|| Vampire

Overview

Vampirism encodes a number of cultural anxieties. At its core, it expresses fears of infection, bodily corruption, cultural and sexual "otherness," and the collapse of rigid social hierarchies. It dramatizes the permeability of boundaries—between classes, ethnicities, sexes, and even between the living and the dead. The vampire is the figure of contamination: a being who blurs categories that civilization insists must remain discrete. Beneath this is a fundamental fear of being consumed—by disease, by others, by desires that exceed normative limits.   The Victorian subjects had a multitude of methods to prevent vampirism. Corpses were often buried with scythes or sickles positioned near the neck or abdomen, intended to pierce the body if it reanimated and bloated after feeding. Tendons at the knees were severed to prevent movement, and in some cases the body was pinned into the coffin. Bricks or stones were inserted into the mouth to block post-mortem feeding, while stakes were driven through the heart, stomach, or head as a method of anatomical restraint. Family members might exhume a corpse to check for signs of fresh blood, and if found, the internal organs were burned and the body reburied. Grains like poppy seeds, millet, or sand were scattered around the grave, under the belief that a vampire would be compelled to stop and count each one, delaying its emergence.   Other times, they would either burn the body and inhale the smoke or burn the heart, mix the ashes with water and feed it to sick relatives to prevent illness. This came from the belief that feeding off a vampire would stop you becoming one yourself.

Mortality & Post-Mortem Uncertainty

In 19th-century rural Europe, improper burials, cataleptic states, and ignorance towards the decomposition process created panic about the dead not staying dead. Vampires were often those whose deaths were ambiguous—suicide victims, unbaptized infants, social deviants—but even extended to things like an animal jumping over the corpse! It's the terrifying question of: "My life was shit, but can I even die right?"   Vampirism is the horror that the complicity in your own suffering demanded by religion or society might not lead to salvation at all—that the promise of heaven is conditional, arbitrary, or even false. For the Victorian subject, conditioned to equate moral restraint, sexual repression, and class submission with eternal reward, the vampire is not just a monster but a failure of the contract they were told governed life and death. The vampire is what happens when that contract breaks. It represents the dread that even perfect obedience—lifelong complicity in your own subjugation—offers no assurance of transcendence. It’s about surviving judgment, being excluded from grace, and discovering that all the suffering you endured was for nothing. It's not merely a figure of death undone, but salvation denied.

Economic Class Warfare & Parasitism

Vampirism operates as a metaphor for economic extraction and systemic parasitism. It literalizes elite consumption of the lower classes' lifeblood: their labor, time, and bodies. Vampires do not produce—they extract, consume, and hoard. Supposed fixation with material wealth produces the arithmomania motif. They accumulate immortality and beauty at the price of others' mortality and decay. This maps directly onto fears of capitalism, aristocratic entrenchment, and colonial plunder. Vampires reflect, by their very nature, economic inequality, financial despair, and extractive capitalistic practices that lay waste to communities and those within them. "The undead will rise as the economy spirals into chaos"—this fear intensifies in periods of economic collapse or class struggle.

Reverse Colonialization & Revolution

The vampire also encodes imperial anxiety about "reverse colonization." In this framework, the colonized or oppressed return—transformed and empowered—to infiltrate and consume the imperial center or oppressor. This is evident where foreignness is depicted as a contaminant threatening national purity. Vampires cross borders via seduction, infection, or subversion, often framed as sexually or culturally transgressive. Here, racial mixture, miscegenation, and queer contagion converge in a single figure.   The vampire destabilizes Enlightenment rationalism by introducing the irrational, the exotic, the pathological and leveraging it against the original enforcer. Vampires are referred to in groups as a "colony" specifically because of the fear that having contaminated and consumed others is a proof of sorts that it can inflicted onto the original perpetrator.

Inheritance & Genetic Degeneration

Vampirism can also represent dynastic anxiety—fear of what is passed down. The vampire as sire infects not just physically, but psychically. The idea that vampirism becomes more degraded with each generation speaks to a horror of tainted lineage, not just biologically but ideologically. This aligns with 19th-century fears of degeneracy, atavism, and eugenics. The Dreadfulness here encodes fear that children will inherit the sins—or flaws—of their progenitors, resulting in an escalating loss of humanity.   This is a useful fearmongering tool for the Church to reinforce the values of the period—which can be classed as religion, morality, Evangelicalism, industrial work ethic, and personal improvement. Contemporary plays and all literature—including old classics, like William Shakespeare's works—were cleansed of content considered to be inappropriate for children, or "bowdlerized". It also speaks to the vampire itself (a stand-in for aristocracy) as wealth divides between heirs, beneficiaries and legatees.

The Vampire As The "Social Other"

Historically, vampirism has coded social deviance and marginalization:
 

• Disease: Associations with tuberculosis, syphilis, HIV/AIDS, porphyria and sleeping sickness mark the vampire as pathologically dangerous. A significant number of these diseases are bloodborne and display limited physically identifiable symptoms, making them an invisible scourge to safety and security.


• Ethnic and Religious Minorities: Anti-Semitic and anti-Roma tropes frame vampires as outsiders who corrupt from within. This is especially so when wealthy foreigners arrive in a homogenous culture and are seen as siphoning resources and wealth. The foreign aristocrat is especially a social evil.


• Sexual Non-Normativity: The vampire often embodies queer desire, particularly through same-sex attraction and ambiguous gender performance. Particularly, it is simultaneously the repulsion and compulsion these desires represent.


• Gender Nonconformity: The "New Woman" archetype—a sexually autonomous, politically defiant female figure tied to sterility, abortion, or infanticide—intersects with vampire femininity, generating anxiety around gender roles, reproductive futurism and maternal monstrosity. This plays into anxieties about women who refuse reproductive roles, about sexual women who are non-nurturing, and about the feminization of male victims.


• Addiction: Vampiric hunger operates as metaphor for compulsive consumption—paralleling opioid dependency. The idea that consumption produces a euphoric-paralytic state, and that denial of one's own consumption might induce withdrawal symptoms of sweating, chills, anxiety, agitation, muscle aches, insomnia, abdominal cramping, nausea, vomiting.
  

The social response to this fear that one’s private self, safety and security can be breached, read, or controlled by invaders is the motif that the vampire cannot integrate. It casts no reflection, leaves no shadow, and cannot enter without permission—each symbolizing its failure to assimilate into civic life. Its presence is always destabilizing. The counter-phobia (without physical distinction, the vampire may be able to integrate) developed the motif that vampires move invisibly, read minds (in some lore), or manipulates through charm to gain social access.

Paradox of Desire

Finally, vampirism provokes not just fear, but ambivalence. What makes the vampire dangerous is not only that it is repulsive—but that it is attractive. The consumptive aesthetic of tuberculosis was eroticized in the 19th century. The racialized "other" is exoticized. Queer intimacy is both taboo and seductive. The New Woman is threatening and glamorous. The vampire reveals the fragility of moral aversion—we fear the vampire because we desire (self-love, self-expression, consumption) what we should reject.   The Church sanctioned anti-vampiric rhetoric—vampires were blasphemous bodies, impure agents of the Devil, evidence of sin or corruption. For the Low, who had inherited only suffering and were promised salvation through obedience, the vampire was a useful enemy. It allowed them to remain loyal to systems that exploited them. They could loathe the predator while maintaining faith in the structure that claimed to oppose it but embodied it.   The sick continued dying. The rich continued feeding. The Church continued collecting. No number of exhumed bodies could alter the fact that the true vampires did not sleep in cemeteries. That it isn’t the social “other” that is corrupting, and making sure they live in poverty, misery and barred from heaven. They lived in estates. Sat in pews. Wrote doctrine. As disillusionment set in, the metaphors began to unravel. If the Church and Capital both promised salvation, but only delivered obedience and hunger, then who is the real vampire?   But for the Low, and even more acutely for the aspirational Middle, the fear of vampirism is not limited to being preyed upon—it is the fear of wanting to become predator. To climb. To consume. The moral horror lies not just in what the vampire does to you, but in realizing how effortlessly you could do it to someone else, what it could do for you. Vampirism represents the final, most damning form of class betrayal: the moment when the exploited no longer wish for liberation, but for ascension into the ranks of the exploiters. In a world defined by scarcity, precarity, and competition, the desire to become vampire is not aberrant—it is adaptive. It makes sense.   This is the vampire’s power: it does not seduce you by tricking you into surrender. A vampire has no reflection because you’re the reflection—your ambition, your hunger, your capacity to rationalize harm—and it waits for you to reach out. Most do. They don’t become vampires out of desperation. They become vampires because the offer feels honest. Because it finally puts them on the inside. And they enjoy it. This is why vampirism is feared. Not because it corrupts—but because it reveals that corruption was already there, dormant, waiting for the right offer. It reveals the fragility of ethical identity under material pressure. And it makes visible the unspoken truth: in the architecture of capitalism, exploitation is not a glitch. It's a feature. And it feels good.   Some react contrarily to this fear, and double-down on liberative ideals. But, by the end of the revolution, you might just find you’ve become a vampire anyways. Or, if not, that the one feeding has changed, but you’re still the one being fed on.

Overview

Vampirism is a Compound Stability Class Dreadfulness. This means it is both progressive and degenerative. Certain parameters increase in strength/complexity with time and/or usage alongside the typical external factors (e.g fear, trauma, hybridization), while others degrade or intensify negatively. Below is a complete list of the various progressive and degenerative Dreadfulness parameters, along with the phobic origin that factors into the individual Dreadful's affinity with the parameter. The more a Dreadful aligns with or experiences the phobic origin, the more effective the parameter.

Progressive Parameters

Degenerative Parameters

Overview

Vampires, classified as Latent Physical entities, retain a fundamentally humanoid form but exhibit a suite of persistent physiological anomalies that distinguish them from humans at every functional level. These traits become increasingly salient during affective states of bloodlust, while base features otherwise remain unaltered, although transformation creates a "healthified" effect: scars, acne, pockmarks, illness-related damage, and facial asymmetries are systematically removed. The result is a form of engineered beauty—symmetrical, clear-skinned, and slightly uncanny in its perfection.
  Vampire skin is avascular and porcelain in texture—smooth, hard, cold, and unnaturally uniform. Melanin does not degrade, but instead appears to calcify, with pigmentation becoming immune to tanning processes. The vampire will appear "tanner" (bloated, dark, ruddy) during and within a short time after digesting a feed, reverting to their original pigmentation as satiation subsides. Their eyes, supported by a tapetum lucidum analog and dense rod photoreceptors, glow red in light and support low-light navigation; this ocular mutation allows them to function nocturnally with near-complete clarity. Their most identifiable external traits include hollow, fanged maxillary canines (average length 3.8 cm), which draw from venom (euphoric-paralytic compound) sacs located in the gum lining during a bite. Fingers are elongated, and nail (also hair) growth persists post-mortem due to keratin proliferation.
  Their musculature is wiry and hyper-dense, optimized for explosive movement and efficient oxygen use; ballistic locomotion such as long-distance jumping or high-speed falling is easily achievable. Internally, the liver and pancreas become vestigial. Heart function slows to roughly 10–12 bpm but increases in circulatory pressure, supporting limited metabolic needs. Wounds do not heal in the traditional human sense—there is no clotting—but instead seal via proteinaceous crystallization at the cellular level. Vampires are immune to all human diseases and recover from most injuries rapidly, though destruction by sunlight, garlic, or blessed symbols (e.g., crucifixes) is irrecoverable. Upon death, vampires rapidly desiccate and collapse into ash, leaving no remains behind. They display no shadow, reflection, or detectable heartbeat.

Overview

Vampirism is not hereditary and does not allow for post-infection sexual reproduction—except in rare cases of first-generation vampires, who retain limited reproductive viability and can have vampire offspring. Fertility among first-generation vampires is extremely low, with high rates of miscarriage and severe gestational complications; live births are rare. Even rarer—and biologically precarious—are human-vampire unions, which almost never carry to term but, if viable, result in the birth of a dhampir. For all others, it is a viral Dreadfulness transmitted through bloodstream vectoring. The infection renders gametes nonviable within 24 hours. The host’s reproductive system is suppressed as all regenerative cellular processes are diverted toward somatic preservation and parasitic feeding conversion. Within 7 days post-infection, the virus replaces the host’s DNA entirely. This triggers full-body molecular reorientation and irreversible metabolic reprogramming.

Generational Hierarchy & Hybridization

A first-generation vampire acquires the Dreadfulness through a means that isn’t vector infection (e.g reproduction between 1st-gen vampires) or has their generational hierarchy reset through Dreadfulness hybridization. Hybridization resets generational lineage, severs neural or mnemonic connections to previous sires, and optimizes performance-degeneracy ratios. These vampires are considered the genetic baseline. Each successive generation experiences additive biological burden and functional degradation. Higher-generation spawn exhibit reduced adaptability, enhanced dependency, and unstable neurocognitive traits. Performance traits (strength, speed, perception) degrade in direct proportion to generational distance. Conversely, symptoms such as light sensitivity, compulsive feeding, and psychotic breakdowns intensify.   Through the neuronic and mnemonic link between generations of vampires, the higher-generation vampires can enact some level of compulsion. This scales with the degree of separation, and how high the generation of the compelling vampire is. The lower the generation of the vampire, the more easily they are compelled. For example, a first-generation vampire might still fail to fully compel a second-generation vampire, but can easily compel a third-generation vampire, and have complete control over fourth-generation vampires. A compulsion by a lower-generation vampire can be overruled by a higher-generation's compulsion.

Degenerated Spawn

Degenerated vampires demonstrate predatory fixation (persistent consumptive focus on humans), narcissistic dissociation (self-centrality accompanied by emotional flattening), cognitive fragmentation (disintegration of personal memory continuity), and human objectification (loss of relational empathy or ethical orientation).   Fourth-generation and higher are feral, cognitively unstable, and socially incapable of integration. Despite enhanced extrasensory feedback, these vampires are behaviorally erratic and incapable of self-governance. They must be compelled by a higher generation vampire, or they will act animalistically and continue to feed without stopping or thinking.

Sire Dependency & Termination Cascade

All vampires that aren't first-generation are hierarchically dependent. Killing a sire induces a cascade failure in all linked spawn, even through generations. The onset is 3–5 minutes post-mortem. Symptoms are a sudden collapse of neural function, followed by multisystem failure. The outcome is a total anatomical disintegration into ash. This process is irreversible and biologically consistent across all documented generations. The link does not require physical proximity—termination effects are tethered by bloodline, not geography.

Overview

The full transformation into a vampire occurs over an approximate 7-day period, though timelines may vary depending on individual physiology and whether the acquisition triggers hybridization with other Dreadfulness types. The transformation process usually cannot be interrupted except for death, but there exists one specific method. You can take the ashes of a deceased vampire of the same generation or higher as the incubating spawn and have them inhale the smoke, drink it with water, or consume it baked into bread.
 

• Stage 1: Instability Onset (0–48 hours)
The infected individual experiences acute physiological dysregulation: elevated core temperature (often exceeding 41°C), spontaneous subdermal hemorrhaging, sensory disorientation, and dissociative breaks. Endocrine function destabilizes as the host immune system attempts, and fails, to reject the viral payload.  
• Stage 2: Reconfiguration & Nutritional Dependency (48–96 hours)
This phase initiates systemic somatic conversion: cellular alignment reorients toward parasitic metabolism, replacing aerobic pathways with hemotrophic processes. Blood craving emerges but cannot yet be acted on; the individual is immobilized by systemic fatigue and neural overload.   Nutritional intake during this stage is critical. A consistent infusion of nutrient-dense, oxygenated blood sustains metabolic expenditure and allows the subject’s pre-existing developmental schema (i.e., musculoskeletal growth, neurological maturation) to complete. If deprived, development halts at the infection state, leading to permanent anatomical or psychological arrest in non-adult incubators (e.g., pediatric morphology , cognitive underdevelopment, dysregulated impulse control). Proper nutrition can help with the performance-degeneracy ratio of higher generation spawn, though it can't achieve graduation to a higher generation.  
• Stage 3: Terminal Conversion (96–168 hours)
The subject's original DNA is now fully overwritten by the viral genome. Gametogenesis ceases. Blood now functions as the exclusive metabolic substrate. Neurological restructuring finalizes. For 1st-3rd generation vampires, neurological changes are minimal. Contrarily, 4th-gen+ may exhibit permanent disconnection from pre-infection identity, increased limbic activity, reduced cortical inhibition, and eroded empathic processing depending on nutritional intake during incubation.

  Post-stage 3, the subject is functionally vampiric: externally stable, internally fragmented. Aging halts phenotypically, but degeneration continues at the genetic and neuropsychological level, with effects compounded by feeding frequency and generation distance from a first-gen progenitor.

Overview

While Vampires can eat and drink normally, it has no flavour and can even be found disgusting. It does nothing for satiation or nutrients. Somatic stability requires consumption of human blood approximately once every 90 days (3 months). Absence of feeding does not result in death but in catatonic stasis, marked by cognitive disintegration and hallucinations. Vampires may show symptoms similar to withdrawal—sweating, chills, shaking—if deprived of blood, aligning with thermoregulation dysfunction. It also causes “nodding,” muscular wasting, and recurring cycles of craving and dependency.   Feeding triggers a euphoric-compulsive cascade, often resulting in binge behavior. Subjects frequently lose control post-ingestion, consuming beyond metabolic requirements. Post-feeding stupor, catalepsy, or depressive episodes reflect sedation and comedown states. Feeding may trigger an incapacitating dopamine flood that mimics narcotic euphoria followed by neurochemical depletion. Vampires may exhibit extreme photophobia and visual changes due to CNS overstimulation.   Preferred prey are humans experiencing acute physiological stress; elevated cortisol and altered iron levels in such individuals produce a more nutrient-dense blood profile, making them disproportionately targeted. For this reason, despite abilities that lean towards quick assassinations, most vampires prefer to “play with their food.”

Overview

Vampire physiology is cyclically modulated by lunar eclipse activity. A penumbral eclipse marks the lowest normal appetite in the vampire’s metabolic and hunger cycle, which remains constant if it’s two consecutive penumbral eclipses. Bloodthirst is minimal and manageable. Most vampires experience a state of quiescence or lowered compulsive drive.   It builds to partial eclipses, which represent the baseline hunger interval recurring approximately every 90 days. Most feeding cycles are tethered to this periodicity. Vampires can sustain physical and cognitive stability during this phase, assuming typical blood intake. It builds in the lead-up to total eclipses, with slightly elevated hunger, heightened sensory acuity, and reduced inhibition, but these shifts remain within the normal regulatory envelope of 3-months satiation necessity. Feeding efficiency increases, but cognitive boundaries remain intact.   A total lunar eclipse (Blood Moon) induces an intense psychobiological shift characterized by heightened aggression and loss of feeding inhibition due to neurological hyperactivity, overstimulation of sensory systems, and organ function overclocking. Two twin total eclipses maintain this peak in the time period between, causing frenzy periods so devastating they’re sometimes recorded historically, cause population-wide behavioral volatility. Vampire spawns transformed feeding during these cycles are less likely to perish during transformation and experience improved neurological retention and better performance-degeneration ratios, but the “frenzy” it causes makes pulling away from a bite (thus started the transformation) nearly impossible.

Symptoms of Addiction

Vampires may develop obsessive routines around feeding (specific times, settings, or prey types), mirroring the ritualistic behaviors of addicts. Pre-feeding anxiety and post-feeding lethargy map directly onto cycles. Just as addicts deprioritize everything outside the next fix, vampires may show narrowed behavioral scope—losing interest in prior identity, relationships, or goals, focusing solely on blood acquisition.   Long-term vampirism could result in memory fragmentation, temporal dissociation, and decreased executive function. Vampires may become affectively flat, disconnected, or dissociative between feedings—anhedonia and derealization similar to prolonged sedation or withdrawal. In starvation or withdrawal states, sensory hallucinations and paranoia would mimic typical psychosis (including “shadow people,” auditory hallucinations, etc.).   As in long-term addiction, vampires may show disregard for preservation, engaging in reckless or hostile behavior due to existential fatigue. Feeding may no longer bring pleasure, only temporary relief—aligning with the end-stage addict experience: using not to get high, but to avoid collapse.

Baseline Sensory / Extrasensory Capabilities

Vampires possess highly specialized sensory systems designed for nocturnal predation, target fixation, and environmental dominance. Visual processing operates efficiently under extreme low-light conditions, with perceptual thresholds down to 0.01 lux (equivalent to a moonless, starlit night). Retinal structures include thermoreceptive cells capable of interpreting infrared signatures, allowing for dynamic thermal vision. Certain vampires develop echolocation-adjacent faculties. These vampires utilize high-frequency (ultrasound) echo mapping to detect movement and terrain in zero-visibility environments. Auditory data is rendered into a spatial map in real time. Olfactory receptors are calibrated to detect volatile organic compounds associated with human blood at concentrations as low as parts per billion (ppb). Range is typically 200–300 meters under optimal conditions. Somatic response latency is reduced to 10–15 milliseconds, versus the 180 ms baseline for neurotypical humans, enabling rapid threat response and motion tracking.   Additional extrasensory phenomena such as telepathy, empathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and retrocognition are less common and typically traceable to non-vampiric phobic origins—external fears or hybridized Dreadfulness inputs that activate dormant or epigenetic capacities unrelated to core vampirism.

Degenerative Extrasensory Manifestations (4th-gen+)

Advanced generations of spawn—particularly 4th and higher—display emergent extrasensory faculties with corresponding psychological degeneration.   Blood-memory recall is where vampires extract and internally replicate sensory, cognitive, and emotional data encoded in consumed blood. This forensic memory imprinting enables location, emotional profiling, and trauma retrieval. However, frequent recall results in identity destabilization, cognitive overload, and psychotic fusion of multiple memory strands. Spawn with severe imprint contamination lose their original personality structure.   Neural lineage synchrony is where degenerated vampires are locked into a persistent cognitive feedback loop with their progenitor. This neural tether grants location tracking, behavioral influence, and compulsion enforcement. Spawn at this stage cannot defy their sire’s directives under any condition. The link is one-directional; it does not afford the spawn mutual control.