Most common vampire jobs:
Independently wealthy aristocrat (Dracula, Nosforatu, Interview with the Vampire)
Crime syndicate (Blade)
Law enforcement (Forever Knight, Angel, The Breed)
The arts (Interview…, Queen of the Damned, Blade (rave DJ) )
I have noticed that vampires never seem to rob their victims after they bite them.
Those vampires in Blade are pussies. They’re fast, but that’s about it. Can’t go in the sun. Silver makes them EXPLODE. Not very scary. They do dress pretty cool though.
And are vampires really “evil”? I mean everything has to eat. Some of them are jerks and all but that doesn’t make them “evil”.
Re: Dracula’s frugality
It’s been years since I read the novel, so bear with me. The treasure he does have isn’t invested in anything nor is it earning interest. Thus, the necessity of glomming onto more when the possibility presents itself. Castle Dracula is in sad disrepair and the Count can’t or won’t make repairs. During the “Drac in England” portion of the novel, I remember the Count snatches a handful of gold coins before retreating from his pursuers. In any case, the Count really doesn’t lead an oppulent life style. He does pre-date the chic vampire craze, though.
As for becoming a vampire, folklore has all sorts f ways to get there: sucide, excommunication, being killed by a vampire (often a relative), just being really evil, etc. The various methods used in fiction seem to be mainly the canon set down by a couple influential novels and movies.
Jonathan Harker mentions that all of the appointments of the castle are very expensive, although very old. And Dracula has enough cash on hand to be able to buy Carfax, which is apparently a fairly extensive estate, hire a firm of solicitors in England, and engage all the shipping and handling companies he needs to in order to ship fifty boxes of dirt to England and rent at least one other place to stash them.
I thought Dracula didn’t repair his castle because he didn’t want to, as he liked things old and dreary. If being a Count was similar to the old feudal system, he would have had income from the rental of peasants on his land, and he may have set up some system where they paid their money rents into his accounts in some bank in Transylvania.
Of course his living expenses were low, as he didn’t eat (other than the obvious) and he slept on dirt, which is cheap, and I am betting he didn’t spend a lot heating the castle. He seems to have spent a good deal of time immediately before the arrival of Harker in learning English, studying up on England (Harker mentions his extensive understanding of English law and business, and all the books in Castle Dracula on English subjects). So he had to have some way of ordering books in English, as well as the tickets and arrangements for Harker’s trip to see him. All this argues that he had some human agent with the ability to interact with the normal business world.
I never figured out what Dracula needed with Harker once he had possession of the documents for Carfax. He keeps him around for several weeks, but Harker doesn’t seem to have had much to do besides get more and more scared.
It would have been smarter for Dracula to get Harker to the castle, get the papers signed, finish any other business you may have, and then let Harker go home in peace. Why attract suspicion before you have to?
Or else kill him and hide the body, or let the sisters suck him dry and make what use you can of your first English vampire.
Apparently. Harker notices some letters the Count had written, and notes the names and addresses:
As to why Dracula doesn’t just let Harker go, he might figure he knows too much to leave. He knows the Count is going to London, he knows he’s going to be engaged in something that requires shipping boxes all around, etc.
As to why he doesn’t kill him right away, first he needs Harker to write the letters saying he’s left, so his death looks like an accident. Also, it’s possible the count is just lonely. He doesn’t have anybody to talk to other than the vampire babes, and he doesn’t seem to get along all that well with them. And that’s the whole reason the Count is going to England in the first place…he’s grown tired of his life in Transylvania. So, the plan is to keep him around to talk to till it’s time to go, then kill him.
I’ve heard the “three bites and you’re out” rule before too. The victim may get weird and display vampiric traits after a bite or two, but can still be saved as long as the main vampire is defeated before he can administer bite #3. Stoker is not explicit on this point, but I think there is good reason to believe that being bitten more than once (if not specifically three times) is an essential part of becoming a vampire in his world. None of the children attacked by Lucy become vampires, and Lucy herself was only transformed after multiple visits from the Count.
It is also possible that injesting the blood of a vampire is a step in the process. This is the case in many more recent vampire novels. I’ve seen Anne Rice credited with inventing the idea, but Dracula is shown forcing Mina to drink his blood and I don’t think he was just doing it for kicks. This may, however, have only been a way of strengthening the psychic bond with Mina.
Van Helsing suggests as much about the Count himself. He says the Dracula family produced many noble individuals but also many evil ones, and that some were even said to have dealings with Satan.
Oh, in looking over Van Helsing’s speech just now I found exactly what he has to say on the subject of vampires and sunlight. “His power ceases, as does that of all evil things, at the coming of the day.” But in the very next breath he explains that a vampire who is not on his home turf can only transform himself at the exact moments of sunrise, sunset, and noon. So at least according to Van Helsing’s take on vampire lore, vampires can walk by day and even have a (very) brief window in which they can use their supernatural powers.
All of the lesser vampires in Dracula seem to stick to their coffins by day, so we can’t be sure that they really could get up before sunset. But since Dracula does make one daylight appearance late in the novel, the nocturnal lifestyle must be a choice for him and not a necessity. He probably very much dislikes having to get up when his powers are weak and sleep when they are strong, but he can do it if he needs to…like if he’s got to arrange to get out of the country in a hurry.
It is clear that sunlight is not actually dangerous even to the lesser vampires in Dracula. Van Helsing goes to kill the vampire women at Castle Dracula during the day, and simply opening their coffins is not enough to do the trick. He has to stake them.
In Carmilla, J. Sheridan le Fanu’s seminal vampire novella that served as part of Stoker’s inspiration for Dracula, the title character never gets up before about 1 pm. She is able to go about normally in the sunlight, but is apparently incapable of getting up in the morning. This seems to be a part of her limitations as a vampire, although I’ve known plenty of ordinary mortals who had much the same problem.
I’m occasionally goth, for example, right now as I’m writing this; I fantasize about being a Harry Potter-style bat Animagus; and I spend most of my time indoors reading anyway, and enjoy cloudy days.
I’m starting to suspect that bat that landed on my head that one year at summer camp…
But seriously, do you know how cool it would be to be a bat? I mean, not only can you fly, but you also have claws, and you can see with your ears, and hang upside down all day!
I don’t know about the whole having-to-feed-on-blood thing. That’s kind of gross.
If I were a vampire, I would buy all my clothes at thrift shops. I’d probably also be an author. And sneak around reading my victims depressing poetry and then ask if they like it, and if I don’t like what they say, I kill them.
Did I just say that in the present tense? Oops. My secret has been revealed.
Dr. Kovacs taughts us Statics in undergraduate school.
He was an engineer from Hungary and sounded like Bela Lugosi.
“The NORMAL dis-tri-BUTION of the force on the BEAM…”
There was a surveyor course in that classroom, and I always sat by a box of stakes. Ih he had come near me, he would have gotten a pine 2’ x 2’ in the chest, engineering tape and all. He might have just been interested in a diagram in my notebook, but that would’ve been To Damn Bad.
Coutts is a bank, isn’t it? So Dracula must have been able to get a deposit transferred somehow, or else mailed a bunch of gold coins.
I suppose so, but then Dracula should have let him go before things started looking suspicious. The longer Harker hangs around, the more things happen to make him wonder.
You are correct about the letters, and Dracula makes Harker post-date some letters to Mina to establish that he is still alive. Although after Harker writes the letters, Dracula could kill him then and save a lot of trouble.
And Dracula does mention at one point that he wants to practice his English with Harker. It must have worked, since I don’t remember anyone throughout the rest of the novel in England who spots Dracula as a foreigner.
Although, did you notice that when Dracula warns the vampire babes off Harker in the first part of the novel, he speaks to them in English? Harker, who speaks no Transylvanian, is able to understand what Dracula says to them, and what they say to each other before the blonde starts getting ready to put the chomp on his neck. They also speak in English to Mina and van Helsing late in the novel. Maybe Dracula could have practiced with them.
I sort of doubt if Dracula was lonely in any real sense. He lives alone in Carfax, and says specifically that he likes to be alone during one of his earlier speeches to Harker. I thought the point of his move to England was to seek out fresh prey, and that Transylvania was pretty much played out. Possibly they were used to warding off his attacks with garlic and mountain roses and so forth, and Dracula felt the hunting would be easier in England.
As regards the three-bites-and-you’re-out rule, I am trying to remember how many times Lucy gets bit. van Helsing said that it made a difference when she was dying whether she died in the trance (with the “stertorous breathing”) or if she died when she was more normal. van Helsing also realized Lucy was dying when the mark of the vampire bite disappeared from her neck.
Which is why I thought the rule was that you weren’t a vampire unless you died from his bite. Mina was a vampire because he bit her, and also because he forced her to drink his blood. I suppose that hastened the vampirization process along, as well as establishing mental control over her.
Incidentally, I always assumed that “bloofer” meant “beautiful” when the children who Lucy bit talked about her as the “bloofer lady”. Is that correct? None of the children Lucy bit would be vampires, as none of them died, but van Helsing said that this could not be assured until after Lucy had been staked. Mina’s scar from being touched with the Host also disappeared after Dracula was killed, which argues that killing the vampire who made you a vampire would free you from any danger of becoming one yourself.
Or else the plot just had holes in it. Doesn’t matter, it is a cool novel anyway, although a bit padded.
Well, I’m assuming “Herren Klopstock & Billreuth, bankers, Buda-Pesth” are his bankers. So the four letters are, the first to his bankers, to authorize them to disperse the money, the second to Coutts, to get them to receive the money for Carafax, the third to Varna, for the Demeter, and the fourth to Billington to take control of the boxes of dirt.
Right, but he needs Harker alive and there at that point, to answer his questions. He asks him about the propriety of hiring more than one solicitor, for example. Maybe he just wants him as a resource about England. You’re right, though, it’s sort of a loose plot point.
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Well, or he speaks to them in German. The first chapter establishes that Harker speaks “a smattering of German”
It looks like she’s bitten 11 times. The first August 11 (Lucy sleepwalks), then August 14 (Lucy sleeps by the window), August 16 (Mina notices the marks on her neck are bigger), August 24 (“I am full of grave fear”), August 25 (“My face is ghastly pale”), August 31 (“Lucy is ill…getting worse every day”), Sept 6 (“terrible change for the worse”), Sept 7 (Arthur’s transfusion), Sept 10 (Seward’s transfusion), Sept 13 (Mrs. Westrina removes the garlic) and Sept 17 (Wolf attack, Mrs. Westrina dies).
Not if they’re all Buffy vamps. When they want to convert you, they suck your blood, then you have to suck their blood. It’s this whole big circle of sucking. Mostly, they’re just gonna kill you.
Cut me some slack, people! I had three hot babes in the castle… letters to write, forms to fill out, treasure to collect, dirt boxes to fill… moving to a new country is a MAJOR hassle…
Where did vampires come from in the Blade movies? I got the following:
Mortal + Vampire bite = New “turned” vampire
Pregnent mortal + Vampire bite = Vampire mom + Daywalker child
Vampire + genetic tampering = new strain of freak-a-zoa vampires
Now there are also quite a few references to “pureblood” vampires, presumably vampires that were just born that way. So where did they come from? Do they just mate like everything else and make little vampire kids?
