“Hey dad, where do vampires come from?” whispered the little boy.
The father have long dreaded having “the talk” with his son, but he knew it was time. He took off his glasses and put away his naughty magazine (he was reading it for the articles) and sat cross legged on the floor next to the boy.
“You see son…” he started with that slight hesitation in his voice – a mixture of embarrassment, and shame. “You see… When mommy vampire and daddy vampire really love each other they… They get really close, you see and daddy vampire puts his… You know… His wee-wee…”
“Dad, this is gross… Vampires are dead… Their bodies are essentially corpses held in stasis by some evil magic fueled by the life force they draw by drinking human blood. As romanticized as they are, Vampire sex is kinda revolting if you think about it. Besides, most movies and books agree that their reproductive organs don’t actually work. I mean, mechanically maybe they do. But vampires would not actually be able to conceive a child since they don’t produce sperm or ova. They reproduce by turning other people into vampires.” said the boy. “So when I asked you that question, I was thinking more among the lines of whether getting bitten by a vampire automatically turns you, or do you have to do something more – like drink vampire blood. What do you think?”
“You… Uhm… You seem to know a lot about this stuff already young man.” The father suddenly realized that he would not have to explain the technical details of sex to the impressionable youngster sitting in his study and he wiped his brow with a sigh of relief.
“Yes dad, I’m 28…”
“Ah… Yes… Ahem… That you are my boy… That you are.”
Fade to black, roll credits (make them funny dammit, cause this skit was shit).
So… Vampire reproduction. How does it work folks?
There seem to be two main schools of thought here. Some vampire stories say that if you get bitten, you will turn into a vampire within days, or even hours. We have seen this portrayed in Daybreakers, Blade films (and I assume also the comics) as well as in most interpretations of the Dracula related stories.
This method of reproductions is a bit problematic for vampires. Their condition is more like a viral disease that will spread and spiral out of control if not kept in check. If a vampire infects a victim with almost each bite, and he bites at least one victim per night, the vampire population will grow exponentially. Eventually the vampires will outnumber humans and many of them will starve to death. This is exactly what happened in Daybreakers which is one of the reasons why I like this movie. It shows you a logical outcome of a Vampire like infection getting out of hand.
If you wanted to control the vampire population you could try just killing your victims after feeding on them. This could work for a small group of vampires living in a large city where people go missing every day. Still, having to kill a human each night is risky. If Hollywood movies have taught me anything it is that for each serial killer (and for all intents and purposes a vampire who kills all his victims would probably be treated like a serial killer by the law enforcement) attract alcoholic, chain smoking, burned out cops and their enthusiastic but inexperienced portages. They become their life long obsession, and they will pursue it even if they have to ostentatiously give back their gun and their badge to the police commissioner.
The third option is of course not to bite humans, but drain their blood in a more unconventional way – you know, syringe, blood bag or if you want to be crude and rude a knife and a straw maybe. Unfortunately most vampires do not do that because sipping blood from a rubber hose attached to someones wrist is not nearly as bad-ass and romantic ans biting someone in the neck.
Many writers have realized that treating vampirism as a infectious disease is problematic. Since the image of vampires worrying about disposing bodies of their victims, or drinking blood through a straw did not fit into their vision, they have devised a workaround. They see vampirism as a gift – something that cant be caught like a nasty case of flu, but must be given and accepted. They have devised this ritual of turning which usually involves draining the victim and then making it drink vampire blood. I’m not sure who started this trend, but it might have been Anne Rice and is used in movies based on her novels. This is also how it works in the popular HBO series True Blood.
This method is very practical, since vampires can now bite people left and right with impunity. Rich and powerful vampires have harems of willing donors who give up their blood willingly hoping to one day receive the gift of immortality from their master. And since the act of turning usually requires a conscious act of acceptance from the turned victim, vampires who are bitter about their condition can’t lay all the blame on the one who turned them. They must also hate and blame themselves a little bit for accepting the gift. This approach romanticizes the vampiric condition making it something that is to be sought after. Mortals are promised eternal life an eternal youth, but soon discover their new un-life is bleak and dehumanizing. They are plagued by hunger for human blood, they find themselves in the middle of cutthroat political games played by the elder vampires. They must lie to, hide away from and hurt people just to stay alive. Many vampires learn the lesson that you should be careful what you ask for, the hard way. Their punishment is nothing less than eternity in hell on earth.
Needless to say stories about infectious vampires tend to be more action oriented. Vampires spread fast, but don’t live long because their outbreaks attract attention and they are quickly put down by humans. On the other hand vampire stories of the second kind tend to be more cerebral. They often contemplate what it means to be a vampire and they give you a glimpse on how vampirism could affect human psychology. This is of course not a rule – just an observation.
Which type of vampire reproduction do you prefer? Are there any other ones? Let me know if I missed some interesting movies that shown alternate methods of making new vampires.
the original bram stoker novel teaches us that a victim has to die in order to become a vampire. if you just sip a little bit then and now he would survive and “only” become submissive.
A german pulp series around the year 2000 called “Vampira” had a more sophisticated concept of vampires and reproduction. I liked it very much, but it ceased after around 130 parts when they started to involve Cthulhu, and the readers didn’t like that very much (me neither, it simply didn’t fit into the history).
The idea was a very nice one:
the first vampires were only 20, and they were the children of Adam and Lilith (who came before Eva). Lilith was a powerful witch and sent their children to the future to hide them. But of course God saw everything and so she was damned to eternal imprisonment because she gave life to vampires, and Adam and Eva started afresh ;).
The future the vampires were sent to was Uruk in ancient Mesopotamia, and they declared themselves “gods”. This was the real reason why God then sent the flood …
Similar to Noah’s ark there was a “vampire ark” to save the vampire “gods” from the flood.
During the flood they somehow lost most of their memory. They decided to sleep centuries, where only one of them would stay awake to guard and try to find out about the lost memory, changing places after each century. In this time the guard created “normal” vampires by having small babies drink his vampire blood from a magic goblet (this only works with the guard’s blood). Normal vampires can only create stupid and powerless vampire slaves which have a limited lifetime and decay after some months.
The main protagonist is the daughter of a human and a vampire, and ancient Lilith from her prison had planned to have her extinguish all existing vampires, then travel back in time to free her and ask for forgiveness.
This was a remarkable pulp series, imho the only one where God is really a part of the story and is doing things.
Sorry, only a german Wikipedia link available:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampira_%28Romanserie%29
The idea of vampires being able to “take a bit” from their victims and thus causing an addiction is also found in the RPG Shadowrun and to an extent in the World of Darkness – Vampire.
In the WoD vampires can take blood from their victims until they die. If they stop before that point the victim will recover (but may need medical attention depending on how much blood was taken).
In both systems a vampire has to drain a victim of blood (or Essence in SR) and then give some of “his” blood/essence back in order to create a new vampire.
I quite like this system since it gives the vampire control about whom they turn into a new undead curse to mankind and doesn’t create a plague that decimates the humans in years (which would make RPGs dealing with “being a vampire” rather shortlived without the chance to span centuries)
In movies on the other hand the infectious variant is a good sign for more action…
I can’t recall where I’ve seen this, but there exists a Vampire mythos where fresh converts cannot transform their victims into Vampires, but ancient (read centuries old) ones can. Its as if even Vampires have to undergo a puberty period (which could take hundreds of years) before they can reproduce. Given the selection pressures from internal conflicts, human Vampire-Hunters and the Sun, this also seems to ensure that only the best “Vampire-traits/genes/essense” survives the coming eras.
@ Dileep:
This is a nice take on it. If you have to survive several hundreds (or even just a hundred) years in order to be able to create another vampire survival of the least obvious raises its head.
Do you remember if old vampires automatically create offspring once the ability manifests?
@ MrPete:
Well from what I recall, Vampires were depicted as a self-aware endangered species. In the plot, at some point in the past, when Vampirism became widely known to the humans, a massive religion inspired holocaust nearly drove them to extinction.
The ancient ones are smart enough to know that they have to live in the shadows and be careful about their numbers. And creating a lot of young and reckless vampires will only betray their existence to the world, as young inexperienced ones who have just tasted immortality and super-human ability are impossible to control or educate en masse. So they had to prune all new converts and over time leave only a few of them (who show mental maturity and restraint) alive to join the ranks.
There is one interesting element they didn’t exploit, which is the possible role vampires played in the Renaissance and the popularisation of science in helping debunk public belief in Vampires.