Vampirism - Tumblr Posts

in this essay, i will

God. Just rewatched The Haunting of Bly Manor and Midnight Mass. Rewatching The Haunting of Hill House rn. Going to watch The Midnight Club and The Fall of the House of Usher after this. Mike Flanagan, I love you. Just going insane over all of his work, each piece is so haunting and moving and amazing. You know how it is.

Midnight Mass / Frank Bidart

Reblog to get the creature to come to you. Like to give them a little gift of some sort.

Reblog to get the creature to come to you. Like to give them a little gift of some sort.

what if we were 2 porcelain cats drinking blood together

Rita & Juliet Venegas (The Vampires) photographed for 'The Fly' Magazine 🩸

💓💗How romantic❤️❣️

[OC:Vampsona/bunny form]

Blood cw

I wonder if vampires taste blood.

Like sure, they have a starved kinda hunger for it, but can they like...taste it?

Some universes allows them to drink animal blood and others are restricted to human.

I'm kinda curious because I just got my wisdom teeth removed and my numb mouth tastes like blood. I hate it.

The lady of the vampire masquerade

color palette inspired from the cover

That moment she was mine, mine, fair,

Perfectly pure and good: I found 

A thing to do, and all her hair

In one long yellow string I wound 

Three times her little throat around, 

And strangled her. 

No pain felt she;

I am quite sure she felt no pain. 

An excerpt from Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover”

Alternates Below:

-hums Mary on a Cross as she peruses the books-

There are things all around you in the world, trying to survive, that you'll never get a chance to notice.

There's a werewolf in the café that you always go to, working on his laptop. It's already far enough into the lunar cycle so that he's becoming semi wolflike at night. He'll spend to weekend upstate this month when the full moon finally hits, like he always does. He tells himself it'll be nice to get the fresh air, and he's glad he's privileged enough to not end up hurting anyone. You just think of him as taking business trips every month.

There's a ghost whose possessing a human body for the first time in a long time, standing on the subway platform with some of her living freinds. She's laughing about how weird it is to walk around as a person, and slightly nervously commenting on how there's plastic in this body's blood. This is her first time she's possessing a male body, and the awkwardness of it has given way to a strange fascination and euphoria as to how it feels compared to her body when she was alive, she likes how people look at her, and how handsome she feels.

There's a goblin whose been stealing food from that deli that you always go to, and petting the cat every time he get a chance to. He lives in subway tunnels, because it's safer to dodge trains then dodge the eyes of humans. The world is a much bigger place to someone so small, and the streets and buildings weren't built for him, and neither were the trees or animals. He wakes up every day hoping to survive, in a world where humans are giants that stalk the streets, and where scaring someone is a crime that may cost him his life. He prays he won't die for the crime of being small, or the crime of being ugly.

There's a vampire on your college campus, trying to still have a normal life after being turned. She knows everything from her human life will be gone in a hundred years, it was supposed to be gone the momment she was bitten but she tries to make it so she can still keep moving forward. Her body lacks so much that it used to, she doesn't sleep, doesn't desire sex, doesn't eat, but she's still a person, who can talk to her freinds, and still go to classes like she used to. She'll survive like this as long as her family is supportive enough to let her stay in their apartment, and as long as her girlfriend let's her drink blood from her hand, as if she was handfeeding an animal. And for awhile it'll be like she's still a person.

There's a demon on the sidewalk near your campus, standing right near the subway station, whose having to focus their energy on a spell that makes them look human, knowing their true form would terrify the humans around them. They're walking every street so excited, so amazing by the city around them, by the world around them, the glistening towers, the people outside talking, the sky that's so very blue. It's all so mundane to the humans around them, but to a demon, who was told they never deserved any of it, that they'd never see anything but the underworld, it's the most amazing thing possible. And the world is so pretty, so hopeful, through their doomed eyes.

31 Days of Halloween Writing Challenge#2

It had been 200 years since Raphael had felt love. He mostly stayed in his castle, letting the world pass him by. His cape had holes in it and he got his blood from the rats that had infested. He never wanted to be a vampire and always saw it as a curse.

That is, until he met Sophie. The girl was an elementary schooler who had died during a storm on her way home from school. She was hung and still doesn't know who her assailant is. She had to watch her parents cry at her funeral. After, she wandered the streets until she found Raphael's house where she felt she could cry with no one around. She didn't realize Raphael was there.

"Why are you crying?" Raphael asks, slowly approaching the young ghost. She flinches when she hears his voice. She was still wearing her school uniform, her facial features still intact as she hasn't forgotten them yet.

"I am dead. I barely lived and had to watch my parents cry at my funeral. I just wanted to help the poor ghost in the park and I don't even believe in ghosts!" Sophie cries to the first person to talk to her in weeks.

"Well I am forever alive with no one to talk too. If I get close to someone, I know they will die before me and I will grieve again. Living forever is so lonely." Raphael says, tears welled up in his eyes and his fangs made little cuts in his mouth. The young man was tanned and yet pale somehow, like he is sick forever.

"Well, I could be your friend," Sophie sheepishly says.

"One day you may move on too and I couldn't bear that!" Raphael cries.

Sophie, almost regretting her choice of creepy house to cry in, tries to pat the poor vampire but her hand goes right through him.

"I am just a kid. I don't even know what unfinished business I could have. I doubt I will leave so soon or suddenly. You're the first person I have spoken too. The first to acknowledge that I am here. Please let me stay!" The poor ghost couldn't help but miss her parents, just as Raphael missed his own family.

"okay little girl. You remind me of my daughter and it's been decades since I've spoken to anyone. I will let you stay."

So that's how they spent their days, talking to each other, and giving advice...that is for now...

31 Days of Halloween Writing Challenge (makeup)

The years went by and Sophie had stopped crying. Raphael treated her like a daughter and she saw him as a fun uncle. The two became inseparable...mostly because they both didn't want to leave the house. Sophie did convince him to drink human blood and he convinced her to go see her parents.

As the years progressed, Raphael kept growing stronger now that he was eating properly. Sophie however, was becoming more depressed. Her parents were growing older, they had another child, Sophie's half sibling. She got to see them move on with their lives.

Sophie started to show up to her brother's room. She would talk to him, help him out when he was scared, and make funny faces at him but for some reason that only made him cry.

"Don't cry! I just want to make sure you get to stay with mom and dad longer than me." She would coo to him, but she would make sure to hide whenever her parents came in.

When the boy was around 6, he started communicating with her. He could see her! The two became fast friends. They played house, he showed her the newest video games, and she helped him with what to wear everyday.

Eventually, she wanted him to meet Raphael. So she kept watch and had him sneak out of the house...

Day 4 of 31 days of Halloween

The dark night shrouded the young boy in a cold blanket. He remembered to put on his sneakers but he wasn't good at tying the laces yet and the shoes flopped off and on his foot with every step, laces trailing behind.

Sophie didn't tell Raphael that they would be visiting or even that she had a brother. She thought it would be the best surprise! She knew he would love him just as much as she did. The young boy and ghost crossed the city, sometimes having to reroute because she forgot he can't just float over fences and rivers.

Though the boy was scared, she kept reassuring him and because he didn't know where they were, he followed. Eventually, they found their way to the old abandoned house that Raphael called home. At night, it was even scarier. The vines hung from the roof, the gargoyles out front were snarling, and the spikes on the roof made it look like an abandoned church.

The boy cautiously walked up the concrete steps, careful to avoid tripping on the moss that covered the sloping cliffs. He made his way up to the hulking doors and hit them as hard as he could, but not a sound was heard. He tried again. BANG. The sound echoed through the building.

"I will just go get him. He must be sleeping" Sophie says, sliding through the tall mahogany doors with ease. She finds him sitting in the study, drinking the blood of a delivery man.

"Raphael! I came to visit and I brought a friend so please come to the door. He can't get in."

"you brought others here without permission?" He races to the front and opens the door to see the slip of a thing that Sophie calls her brother. His hair was curly and long, his ribs poking through his skin under his small shirt. His hooded eyes stared at the vampire with only a mild interest.

"Are you Sophie's friend?" The boy squeaked out. The vampire bared his fangs and invited the boy inside...

Interesting article! The disease I was thinking of is porphyria. But it's also very intriguing to see garlic linked to rabies.

I wonder, though, if the burning properties of raw garlic that they talk about in the article might be part of the puzzle. The article dissuades the reader from eating raw garlic because it can cause second degree burns (which, as an aside, yikes, and I had no idea). Traditionally fire was used to purify. That's why heretics and eventually witches were executed by burning. The Church believed it was necessary to burn the heretic/witch to cleanse the world of their corruption and evil. So... maybe stuffing garlic in the decapitated head of a vampire is less about garlic as a cure for vampirism as a disease and more a method of burning purification.

Though why not take the next logical step and burn the body?

I know it's kinda late in the game for this question, but why garlic?

I'm aware of the idea that vampire stories were inspired by a real disease... I cannot for the life of me recall its name. And people suffering from it are sensitive to light and strong flavors and smells.

But is there anything more to it? The disease idea works to explain why garlic repels vampires, but why stuff it in the mouth of a decapitated vampire head?

And I saw that some have argued that Stoker was inspired by the Potato Famine, which he lived through, I gather. People would weaken and die, and some were buried alive. How does garlic fit with that?

Did Stoker find out about garlic from a specific source, and if so, what does the source say about it?

Forever lost in you

Let me bend your mind

Dismember this body with dismay