The aforementioned Anno Dracula books by Kim Newman have an interesting take on that…the contemporary characters (real and fictional) have to make a moral decision about whether to become vampires or not.
I usually hate this sort of pastiche, but the first two of these were kinda fun and Newman is a fanboy who did quite a lot of research.
I believe there have been a number of them. Shit, I think Steven Seagal even starred in such a movie. I think there’s a trilogy of books that starts with an infection on a plane which turns out to be vampirism and the world goes under. It’s a TV show/miniseries or something now. I also recall some other story where people were kept as cattle, but the trouble was there wasn’t enough people left to feed everyone, and the vampire society was falling apart. There was some scene at a ‘blood’ store where a guy flipped out because he wasn’t getting enough blood and started trashing the place, and when his blood handout spilled on the floor other vampires scrambled to get it.
Richard Matheson, I Am Legend.
The Strain (FX TV series) and Daybreakers (movie), respectively.
There’s also The Passage, a novel that was adapted into an NBC series, and Van Helsing, a SyFy original series. The first (and only) season of The Passage was about the origin of the vampire plague, but in the last couple of episodes the world is falling apart, and an epilogue in the final episode shows a post-apocalyptic wasteland overrun by vampires. Van Helsing starts after the vampire apocalypse, with only a handful of human survivors, including the titular hero, a descendant of Abraham Van Helsing.
That’s all off of the top of my head. I’m sure there are many others.
I wonder how long it would take for a vampire to starve to death.
In the Dracula novel, when Jonathan Harker finds Dracula in his crypt in the castle, feeding seems to have partially rejuvenated Dracula. Maybe a starving vampire just gets older and older until he dies, or gets too weak to leave the coffin.
How long a vampire can go without feeding changes the figures slightly, but doesn’t fix the Malthusian dilemma of geometric progression. A vampire can keep biting the same person over and over, as Dracula did with Lucy, and give the victim time between to recover, but eventually they will die and the vampire needs another victim. And has a competitor. And so on, and so on.
Van Helsing says at one point that a vampire cannot enter a house without being invited in by the victim. Apparently Dracula bit Lucy while she was in the graveyard, and subsequently had enough mental influence over her that Lucy would invite him into her house. Lucy only bit children who were out of doors, apparently.
Dracula kidnaps a child early in the novel to feed to the three vampire sisters. He must have caught the child out of doors. But then the child’s mother shows up in that heart-wrenching scene where she screams “Monster, give me back my child!” and Dracula calls in the wolves to eat her, instead of sucking her blood. Seems like a waste of resources.
Regards,
Shodan
Wrapped the book up at lunch. It’s quite the page turner when the hunt for the boxes of dirt begins. The book starts slow and is a bit wordy, but not bad at all.
In the Anne Rice universe vampires don’t die of starvation. They can be killed by various means but feeding is simply for keeping up vitality. Akasha went for centuries without feeding and just kept getting stronger and paler.