker's novel and earlier vampire lore, sunlight did not cause vampires to go up like flash paper. Several times in the novel, Dracula appears in broad daylight with no ill effects. He is simply incapable of using at least some of his vampiric powers during the daylight (he cannot change form except at dawn, noon and dusk, but still seems to be able to charm wolves to some degree). Sunlight causing a vampire to suffer pain and damage, glitter, smolder, or go up like a one man pyrotechnic band was pretty much wholly created by Hollywood, and specifically, by F.W. Murnau in Nosferatu, the first film to use this idea and probably its inventor (which incidentally was made in 1922 in Germany, when a typical Hollywood film consisted of Buster Keaton being chased by a bunch of coppers).
Note that having a heroic vampire no longer counts as "different". Vampire Refugees are also a frequently used trope.
Differences may be reinforced by spelling it "Vampir" or "Vampyre", or using a clever synonym like "nosferatu" "sanguinarian" or "strigoi". If the differences are emphasized by overt mocking of other authors and unused vampire tropes it becomes Your Vampires Suck.Supertrope to Chinese Vampire, Classical Movie Vampire, and Looks Like Orlok. For Audience Reactions, see Your Vampires Suck.
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- ↑ From the top left: Dracula, Count Orlok, Aleera, Spike, Marlowe, Edward Cullen, Alucard, Karin, and Count von Count.