2w ago

What is the most ridiculous vampire rule you've heard?

One thing I've always loved about vampire stories is that there are no hard rules. Vampires can be whatever the author wants them to be as long as they're internally consistent within the story. This makes them extremely versatile monsters that can be constantly re-invented and none of them are "wrong".

For example, sometimes all it takes to turn into a vampire is to be bitten by one. And sometimes you have to drink the vampire's blood to turn. Or, sometimes a vampire can just drain your energy without transferring any blood at all.

Of course, the rules can also get a bit ridiculous. Maybe the vampire is required to obsessively count grains of rice first. Or maybe they're required to hop around with their arms out (the chinese Jiangshi). Maybe they can turn into a wolf, a bat, or... fog.

So what's the most ridiculous rule or type of vampire you've come across?

(For the image on this post I wanted the most ridiculous picture of a Jiangshi I could find. I went with a shot from Robo Vampire which has a really fun RiffTrax. The only other Jiangshi I'm aware of is in the NES game Phantom Fighter... because I've never watched any of the Mr. Vampire movies)

63 comments

Vampires don't necessarily live in castles. Count Dracula only did because he was a count.
Also, vampires can see themselves in most mirrors as long as no silver is used as the reflecting surface.
- Also, vampires can see themselves in most mirrors as long as no silver is used as the reflecting surface.
  I think this makes sense more than just not having a reflection, if the rest reflects the "Judas was the first vampire" bit, which is at least where some of the silver avoidance is set to come, because of the silver pieces.
  
  Judas was the first vampire
  Vampire: The Masquerade lore has Caine (as in the biblical Caine and Abel) as the first vampire, and my search for the idea that in some versions Judas is the first vampire mostly turned up results of people saying they were only familiar with it being Caine and expressing confusion about where the idea of Judas came from.
Can't see themselves in a mirror but Dracula always had a perfect parting (from Karl Pilkington of course).
If they kill someone once a day to feed and turn them into a vampire in about a month everyone on Earth today would be a vampire, so the maths said they can't be real.
- Solvable if conversion success rate is tiny
- Wait a minute, jou just made me think about something. Vampires cabt see themselves in mirrors, but what about make up? Do they just see floating foundation? Whats the average makeup routine for vampires?
  
  It occurs to me that they must all do each other's hair (and makeup) which is quite nice of them.
  
  The real question is when did vampire become hot? Nosferatu didn't need a mirror. The original count dracula was a slender man with an unusual height, strength and a pale colour when did not find enough victimes. Then vampires became hot. And cute. Castlevania dracula is closer to bram stoker than almost any other iteration.
  
  There is lots of story where vampires have mitigate or eliminate their affliction for day light, either with evolution, magic, science or something else. We may say they don't have a reflection as a general rule but there are some tricks.
  
  what about make up
  Well, if clothing is also invisible, I think makeup seems pretty likely to be the same.
- True, no matter how often they're required to feed, you really can't have vampires living for centuries eating that consistently. And with each new vampire also eating that often, you're burning through humans exponentially.
  
  Best exploration of that was the film Daybreakers, where the bulk of humanity had been converted and the remaining humans were a dwindling natural resource. Great flick!
  
  But do the food source have to die? Lucy in Dracula died of exotion after a exsanguination that lasted of weeks. A lot of lady in distress throughout the story are saved by the MC or their lovers after the vampire took a bit. Also vampire may grow old faster but they are not immortal. They have lots of fatal weakes such as the sun, day light, christanity symboles, hunger, disease, angry humans, suicidal thoughts and so on.
- I never liked the media that had them spread like zombies. Just being bit isn't enough to turn you. You have to not die from it, to start. So not every victim becomes a vampire. I prefer when it's a deliberate choice - like they have to be fed some of the vampires blood or something.
The whole "they need to be invited in before they can enter your home" always struck me as a weird one. What would happen if a vampire just ignored that and entered anyways? What if someone considered a forest their home? What if squatters moved in to the vampire's home? Or some official declared it belonged to someone else? What if they are invited by someone who doesn't live there?
- In the Scandinavian vampire movie Let The Right One In, a vampire that enters uninvited starts leaking blood from every pore.
- In the Artemis Fowl books magical beings like elves, fairies, dwarves and pixies lose their magic if they enter a home without invitation. And in one book it's more or less said that a home is a building enclosed by walls and a roof.
- In "being human" US there is a hilarous scene (intended as very brutal) in which a vampire lure a bunch of ennemi in a mortal house as neutral ground, all the exit are blocked and they are uninvited, burning them to death.
- See this is why vampire stories don't have lawyers in them.
  
  vampire lawyers tho... there's an idea.
  "At Tepes, Lestat & Orlok LLP we can provide the kind of legal services that will last even the longest lifetime.
  
  vampire stories don’t have lawyers in them
  Umm...
  Might I invite you to join this Community's readthrough of Dracula? For someone interested in talking about vampires, it's very helpful to be familiar with the most famous work of the genre.
- Use them for proof of home ownership for disputes.
  if the squaters claim it's their house, they can invite a vampire, if he comes in, it's they're house. the landlord can try to invite the vampire too, and if he can't come in, the landlord loses their claim.
- A lot of vampire behavior may have arisen from neurodivergent behavior as witnessed by ignorant peasants.
That's funny! Those were used as enemies in Super Mario Land. I never knew what they were based on. They have little hats and hop at you. They also come back to life after being stomped on. It all makes sense now!
https://youtu.be/3e4Qgl2e_T0?t=1402
- Wow, that is impressive! I can't believe you actually remembered a random enemy from Super Mario Land! I watched that video clip and you're totally right, those have to be Jiangshi. Crazy!
  
  Oh, I played that game for hundreds of hours as a kid, and I still do a playthrough every couple of years.
The one that never made sense to me was the whole "Unable to cross running water."
So you could trap Dracula with a garden hose?
- Also doesn't several Dracula stories have him taking a boat? Hell, a lot of vampire stories in general involve taking a boat
  
  Last Voyage of the Demeter, yeah...
  
  Pretty sure they could only cross water if they carried their home soil with them.
- Oh that's a good one! How fast does the water need to move to be considered "running"? How wide does it need to be for it to be considered "crossing"? This is like the Gremlins thing about not feeding "after midnight".
  
  The answer is probably "whatever running water I am trying to scare my children from crossing, that's the level of water needed to keep the vampires on the other side."
- And what about underground rivers? If the water is far enough underground, does it not count?
  Mercedes Lackey did a take on this where her vampire character explains that vampires tend to be rather aggressively territorial, and delineate their territories via landmarks. He says that one might as well say vampires won’t cross lakes, or mountains, or major highways.
- i believed is blessed water, by a priest so the river is sanctified and will instantly purify a vampire, demon or undead. dracula seems to possess abilities far beyond any vampire, like flying casting powerful magic, turn to mist amongst other things. also purified salt works against them too.
The counting objects thing was funny when they used it in that X-Files episode. Basically trying to make a lot of the goofy lore seem plausible through science, so the vampires all had OCD and they slow one down by just dropping a box of pens or something that the vampire had to stop and pickup while counting. lol
The other one I've only seen used twice (Buffy the Vampire Slayer the movie and in Soul Reaver) is that vampires can't cross running water. In Buffy, she stops a bunch of vampires chasing her by turning on a hose which prevented them from crossing the stream of running water along the ground.
- Aren't the two or them part of the old myth of the generic bad spirit? Like, the shoe stuff that I don't remember clearly. I'm pretty sure there is something about the running water in Dracula. That's why somebody had to make it cross. He can't simply take the ferry.
  
  Dang, idk... I haven't read Dracula since, like, the 4th grade and I kinda hated the format of the book just being basically letters the characters wrote. I barely remember anything specifically from it.
  I remember the buffy thing cuz it was funny and soul reaver because it's kind of a big mechanic (you can only enter water when in soul form otherwise it's basically a bottomless pit that kills you).
- isnt that faeries, they are obssesed with counting.
- I don't remember that episode, but I would think the vampires could have just stepped over the hose. Unless water flowing inside a hose also qualifies. So follow the hose to the tap and shut it off. But presumably the principle only applies to running water that's out in the open, otherwise vampires would be unable to move around in cities or towns because they're honeycombed with water pipes, or through a lot of natural areas because of underground streams. Maybe there's a range limit.
The one where they can play baseball in the daytime as long as it's cloudy.
- The best part was a bunch of the movie scenes were clearly shot in broad daylight, they just slapped a gloomy filter over it.
I mean, if we're going to avoid the sparkling fucking vampires, then it's gotta be mirrors. Makes no sense within the mythologies surrounding vampires imo.
Running water is about the purifying nature of it supposedly, as other "evil" entities are also unable to.
Wooden stakes being needed to pin them down or be a death blow, there's links between wood and life that make sense within that framework. It wasn't originally just any wood, it was (iirc) dogwood and ironwood. Something like that.
Garlic, also a purifier.
You gotta realize, most of the early written vampire stories did come from existing legends, and those legends did usually have an internal consistency to some degree or another. But not mirrors. Stoker pulled that out of his ass due to not understanding his sources, so it doesn't really match with much.
The idea is that vampires lack souls, and thus fear mirrors, depending on what set of myths you're working in. But there's also supposedly a tie back to real people with rabies being easily startled, with mirrors apparently being something that would do so even easier, but I'm not sure it holds up to scrutiny since the tie to rabies is weak as fuck to begin with, and there's no record of that being a specific thing. It seems more like a hypothesis being projected rather than something with provenance.
But we got being invisible in mirrors.
Now, some people have decided that the mirror thing is because of the silver in mirrors, and add silver being potent against vampires in some cases, but neither is based in any of the known vampire mythology as it existed pre-stoker. And there's arguments there that kinda make sense if you buy into some of the supposed mystical and magical properties of silver. It's tie to the moon in some beliefs would maybe give it sovereignty over most creatures of the night, and is supposedly why it's werewolf killing.
I can't even remember exactly when silver started being common against vampires in books. I know that the Blade trilogy made it seep into pop culture, but it did exist before that.
Most of the stuff around the older books does make a kind of sense, but not that one
- Mirrors used to and sometimes still are made with silver nitrite, silver is a purifying metal
Don't forget crucefix ( silver or wood )bad for there healt or not. Sil
In buffy / vamp diaries they could not enter a home uninvitef. Other movies it is no problem.
Garlic is dangerous for them or not.
Sun is bad. Sun makes you sparkle / sun is just sun
Or in vamp d there was a herb that could weaken them. And make you abel to resist there hypno ( also not in every movie ) powers.
Cool rather than ridiculous. Trinity blood (anime). Basically, it introduces a new type of creature that feeds on a vampires' blood (and doesn't hurt humans), a vampire level 2 of sorts. Light novel and manga (which I haven't read) go into further details, and it involves alien bacteria and an apocalypse.
- Like in Blade 2?
  
  I think those were berserkers who spreaded their infection on other vampires and also drank human blood. In Trinity Blood, they are very few, don't need human blood and also kind of main characters.
one of the wierd ones is the vampire feeds on said humans, but have to feed its blood to turn them. and in SPN they have a magical cure for vampirism, if the infected hasnt fed yet. castlevania also does it this way. Also in the same show, apparently you can absorb magic powers through biting the victims, in this a "god's power spirit energy. also the wierd part of vampire evolution is in various genre, they can be made immune to sunlight, mostly through magical rituals or given magical power by a more powerful vampire. akasha giving sunlight immunity, or the short lived blade series on spike, or
- the vampire feeds on said humans, but have to feed its blood to turn them
  Unless I'm misunderstanding you, that's not especially weird. In fact it's very, very standard, and has been since Dracula did it that way in 1897.
Not ridiculous but unexpected is the story of the TV show "Caro Nostra".
This story is about ogres, not vampires but at the same time it is definitly a vampire story. The vampire who want to be close to the human world, the girl that is somehow special, the forbiden love story that cause a broken balance in the equilibrum of the vampire world, the police looking at a weird murder spray that seems to go back to 50 years ago, the old acquintaince that actually grow old... This is definitly a vampire story.
But at the same time, since it is not vampires, the mythology behind the monster feels totally new and that's very catching.
- Hehehe, "murder spray".
  
  I have no idea how this is wrong, sorry (T_T) How do you write this?

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