Are you sure it was “wheatie bits” and not this?
It was definitely Weetabix. I remember going and looking it up after that episode aired, because I had no idea what Weetabix was.
Yep. Weetabix. He also likes adding something to his blood to make it spicy, but I can’t remember offhand.
The BBC-America series Being Human has a vampire that can walk in sunlight, eat food & have sex. I don’t know about reproduction, I’ve only seen 4 episodes.
Heh, “wildly inconsistent” is more like it. I’m going on memory here, so I may be off on some of the details, but from what I remember early on some of the conversations between Buffy and Giles established that vampires really had no connection to their previous lives. There was a bit of dialogue about a person’s soul leaving the body and a demon setting up shop. It looked like you and talked like you, but that’s where the similarities ended. In fact, at first, this seemed to be the sole reason Angel was different from other vamps with the whole re-ensouled thing. I think Whedon got away from that rather quickly though. As mentioned, Harmony’s personality changed almost not at all after she was turned and Spike retained a lot of his human quirks. And I remember after Willow met her vamp double from the alternate universe she was remorseful about the possibility she could ever be that evil, and Buffy repeated the bit above about vamps being completely different from their human hosts. Angel interjected something about not that not being “completely accurate” but Buffy shut him down with a look before he could continue. Angel himself is an interesting case as well as “Angelus” seemed to be a magnificent bastard pretty much from the moment he was turned, but it was established in some of the flashback episodes that Liam was actually something of a loser and a layabout. Angel and Angelus seem to have more in common than either did with Liam.
I do remember the episode where Angel became human for a day, and he did gorge himself on chocolate, cakes and ice cream. I think he said something like, “vampires can ingest food and drinks but they don’t really taste them like humans do.” (And I assume they get no sustenance from it.) Which, of course, leads to the question of how they can prefer one food over another, but it may just a vestige of their human personality.
I always justified the “soulless vampire” inconsisency as being something that Giles & the Watchers had a dogmatic position on, but they were just plain wrong. You could say that their consciences or humanity or goodness was dulled, but they definitely retained their personalities. Hell, IIRC human Liam was something of a cad, and Angelus was a more-evil version of him.
And as for Willow/Vamp Willow- “I was skanky and evil and I think I was kinda gay”
followed by the Buffy & Angel remarks. Big-time foreshadowing! We just didn’t know it then!
(That’s why it’s FOREshadowing!)
To the OP- I’ve only skimmed 2-3 Anne Rice Vampire Novels, but IIRC they definitely have sex!
In Stoker’s book, Dracula could walk around in the daytime (although if he fell asleep in the day, he was pretty much catatonic, albeit not completely helpless). As others have noted, it was the movie Nosferatu that introduced the idea of a vampire evaporating in daylight. Nevertheless, the movie didn’t have an effect for a while, and in subsequent mmovies (like Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr) the vampire isn’t adversely affected by daylight (The titular vampire is staked in Vampyr – albeit with a metal stake – in daylight, and it’s not the daylight that does her in). The thing is, vampires are always “creatures of the night”, and the implication has always been that they didn’t generally go out in the day, for whatever reason. In Varney the Vampire from the 1830s, daylight didn’t seem to have a bad effect on him, but it required moonlight to revive him.
The movie that REALLY established the dissolve-in-sunlight meme was Son of Dracula, followed by House of Dracula, both Universal films from the 1940s. I’ve never been able to find out if they were influenced by Nosferatu.
as for not being seen in mirrors, that’s not a “classic” vampire trope. Stoker seems to have invented it. Not everyone buys it, and even Hollywood hasn’t been consistent with it. Bela Lugosi, Universal’s original Dracula, who couldn’t be seen in a mirror in the 1931 film, is ostentatiously reflect by a mirror in the 1948 Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
People have been obeying or flouting the “scared of crucifixes” thing ever since Dracula – just look at the stories and movies that have come out. In the 1979 Dracula Frank Langella grabs a crucifix and it bursts into flame. And he walks around at all hours, claiming “it’s always night somewhere”
Please read Charlie Huston’s “Joe Pitt” trilogy for a very modern take on the vampire mythology.
He’s the guy to read when you wouldn’t be caught dead holding a “Twilight” book in your hands.
IIRC Stoker’s widow had it pulled from exhibition for copyright violation. (I don’t know if she ever got any money from them.)
Can’t believe I didn’t know BUFFYverse vamps could eat and drink. I need to rewatch the show (I never did see the final few seasons or watch Angel).
One of my favorite movies to involve the vampire:cross relationship was FRIGHT NIGHT when Chris Sarandon’s character continues walking towards William Ragsdale who’s holding up a crucifix and tells him “You have to have faith for it to work”.
One of my earliest ‘geek moments’ in watching a movie was the light comedy Love at First Bite in which Van Helsing’s grandson (Richard Benjamin) attempts to harm Dracula (George Hamilton) by holding up his religious necklace; Dracula hisses and turns his face then looks again and says “wrong one”, whereupon Van Helsing, who’s Jewish in this one, realizes he’s holding up his Star of David necklace and says “Damn it!”. The geek moment was I’d just read a young adult’s book about vampires and monsters and was thinking “No, actually the Star of David would work just as well- it’s any symbol that’s holy to the person holding it.”
And in the book I Am Legend, the cross only works on vampires who were Christian…Jewish vampires get scared of the Star of David, and god help you if you meet an atheist one.
Fevre Dream by Geo RR Martin has non-human vampires:
They can take a little sunlight, but even a few minutes gives them a horrible sunburn. Heavy clothes and a hat help, of course.
They can eat, but they get “the hunger” if they don’t drink human blood. The hero vampire of the book has developed a blood potion that can quell the hunger.
Mirrors, holy symbols and the like have no effect.
Massive damage is what kills one- so yes decapitation or a stake through the heart. Or even a buffalo gun through the brain.
They could have sex with each other and thus beget vampire children (this was extremely rare). They could not make a human into a real vampire.
The Vampires in my homelands folklore just plain could not go out in the daylight. Daylight did not seem to destroy them, it was more of a geas. Or maybe they were near powerless and baby weak. And of course, their true nature was obvious in the light of day. They looked and smelled like a corpse.
Those vampires were repelled by Strong True Belief, and somewhat by garlic. Staking and beheading killed them.
They could not make more vampires. Vampirism was a curse. They hungered for the blood of their enemies and family. They did not need to eat, but some ate corpses.
Fred Saberhagen did a take on the classic Dracula stories. Here it was wood, not stakes per se. So a stout wood cudgel could knock a vamp out and wooden bullets kill one.
Daylight rendered them powerless (as a human), and even damaged them.
Whitley Strieber’s The Hunger (adapted as a 1983 movie starring Catherine Deneuve, Susan Sarandon, and David Bowie) probably has the most human-like vampires of anything I’ve read. (I’ll mention here that it’s IMHO a pretty bad book, but it did at least have some original ideas.) Vampires are a distinct species, humanoid but not human. Their appearance is very similar to humans but their hair, eyes, and mouths are somewhat different, and the main vampire character Miriam wears a wig, contact lenses, and dental appliance to avoid arousing suspicion.
In The Hunger it’s suggested that the vampires evolved on Earth the same as but earlier than Homo sapiens, but in the sequel The Last Vampire it’s explicitly stated that the vampires are an alien species that came to Earth sometime in the Stone Age. Either way, they don’t have any supernatural weaknesses – no problems with sunlight, crosses, garlic, etc. They feed only on blood, but they do need to sleep (not as much as humans, though) and breath. They are stronger and healthier than humans, apparently invulnerable to disease and poisons, and do not age after reaching physical maturity, but they are not actually immortal. A careful vampire can live to be thousands of years old. A careless vampire could be killed in a fire, by drowning or smothering, through serious physical injury, etc. Vampires have some limited ability to influence the thoughts of humans, but other than that have no magical powers. There’s no turning into bats or levitating anything.
These vampires normally reproduce sexually with other vampires, but Miriam has also worked out how to turn humans into vampire-like beings via blood transfusion. However, this only works for a couple of hundred years. The aging process eventually catches up with all of her human/vampire hybrids. Much of the plot of The Hunger involves the sudden aging of Miriam’s once-human lover and her hopes that new medical research can either cure him or help her to avoid this problem in the future.
This is the one I was coming in to mention. I’m only two episodes in myself but it is a fun show; great soundtrack too.
The main vampire, does all that **Eyebrows **says, in fact he is actively trying to ‘stay human’ and fight off the vampire instincts. Though it maybe because I’m not quite as far into the show, but it seems he can’t have sex without also feeding off of blood.
Also in the show, there is a network of vampires who work everyday jobs. The main one, John, works in a hospital and his adversary is a police sergeant. In the first episode, the sergeant, (with help from one of his lackeys) attempts to get John to use the hospital to “recruit” new vampires in positions of power, including a politician that was checked in.
Most people who address this say that other religious symbols work, too – Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend has a Jewish vampire scared off by a Torah, and in Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula comic a Jewish guy holds off Dracula with a Star of David. But in The Fearless Vampire Killers a woman trying to hold off a Jewish vampire is unsuccessful, the vampire saying “Oy, have you got the wrong vampire!”
You’re almost right about the widow Stoker – but she had the prints of [NB]Nosferatu** she could find destroyed. She never saw any money out of that action, and didn’t look for any.
Nothing can kill them? not even a nuke from orbit? Black Hole? Supernova?
Brian
Hmm, from what I remember (I’ve read **Interview **through Memnoch, but nothing after that one) Anne Rice is pretty clear that they can’t have sex. At least, not any kind of penetrative sex. They’re all in love with each other and most are gay/bi so there’s a lot of talk about desire and lust, but in Tale of the Body Thief, Lestat says that one of the first things he wants to do after becoming human is to have sex with a woman and then a man, since he’s not been able to for hundreds of years, and in fact describes his penis as a “useless piece of flesh.” And I think, IIRC, in Queen of the Damned there’s a scene where Lestat is stripped naked & bathed by some women and he says that even if he wanted to, he’d be physically incapable of having sex with them.
Yeah, people frequently claim that her vampire novels are full of sex, but I don’t recall any sex scenes in the first five books either (I also stopped with Memonoch). Something must give people that impression, though. Unless they’re mixing them up in their minds with the Mayfair books? There was a lot of sex amongst those witches.
Er, well, the series is here, though the pseudo-vampy stuff doesn’t appear till about midway through the first ‘season’. Of course I’ve spoiled some of the mystery anyway. (It’s mostly a sort of soapy melodrama/mystery/suspense melange.) God help me, I’ve never posted this here before. If it weren’t so on topic I wouldn’t have! Please forgive the site, it’s from 2001.
No. Though, of course, no one has ever tried it. As far as the characters know, they can’t be killed.
The vampires drink each others’ blood, and this is described in an erotic manner. IIRC there are some actual sex scenes in The Vampire Lestat from before the title character was turned into a vampire. There’s definitely sex in Tale of the Body Thief, but that’s when Lestat is in a human body. So while there are sex scenes in the books, the first few don’t have any vampire sex that I can recall.