Rice's work also saw the beginning of the convergence of traditional Gothic ideas with the modern Gothic subculture and a more explicit exploration of the transgressive sexualities which had always been implicit in vampire fiction.

The vampire lifestyle or vampire subculture is an alternative lifestyle, based on the modern perception of vampires in popular fiction.

Active vampirism within the vampire subculture includes both sanguinarian vampirism, which involves blood consumption, and psychic vampirism, whose practitioners believe they are drawing spiritual nourishment from auric or pranic energy.

In Carpe Jugulum, Terry Pratchett pastiches the traditions of vampire literature, playing with the mythic archetypes and featuring a tongue-in-cheek reversal of ' vampyre ' subculture with young vampires who wear bright clothes, drink wine, and stay up until noon.

* The Doctor Who serial State of Decay features a vampire named Camilla who in a brief but explicit moment finds much to ' admire ' in the Doctor's female travelling companion Romana who finds she has to turn away from the vampire's intense gaze.

The Vampyre has been accounted by cultural critic Christopher Frayling as one of the most influential works of fiction ever written and spawned a craze for vampire fiction and theatre ( and latterly film ) which has not ceased to this day.

According to legend, a vampire has no reflection in mirrors because it is an undead creature and has already lost its soul.

This method resembles the Ancient Greek practice of placing an obolus in the corpse's mouth to pay the toll to cross the River Styx in the underworld ; it has been argued that instead, the coin was intended to ward off any evil spirits from entering the body, and this may have influenced later vampire folklore.

Many of today's standard vampire tropes originated in Varney: Varney has fangs, leaves two puncture wounds on the necks of his victims, has hypnotic powers, and has superhuman strength.

* Spike — A punk vampire who has killed two previous Slayers, Spike took his nickname from one of his former killings which involved a railroad spike.

* American ( U. S. A .)— Caine, Rachel: Feast of Fools ( Morganville Vampires, Book 4 ) ( 2008 ; vampire Myrnin dresses as Pierrot ); Dennison, George: " A Tale of Pierrot " ( 1987 ); DePaola, Tomie: Sing, Pierrot, Sing: A Picture Book in Mime ( 1983 ; children's book, illustrated by the author ); Hoban, Russell ( has lived in England since 1969 ): Crocodile and Pierrot: A See-the-Story Book ( 1975 ; children's book, illustrated by Sylvie Selig ).

* " Fool for Love " 2nd flashback: Months after being sired, William, now called Spike, has through acts of public mayhem forced Angelus ' vampire group ( himself, Spike, Drusilla, and Angelus ' sire / paramour Darla ) to flee London ; Spike first learns of the existence of the Vampire Slayer.

One of the first works of art to touch upon the subject is the short German poem The Vampire ( 1748 ) by Heinrich August Ossenfelder, where the theme already has strong erotic overtones: a man whose love is rejected by a respectable and pious maiden threatens to pay her a nightly visit, drink her blood by giving her the seductive kiss of the vampire and thus prove her that his teaching is better than her mother's Christianity.

It has been argued that Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem Christabel ( written between 1797 and 1801, but not published until 1816 ) has influenced the development of vampire fiction: the heroine Christabel is seduced by a female supernatural being called Geraldine who tricks her way into her residence and eventually tries to marry her after having assumed the appearance of an old beloved of hers.

Bram Stoker's Dracula ( 1897 ) has been the definitive description of the vampire in popular fiction for the last century.

Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist's critically praised vampire story Låt Den Rätte Komma In ( 2004 ) about the relationship of a 12-year-old boy with a 200-year-old vampire child has now been translated into English as Let the Right One In ( 2007 ) and a film adaptation has been produced.

In recent years, vampire fiction has been one of many supernatural fiction genres used in the creation of mashups.

The Dhampir, the offspring of a vampire and a human known from Serbian folklore, has been popularized in recent fiction.

Louis is initially horrified that Lestat has turned a child into a vampire, but soon begins to care for Claudia tenderly and dotingly.

Telling the boy of one last encounter with Lestat in New Orleans, Louis ends his tale ; after 200 years, he is weary of immortality as a vampire and all the pain and suffering to which he has had to bear witness.

In this Moriarty is a vampire and is no longer interested in criminal pursuits as he now has an eternal life which he can dedicate to intellectual contemplation.

The television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, created and largely written by Joss Whedon, also explored vampire folklore in the light of postmodern and gender feminist theory.

The Children of Osiris are the closest the game has to a " good guy " vampire bloodline ( possibly rivaled by interpretations of the now largely extinct Salubri ).

While Lestat spoils Claudia and tries to teach her how to behave like a vampire, she largely ignores him and reserves her love for Louis.

Medievalists are, however, largely skeptical towards this interpretation, possibly because vampire legends are believed to have originated in Eastern European folklore and became known to the Western public only later through reports coming from the East in the 18th century.

Langevin is credited with the creation of the mythology of the post-apocalyptic vampire lord Voivod, about which the band originally coalesced, and is largely responsible for its continuing science fiction themes.

This legend may have originated from the vampire bat, an animal endemic to the region.

* The German erotic / vampire / comedy comic series Sandra Bodyshelly ( 2002 – 2004 ) by Harm Bengen incorporates several plot elements from vampiric fiction.

Chris Sarandon ( born July 24, 1942 ) is an American actor who is best known for playing Prince Humperdinck in the film The Princess Bride, the vampire Jerry Dandridge in Fright Night and Detective Mike Norris in the first entry of the Child's Play series, and providing the speaking voice of Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas.

* Kroft Family-A family of vampire hunters that existed from the 16th Century to the 19th Century.

Although vampiric entities have been recorded in many cultures, and may go back to " prehistoric times ", the term vampire was not popularized until the early 18th century, after an influx of vampire superstition into Western Europe from areas where vampire legends were frequent, such as the Balkans and Eastern Europe, although local variants were also known by different names, such as vrykolakas in Greece and strigoi in Romania.

While even folkloric vampires of the Balkans and Eastern Europe had a wide range of appearance ranging from nearly human to bloated rotting corpses, it was interpretation of the vampire by the Christian Church and the success of vampire literature, namely John Polidori's 1819 novella The Vampyre that established the archetype of charismatic and sophisticated vampire ; it is arguably the most influential vampire work of the early 19th century, inspiring such works as Varney the Vampire and eventually Dracula.

The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first appearance of the word vampire in English from 1734, in a travelogue titled Travels of Three English Gentlemen published in the Harleian Miscellany in 1745.

The English term was derived ( possibly via French vampyre ) from the German Vampir, in turn derived in the early 18th century from the Serbian вампир / vampir, when Arnold Paole, a purported vampire in Serbia was described during the time Serbia was incorporated into the Austrian Empire.

However, despite the occurrence of vampire-like creatures in these ancient civilizations, the folklore for the entity we know today as the vampire originates almost exclusively from early-18th-century southeastern Europe, when verbal traditions of many ethnic groups of the region were recorded and published.

This tradition persisted in modern Greek folklore about the vrykolakas, in which a wax cross and piece of pottery with the inscription " Jesus Christ conquers " were placed on the corpse to prevent the body from becoming a vampire.

The sole member of the German darkwave band Sopor Aeternus & The Ensemble of Shadows, Anna-Varney Cantodea, adopted her name from Varney the vampire.

According to the first dictionary of modern Serbian language ( published by Vuk Stefanović-Karadžić in 1818 ) vukodlak / вукодлак ( werewolf ) and vampir / вампир ( vampire ) are synonyms, meaning a man who returns from his grave for purposes of fornicating with his widow.

Although he enters the series as a villain, Spike allies briefly with the Scoobies during Season Two to save his vampire lover Drusilla and stop Angel from destroying the world.

Forced to take a mundane and degrading job slinging burgers at the Doublemeat Palace, she begins suffering from extreme depression and self-loathing, embarking on a violent sexual relationship with the vampire Spike which leaves neither satisfied and spawns dire consequences for the both of them.

In the Tales of the Slayers comic one-shot " Broken Bottle of Djinn " ( 2002 ) by Doug Petrie and Jane Espenson, Buffy battles a spirit in Sunnydale High, while the Tales of the Vampires comic book story " Antique " ( 2004 ) by Drew Goddard sees her breaking into Dracula's castle to rescue Xander from the infamous vampire.

Matheson goes to great lengths to rationalize or naturalize the vampire myth, transplanting the monster from the otherworldly realms of folklore and Victorian supernaturalism to the test tube of medical inquiry and rational causation.