#Vampire Hunters

[beexpeach2]

this is so hannigram coded

Vampire Hunter Will riling up Vampire Hannibal, knowing that more he edges him, the harder Hannibal will take control back from him. Will wants to ruin Hannibal first, to taint and tease and edge until Hannibal becomes desperate enough to lose control of his perfect composure. Will wants to see the beast in Hannibal, wants the uncontrolled and raw monster to desire him so much that Hannibal lets go of all human pretense to finally take control and demand permission from him.

if vampires can't come inside without permission does that mean that you can just keep riding that thang and they can't um . yknow

[room25-morgue-street]

I’ve been… brainrotting 👍🏽

[velvetbatss]

Vampire hunter’s kits 🧛🏻

[crownedinmarigolds]

My part of a trade with the absolutely amazing @spell-fox of their characters: Lucretia, Theodosia, and Randell. Members of the Red Order, aka Hunter Nuns (and their Lasombra Boi)! (Aka, something I would've joined immediately if I were born back in the day.) Thank you SO much for trading with me. Spell-Fox drew an AMAZING rendition of Noa and Nyth in our Dark Ages AU. UGHH I love every bit of all of this.

[avvail-whumps]

I’m just thinking about a vampire hunter who lost their arm. They replace it with a prosthetic one made out of silver. Imagining the pain when they grab a vampire, or pin them down by their neck while their skin burns under the silver and there’s nothing they can do because it hurts so much. Fingers desperately trying to find something other than the arm to grab onto to try and pry them off.

[pocfansmatter]

Alright my theory about Remmick from Sinners & the Native Americans.

First we're gonna start off with a little history lesson then we'll get to what I think happened between them before the events of the movie.

15000 members of the Choctaw tribe were forcibly removed from the land in 1831 through the Indian Remival Act (1830) and they endured what is known as the trail of tears from 1831 to 1833. They were forced to relocated from Mississippi to Oklahoma. Although not all of the tribe left that was just the first round.

"Approximately 15,000 Choctaws made the trip between 1831 and 1833. One-quarter to one-third perished from disease, starvation, exposure and murder. They called it a “Trail of Tears and Death,” a name that would later be used for the Removal of other southeastern tribes."

I'm not gonna go into the horrors of the Trail of Tears because I dont want this post to be too long. Feel free to research on your own and come back here.

Now over 10 years later The Great Famine of Ireland or the Irish Potato Famine hit between 1845 to 1852.

Despite just dealing with the pain of the Trail of Tears in 1847 the Choctaw collected a donation of 170 dollars equivalent to 5000 today and sent it to Midleton in County Cork, south of Dubli in aid of families experiencing hunger during the Famine.

In 2015 a sculpture honoring the Choctaw's generosity was placed in Midleton's Bailick Park called Kindred Spirits.

Now we get to 2020. You remember it I'm not going to get into the gory details. Ireland raises nearly 8 millions dollars through go fund me to send to the Navajo and Hopi nations which were hit the hardest during covid. They also sent medical supplies, water, and food. They site the Choctaw's original generosity for their donations saying they were "paying it forward".

Those are the main highlights but there are other events that show the continued relationship between Ireland and the Choctaw but I'm not gonna put everything because this is still about Sinners remember.

So let's get back to the movie. Please bear with me I only say it twice & I'm going based off memory. Ryan Coogler is very deliberate with his choices. We know that this film was multilayer and full of double meanings. We also know he does his research. I think the relationship between the Choctaw and Irish is the reason he had the Choctaw tribe chase Remmick to Bert & Joan's house. He could've kept it vague and called them "Indians" never specifically named the tribe but he puts in the dialog that they are Choctaw.

Something I caught right away is when Remmick gets there he asks for help and says "they killed my wife... I thought they were going to help me" and when they ask who is chasing him he says the "Choctaw" to which Joan replies there are no "injuns for miles". That's when Remmick notices the white hood & bribes them with gold. The thing that immediately struck me is he calls them by their actual tribal name "Choctaw" where as most white people (even today) around that time period would have just called them Indians which is shown in Joan's response. Being Native myself I immediately clocked the specification. It's not something that happens regularly even today. I remember the first time a white man looked at me & said "you're *my tribes name* aren't you?" I was shocked and could just nod. That's something that happens when someone is very educated and actually cares about the tribe enough to call them by their true name. Remmick showed a level of respect in that one word than people realize when watching the film.

Remmick knows the Choctaw because he's Irish.

So my theory is that what if Remmick isn't lying and he had a wife... maybe he had a whole family of vampires. Remmick's whole thing was "fellowship" and building a "clan with love", he wanted Sammie because of his ability to conjure his ancestors. He said he had some people he wanted to see again.

I think Remmick came to America looking for more family to turn, and being Irish knowing the Choctaw helped his people in the past, thought they would be his friends, that they would "help" him. When he got there however the Choctaw knew immediately he was a bad spirit and started to hunt him instead.

I think they killed his wife and any other vampires he had with him. I think he was the only one that managed to escape. I think they hunted him and his family one by one all day and the only thing that saved him was finding Joan and Bert's house and appealing to their racism. That and the sun setting were the reason the Choctaw washed their hands of the situation because the racists clearly didn't want their help.

What do y'all think?

People who wanted to be tagged:

@waywardconsultingtimelady @botanicalbias @bostontearave @kaitlyntalks

[suebswrites]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/63639943/chapters/163119514

Xaden Riorson, Vampire Hunter

The vampire hunter AU you didn't know you needed.

Xaden Riorson, leader of The Young Renfield Society, is on a mission: revenge against the vampires that killed his father. And no one is going to stop him or get in his way - not even a distractingly beautiful fledgling who just might be the daughter of his greatest enemy.

For @copperfirebird. Happy birthday!!!!

[queenlakiefer]

Saw this picture on Facebook and had to edit this and put Edgar there because it is totally something he would do 🤣

[alpaca-clouds]

The Horror Of Vampires?!

A friend and I talked about something recently, and frankly it really made me think about this. Officially vampires are creatures associated with horror literature and horror media. However, most people do not really interact with vampires that way? Like, sure Interview with the Vampire and Castlevania for example do get marketed as horror - but... People usually watch horror to get creeped out or spooked. But people usually watch vampire-adjacent media either because "vampires are hot" or because it makes for good action. I mean, I love my vampires - I spoke about it this week. But I (who was afraid of his own shadow as a kid) never once in my life considered vampires as "spooky" or "scary".

And looking back on the history of vampire media... This is not exactly a new development, right?

Lord Ruthven and Varney

We could start whenever with vampire novels, as the vampire genre goes back until the 18th century. However, I am going to start at the beginning of the 19th century wth The Vampyr by Polidori and the Varney Penny Dreadfuls by Rymer. Because these two already quite well show that vampires were not really creatures of horror back then.

Because neither story really was horror even back in the day. The Vampyr was mostly just Polidori poking fun at Byron. While some of the themes we find in Dracula later are present here, ironically it is quite clear that Polidori did not quite think about it the same way that Stoker did. (Or to put it differently: Polidori hung with a very different crowd than Stoker.)

The Varney stories are mostly just... confusing in this regard. The Varney story is most notable for being published as a penny dreadful first - and it seems the writer or rather writers were not quite certain whether Varney was an actual vampire or just a metaphoricial one. One way or another, Varney definitely was portrayed as more and more sympathetical over the run of the novels, and his death in the finale is actually quite tragic.

Dracula and Carmilla

Dracula and Carmilla were probably the one thing that actually was meant to be read as horror. And while we, who definitely would be considered to be "sick bastards" by Victorian standards, would not necessarily consider it this way, it was definitely meant to be read this way back in the day.

Both novels definitely play of the same ideas for horror. A very Victorian kind of horror. Because the horror in both novels is very much based on the idea of "corruption of the innocents" and the "alien who comes to corrupt".

Nobody is gonna argue that both books are extremly queer, which is exactly part of the horror. This was written by Victorians, who were quite appalled by the idea of queerness. Many paragraphs have been written before about Bram Stoker, who very probably was queer himself, writing Dracula with a mixture of xenophobia, antisemitism, and internalized queerphobia. Dracula is all the things that the Victorian society feared. The "stranger from the East" who comes in and corrupts the young people (Johnathan, and Lucy mostly, while Mina is obviously incorruptable).

The same is somewhat true for Carmilla. Carmilla comes in and corrupts a young girl into queerness. The queerness here is the basis of the horror.

Again, we do not quite read it this way these days. But that was what made those novels horror - and maybe it was what kinda made sure that vampires would not stay horror for long?

The Blood of the Vampire

Another book that came out close to the end of the century and already goes very deep into making the vampire sympathetic is The Blood of the Vampire by Marryat. While this story leaves it open (as do many vampire stories of the day) whether it is truly vampires involved here, there is definitely the suggestion... However, we read the entire story from the point of view of the vampire, and the horror is in fact that this young girl does not understand what is happening to her, and that she through her nature accidentally kills people.

I am Legend

Okay, I will admit one thing: Of all the vampire novels released between 1990 and 1970 I have only ever read I am Legend. Now, I am Legend is pretty much somewhere between vampire novel and a zombie apocalypse. Now, if you only know the Will Smith movie, you do not know anything about this story, mind you. Because the twist is completely different.

Now, for the most part the horror of this novel - and this is definitely horror - comes from the decay of society, and how a human being completely isolated will usually use his mind. Sure, part of this are the vampires, but the protagonist's mind is actually a way bigger part of the horror than the vampires.

Especially as the final reveal of the story is: "Vampires are actually quite alright. And they will be the future of humanity."

Salem's Lot

Salem's Lot is another story that definitely features vampires as horror creatures. And to be fair, I am struggling to say much about it because there is just one simple fact: I find King's writing incredibly boring and even kid!me (who, again, was afraid of everything) never found King's stories very spooky or frightening. For the most part I would argue that Salem's Lot has not much horror that is specifically connected to the vampires being vampires. They are just "monsters" that can turn pretty much everyone against you. That is the horror here. The big difference between vampires and zombies would probably be the very specific weaknesses of vampires - and the fact that they are cunning, which zombies usually are not. But generally speaking, the vampires here could be easily replaced with any other kind of monster tht could easily turn other people into "monsters" themselves.

Still, from all vampire media that I have read, Salem's Lot is probably the one example of a story, where the vampires are horror creatures just on the basis of being vampires - and where the book never really bothers even the slightest of humanizing the vampires in any way.

Interview with the Vampire

Just one year after Salem's Lot, though, the novel would release that would very much change vampire literature forever: Interview with the Vampire. Yes, this was officially a horror novel. However, I never read it as horror - and I doubt most folks who read it did. Instead this book and the ones following it, very much is the exploration of the psychology of vampires. Anne Rice's vampires are very sad, very dysfunctional people, who really just want to find some peace and happiness, but are quite unhappy. If anything the thing that is the horror here is not the vampires, but their existence. Because to them existing as vampires becomes a sort of psychological horror to itself. This is obviously especially clear when it comes to Claudia, who is cursed to forever exist as a child in a world that never will respect her and see her as a full person.

As you can see: I am not even arguing that there is no horror in here to be found - but the horror is not "scary vampire", but "being a vampire is fucking scary". Mind you, it is this aspect of the vampire that I found always quite fascinating, and that admittedly got a bit too lost for me on the long run...

So, this was pretty much the point where vampire media changed forever. At this point vampires were hypercharged and suddenly became very omnipresent in media to never go away over the next 50 years. And yes, from the 80s onwards I have read a whole lot more of the vampire media that has been released. However, I will not go much into many details from here on - rather than going into the three distinct types of vampire media that we have now.

Vampire Romance

I am blindly gonna argue that probably the biggest subgenre of vampire literature is vampire romance. Based on the fact that romance is the biggest genre of literature in general, you know? A lot of Urban Fantasy falls into this, too.

Now, generally speaking almost all vampire romances are the same: We have a human main character, most of the times female, who falls in love with a vampire, most of the time male. There are queer variants of this, but very little where a male human falls in love with a female vampire (or the other way around). Sure, I can think of a few novels like that (mostly stuff about non-white vampires, ironically), but generally speaking: Most of this is a tiny female woman or girl, falling in love with daddy dom vampire.

While sometimes the romantic vampires can be dangerous, I can hardly call them horror. Sure, there might be a scene or two - depending on the author - where the vampire goes into a blood frenzy and might be dangerous to their human lover, but in general vampires in this subgenre are depicted as something great, amazing, hot, and desireable. In quite a lot of books the main character ends up becoming a vampire, or at least yearns for it.

So, no. The vampire romance definitely falls out of the horror aspect.

Vampire Hunters

Probably the most varied type of vampire media we have around today is media about vampire hunters. While vampire hunter media was around forever (technically speaking the oldest I have read were from the 1910s and 1920s and published in pulp magazines, featuring usually vampire or general monster hunters - it even seems that this is where the entire "werewolf vs vampire" thing comes from), it really took off in the 90s with Buffy.

Vampire Hunter alligned media usually is more targeted at a male audience, though there are some stories that are more targeted at women. Either way: While the main plot here usually goes about hunting down either one specific vampire or just your average monster/vampire of the week, there is quite a lot of those that have a lot of sideplot focused on romance/sex and a wide cast of side characters. Generally speaking a lot of those stories however will be best described as "action", which is probably why we see this type of vampire story most commonly also in visual media - be it games, shows. comics, or movies.

However, one way or another: Very few of these actually go heavily into horror. While at least some of the games can have some creepy and anxious moments, and a lot of media here goes into splatter and gore... There is rarely a whole lot of actual horror in it. After all, in the end this genre is very much about a power fantasy - which is simply the opposite of horror.

Vampire Horror (?)

Between all the other vampire stories there are some vampire stories, that aim at least to be horror. Del Toro's The Strain definitely falls into this. And in general I have read a total of four books, that actually fall into the genre - while also being completely unable to recall the other three titles, as they do not seem to be in the Wikipedia list.

And this was actually what got me thinking about this the most. Because... out of all those books, only one actually worked for me. And that was a book written from an indigenous perspective doing the same thing that Castlevania Nocturne does: Equating colonialists with vampires.

However, I am not quite sure whether this was because I identified with this perspective, or whether it was because of these books it was the only one not taking place in a semi-modern world.

See, here is the thing: In a modern setting vampire are just not very scary, no matter what you do. And that... Well, it leads me to a theory.

What makes a vampire scary?

So, let me talk for a moment about this. What actually is the horror of the vampire?

From all the novels I have read, I would argue that the general ideas of horror within vampires come from one or more of the following ideas:

Vampires can corrupt anyone into their ways. One horror aspect of this is, that they can turn anyone against you. Even your lover, your family, your friends can fight you on the next day.

Vampires can corrupt you. They can "infect you" and make you live out your darkest desires - be those of sexual or a violent nature.

Vampires can hide in plain sight. They can appear as human for the most part and can hence sneak up on you rather easily.

Vampires usually are incredibly hard to kill (unless you have sunlight).

The last part is the biggest issue.

I will now say it again: Originally vampires could go out into the sunlight. The entire thing with "vampires die in the sunlight" actually goes back to the Nosferatu movie running out of budget for an epic final battle and people ran with it. But it is exactly this that makes vampires so often not work as horror. Because it is a very easy, obvious solution to killing them.

A few days ago I saw a post on my timeline on how monsters that are visible are actually a lot more scary - and I kinda agree. But generally I think that a main issue with vampire horror is, that the "weaknesses" are just too silly and too obvious.

In general I think vampires would work better in a sort of psychological horror, that goes more into the first two aspects of it. Because the vampire as a monster... I am afraid it just does not work anymore these days - if it has ever worked.

And a part of me really would love to write some proper horror with vampires at some point. But I don't know if it can even work. What do you think?

[respecttheshoes]

What if ... Azriel & Gwyn were Vamp Hunters ... (chapter 6)

Azriel brings Gwyn home to look over her injuries. Things start out exactly how you would think, but the evening ends in a way that neither of them expected.

Read Chapter 6 of Slay Me on Ao3.

[one-in-a-million-fishsticks]

Awoocard: **Eats Some Random Vampire Hunter's Shoe At a Function**

Juste: "Huh......."

[grayrazor]

One thing that is very nice about Eggers’ Nosferatu is that it doesn’t demonize Romani people like Dracula did.

They aren’t Count Orlok’s servants, indeed from what we see it seems like they’re the vampire game wardens, culling the population so they don’t spread over the Carpathias and become an invasive species in Germany.

Also, since the protagonist is from mostly-Catholic Germany instead of Protestant Britain, they’ve got Orthodox Christianity as the weird eastern religion instead.

[sabrerine911]

"Undead Hunters smacking a mummy lord and some class misconceptions" WIP (BG3)

Featuring my non-tavs, The Unholy Trinity(Galmar, Beth and Cerise), and Gale, Minsc and the Mummy Lord.

Been finishing off ACT 3 on my modded console Unholy Trinity plus companion army run and decided to try a little respec on my 2 melee characters Beth and Galmar and put some Pali levels on em, since in lore they would have something similar to a divine smite and other holy spells. As Cerise mentions in the comic the Trinity has that ability trough their deep knowledge of holy runic magic from their setting combined with the holy traces of their twisted blood.

On a side note Minsc and Boo know the Trinity since the days of BG1 and 2 and Galmar being a Barbarian and Beth being a Berserker is a reference to that.

Sorry for the small lettering, I did not calculate the space on this one.

[pocfansmatter]

I have so much to say about the Natives in Sinners yall don't even know! Yall ain't ready.

Only reason I don't right now is because it's 2am. The kids got school in the morning & I have work. But trust me it's gonna be a long post & I've yet to see anyone bring up what I'm about to say.

[ourladyofomega]

Japanese poster for Konami's Castlevania.

[mcudc616]

Blade (1998) Posters

— Wesley Snipes as Eric Brooks aka Blade.