cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/34580607

Cross-posted from !wikipedia@lemmy.world

I was looking for something else and came across this. I'd heard of Japanese Kappas and the Mexican La Llorona before....

But were you aware of Empusa? Turns out she "is a shape-shifting female being in Greek mythology, said to possess a single leg of copper" who "feasted on blood by seducing young men as they slept (see sleep paralysis), before drinking their blood and eating their flesh". Then one day she tried that on Zeus who was in disguise as a normie and... well it turned out like you'd expect.

Then there are the Nepalese Kichkandi who are "a spirit of a woman[1] that is latched to an uncremated part of her dead body, usually a bone". Apparently they appear as "an alluring and young female, who lures a lonely male traveler[2] and saps their life force."

Anyway that's just a couple, check out the full list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vampi

What type of vampire do you like most? Do you want them to be mindless killing machines, monsters that can think but can't exactly pass as human, or something perfectly capable of blending in with humanity? Or should there be stages? Would they become mindless killing machines after they've drank too much blood? Or when they haven't had enough?

For example, in Priest they're completely mindless, mostly just animals. Yet in 30 Days of Night they're human-shaped but don't hide or blend in with humans (or even speak human languages). And... I couldn't think of a good example of an aristocratic vampire so I went with Interview with the Vampire. I know there are lots of other aristocratic vampires but couldn't think of a good example of one that can blend in perfectly well with humans.

Sometimes vampires can

In the 1930s, Universal Pictures made a bunch of movies starring horror monsters from classic novels. Movies like Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Mummy. Universal milked those characters for all they were worth, to the point that they started showing up in weirder and wackier things like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein all the way to Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy. Obviously this had diminishing returns. By the 1950s, Universal finally stopped throwing those characters at anything they could (and after Abbot and Costello had "met" pretty much all of them).

Anyway, in the 2010s the Marvel Cinematic Universe was basically printing money so Universal decided

Blindsight is a hard science fiction novel by Canadian writer Peter Watts, published by Tor Books in 2006. ... The story follows a crew of astronauts sent to investigate a trans-Neptunian comet dubbed "Burns-Caulfield" that has been found to be transmitting an unidentified radio signal, followed by their subsequent first contact. The novel explores themes of identity, consciousness, free will, artificial intelligence, neurology, and game theory as well as evolution and biology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)

One of the main characters in this novel is a vampire. It's the future, and this ancient vampire species that used to prey on humans has been resurrected. They sent one of them in a spaceship (as the leader of a team of other transhumans) out to investigate a possible alien artifact.

...just short of the forward bulkhead, Jukka Sarasti climbed into view like a long white spider.

If he'd been Human I'd have known instantly what I saw there, I'

John Carpenter's Vampires doesn't have a very complicated plot, but it doesn't really need one. It was written and directed by John Carpenter and he knows what he's doing.

The movie is about a group of vampire hunters just... hunting vampires. This is a "modern day" vampire movie though (where "modern day" is 1998) so the hunters use the tools available at the time. You can tell they thought a lot about how to effectively kill a vampire in today's world without magical objects. There are nice little touches like the characters putting on chain-mail neck-guards before entering a vampire nest to prevent bites.

Of course, there is a plot here. A "master" vampire has a plan to perform some ritual which should give him the ability to walk in the daylight. And he needs the main character for that ritual. That leads me to my main complaint about this movie. James Woods is the main character and head vampire hunter and there's just something about him in this movie that I don't lik

Anyone who thinks Van Helsing was bad clearly hasn't seen GOTHIC VAMPIRES FROM HELL... just from the title you can tell that they were going for a B movie feel, and managed to hit several levels below that

• fake-looking fangs, fake-looking blood effects
• randomly inserted computer-generated animations
• bad acting, bad writing
• club scenes of people dancing with cheap video distortion effects overlayed
• occasional BDSM scenes interweaved ... to create a mood I guess?
• It all looks like it was filmed in a goth club somewhere with their friends as actors.

Surprisingly, it has a solid soundtrack made up of second-generation gothic industrial / deathrock music. I think Cleopatra Records had something to do with this movie. Anyway, this is a great movie to play in the background if you like dark vampiric stuff happening in the periphery and you're into "dark" music.

I caught it on Tubi (uBlock Origin adblocker on Firefox seems to work here):

• https://tubitv.com/movies/662920/got

And that's it. That's all the vampires memes I've got. I tried stretching it out as long as I could, but I'm done now.