How Vampires Are Created

There have been many different legends and fictional representations of how one becomes a vampire. In modern fiction, the most popular seems to be that one becomes a vampire when blood is exchanged: the victim is bitten by a vampire and then drinks some of the vampire's blood. This method of creating vampires appears in popular literature and television, such as Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire and the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Creating avampire is more difficult in some fictional universes than others. In the aforementioned works, the creation of a vampire by following this method is all but certain. In the television series Forever Knight, however, the rules are the same (the victim is bitten by a vampire and then drinks vampire blood) but it is much more difficult to bring people across. In order to be raised as a vampire, the vampire must bring the victim to the brink of death without killing them, and there is a great risk that the victim will die instead of becoming undead. In the show, Nicholas accidentally kills his mortal wife when he tries to make her a vampire, and Janette admits that she has not sired any vampires because she cannot stop herself from drinking until they are dead.

In some earlier vampire fiction, the creation of vampires was simpler. In the opera Der Vampyr (1828) by Heinrich Marschner, for example, a legend told about vampires states that all people killed by a vampire will become vampires themselves. In the novel Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker, vampires are created when a vampire bites the same person multiple nights in a row. This method is used by Laurell K. Hamilton in the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter universe, in which a person becomes a vampire when they are bitten by the same vampire three nights in a row, and if a person is bitten by multiple vampires within a short time they may rise as a monstrous, mindlessly violent undead creature.

None of these methods of vampire creation, however, have much to do with traditional European beliefs about vampires. Vampires were believed to be of the devil, and as such people were believed to rise as vampires because they had a connection with the devil. This included witches, murderers, and illegitimate children of parents who were themselves illegitimate. The shift in the popular conception of vampires, from creatures of the devil who were unambiguously evil to seductive aristocrats who could feel remorse for their condition and might try not to harm people at all necessitated a shift in the means of vampire creation, one which was morally neutral (or closer to it) and placed less blame on the newly created vampire for his undead state.