So for those of you who don’t know April was vampire month for this blog and I just wanted to gather some loose and leftover thoughts and put them out here . Is everyone cool with that ? Good !

I’ll start off with a quick ranking of the stories I put up here in April .

1. Vampire Hunter D Volume 1 by Hideyuki Kikuchi
2. Let The Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvilt
3. Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris
4. Dangerous Girls by R.L. Stine
5. The Spider Master of Men #26 : Death Reign of the Vampire King by Norvell W. Page
6. The Pale Lady by Alexandre Dumas
7. The Space Vampires by Colin Wilson
8. The Lady of The House of Love by Angela Carter
9. A History of the Vampire in Popular Culture : Love at first Bite by Violet Fenn
10. The Southern Book Club’s to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

Okay so let’s deal with some things I noticed reading all these stories back to back . The first one that I have to point out is that it doesn’t seem to matter when the story was written , there is always either trying to bang the vampire or the vampire is trying to bang someone else . The best example of this is “Dead Until Dark” . It seriously seems like everyone who writes them is horny or at the very least a twisted romantic . I’m not judging by the way , after all who among us didn’t fall in love with Kate Beckinsale in “Underworld” , it’s just funny how consistent this is over 300 years worth of stories . In most of these stories it would be necrophilia with the exception of “The Space Vampires” which has energy vampire squids that possess people over outright killing them and “Death Reign of the Vampire King” which features a terrorist called the Batman who uses actual vampire bats with poisoned teeth to kill people .

Also reading them back to back really helped me put together how parasitic (or maybe symbiotic is a better term ) the relationships are between vampires and us . Naturally they need our blood ( or sometimes our chi ) but it seems to go deeper than that . There seems to be a possessive quality inherent in the vampires , a need to not only feed on someone but also to dominate them and their community . I guess that makes sense . They are a weird combination of parasites , immortal corpses , usually with two or three lifetimes of experience . That would probably mess with anyones head . I think “Let The Right One In” is the best example of this though “The Space Vampires” is the most literal version of the concept .

Also there is more fight scenes in these stories than I expected . Turns out while vampires are indeed powerful there are also enough ways to weaken them enough to turn it into a winnable fight . “Vampire Hunter D Volume 1” and “The Pale Lady” do these better than the rest in my opinion . It helps with the pacing of these stories a lot compared to other gothic stories .

Overall , it seems like you can have more fun with vampires than most other monsters . At least , I’ve always had more fun with them . I was going to put up “Dracula” by Bram Stoker as its probably the book I’ve read the most all the way through but I decided last minute to save it for another time .

Some final recommendations I think are in order I think . Let’s start with comic books/manga , I’ve thought about putting up reviews on these before but for some reason they intimidate me more . So here we go …

1. Marvel Morbious collection
2. Call of the Night
3. Hellsing
4. Tomb of Dracula collection
5. Bram Stoker’s Dracula starring Bela Lugosi : the graphic novel

Oh here is a fun one . Guilty pleasure movies . These will not be explained … ever .

1. Embrace of the Vampire (1995)
2. Tomb of Dracula (1980)
3. The Vampire Lovers (1970)
4. The Lair of the White Worm (1988)
5. BloodRayne (2005)

Also here’s some of my favorite normal movies . I think I like lists too much .

1. The Universal Dracula Complete Legacy collection . Why pick one ? Pressed to pick one though I’d pick the first ” Dracula” with Bela Lugosi .
2. Van Helsing (2004)
3. Blade (1998)
4. 30 Days of Night (2007)
5. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

TV series !

1. Angel (1999-2004)
2. Castlevania (2017-2021)
3. Moonlight (2007)
4. Call of the Night (2022)
5. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003)

I haven’t played many vampire video games but heres a few .

1. Vampire Survivors
2. BloodRayne
3. The Van Helsing tie-in was pretty dope for a tie-in .
4. Dark

At the end of the day … vampires are just cool man !