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With the recent popularity of vampires following the creation of the Twilight series, the Vampire Diaries series, True Blood (based on the Sookie Stackhouse series) and other vampire novels, the rules of vampires have become blurred. I will go over the various rules for vampires from Bram Stoker's Dracula, the original vampire story, and compare them to some of the other rules in the above books.

Rule 1. Sunlight weakens vampires but it doesn't kill them. In most vampire stories sunlight will kill a vampire, but in Dracula it only weakens him. I think we all know that in Twilight sunlight makes vampires sparkle.

Rule 2. Vampires can transform into other forms such as bats, wolves, or mist. In most recent vampire novels vampires can't do this. At most the vampires can fly. Maybe authors feel that allowing the vampires transformations in their stories will dehumanize them, making them seem more like monsters and less like sexy mysterious beings.

Rule 3. Vampires can put people into trances. For the most part this is true in recent vampire novels. In both Vampire Diaries and True Blood the vampires can make people do things or forget things against their will. Once again, Twilight goes against the basic vampire rules as none of the vampires in Twilight have this power.

Rule 4. Vampires can only be killed by having a stake driven through their hearts with a hammer. This is the one that is the same among 99% of vampire stories. The hammer part isn't always true, but the stake is always a way to kill a vampire. Even in Twilight a stake through the heart will do the job.

Rule 5. People are transformed into vampires when vampires feed on them. In most vampire stories this, or a variation of this, is the way people are transformed into vampires. In Twilight the person may only be bitten by a vampire, in the Vampire Diaries the person must have fed from a vampire and then die to become one, and in True Blood a person must have been fed on by a vampire and then die, and then be fed vampire blood. These all closely resemble the Dracula way.

These are the basic vampire rules from Dracula. With so many different types of vampire, I thought it was necessary to bring it back to the basics and see the differences in modern vampires. It's clear that the new rules are closely related to the original ones (aside from the sparkling).

posted by Teens Online at 4:46     1 comment

On Apr 1 at 2:47, Méron wrote:
In some legends vampires could also be weakened when presented with the ash of the "scared tree" which has a strong connection with life, the living and all forms of creation, which the vampires are not.

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