Do Vampires Have Sex? – Charlie Denney

Note: This topic is an outgrowth of a Twitter subject I read about 3 a.m. ~~last night~~ a few weeks ago. It took me this long to get it written and together.

Needless to say, this one’s at least PG-13, probably R. So reader discretion is advised.

Twitter handle is @ECharlayne.

I don’t sleep a lot. And I’m a night owl (much to my beloved husband’s sadness). So I read things online late/early and I see some really strange stuff on the interwebs.

Last night was one of them.

I love reading the #writingcommunity on Twitter. Fellow authors talking writing, asking questions about what your character eats or how to find last names.

Then there are the “human interest” posts, links to things on the web that go with writing. Last night’s read was an article by Emma Kelly in Metro News on Thursday, 29 November 2018. It had a simple title:

Here’s How Twilight’s Edward Cullen Got an Erection, Despite Having No Blood.

No kidding.

The article goes into how Stephenie Meyer brought the concept of a vampire getting a human pregnant would work in her mythos. Her mythos has a vampire’s cellular structure “frozen” like crystal, which is why they sparkle in sunlight. The body has fluid, just not blood, and that is what gets used to get an erection.

I don’t pretend to understand quite how it works but I can tell you how sexy vampires happened and how the Fangs & Halos vampires manage it.

Me “Mom, there’s sex in the book.”

My mom: “Like I don’t know what that is.”

There is more sex in the first 2 books than in the rest of the series so far. The reason is that Lilly’s Angel tried really hard to be a romance novel with vampires. Right up until the angels come in.

In Lilly’s Angel, Lilly and Sullivan have sex. That one chapter establishes that the vampires I have are not the “traditional” vampires.

It used to be that vampires were the villains of the literary world. John William Polodori from an idea by Lord Byron’s idea, Byron wrote love poems, and even with Polodori’s writing, neither man had ever written about such a creature.

Lord Ruthven is a horrible creature. Johann Wolfgang von Gothe published The Bride of Corinth in 1797. The Bride was a vampire, talking about the love of her life and drinking his life’s blood. How’s that for a romantic poem?

So is Varney the Vampire, a penny dreadful serialized story that ran between 1845-1847. It was written by James Malcolm Ryner and Thomas Peckett Prest. They preyed on humans, especially female humans.

Oh, Varney could eat food, but it didn’t agree with him. He could go out into sunlight and a cross didn’t effect him at all. And no sex. None.

Sheradan Le Fanu wrote Camilla in 1871, the very first female, and lesbian, vampire. Yes, lesbian fiction way back when. And she’s not too much of an angsty vampire either! The novel was also serialized as The Dark Blue in a penny dreadful. And it was a horror story.

Bram Stoker’s suave Transylvanian, Dracula, built on that preying, and continued the idea of the vampire sneaking through windows, having sharp fangs that punch right through neck skin and muscles. They’re creatures of the night,

It’s Stoker’s additions, the coffin, the allergy to sunlight and crosses that have been held as “proper characteristics” of the vampire since 1897.

Right up until we started getting the “romantic” vampire.

Think of Dracula. What immediately comes to mind? The accent? The cape? Those were Universal Pictures’s characterization played by Bela Lugosi in the 1930s.

Or is it the tall, dark, and gruesome Dracula that Christopher Lee played in the many Hammer Films. He did 9 of them, all together.

Or, if you’re like me, your favorite Dracula may be the handsome and brave one fighting for his people in Dracula Untold. Luke Evans played Vlad Dracul very well and it’s his portrayal that I saw when I was writing the chess game between Vlad and Mikhail in Archangel’s Gambit.

In Lilly’s Angel, you find out that the vampires can eat food. Arianne feeds Lilly finger sandwiches (and not made out of real fingers…). That’s something that I did.

I also have Lilly walking back to the crypt during the early morning. I had to have her dress as much as she could to do it. And Baron had to wait until dark to follow.

Rules are made to be broken but you need to know what you are breaking and why.

So. Back to Sex.

Audiences began to look at vampires, not as the horrors from the grave but as someone who could love them…forever. It really started with Christopher Lee’s Dracula, but soon there were sexy vampires seemingly everywhere.

Probably the first “sexy” vampire, at least the first one I can remember, was Barnabas Collins. Created by Dan Curtis for the afternoon soap opera Dark Shadows, Barnabas was supposed to be a short-time character, a vampire who would be staked soon as they could.

They didn’t count on the legions of fans, mainly women, who were drawn to him. So he stayed, and was eventually joined by a werewolf, a witch, a few ghosts, time travel. It went off the soap opera rails and never looked back. All because of a sexy vampire.

Later on, in 1991, they tried to revive the series, this time with Ben Cross (who passed away back in August of this year, btw) as Barnabas. It was good, but not the beloved Jonathan Frid version of the character.

And I won’t even go into that abomination that Johnny Depp tried to do, that wasn’t Barnabas and certainly not Dark Shadows.

But what did Dark Shadows do for “sexy”? You had hints of relationships but the program was aired in the late afternoon when kids were home from school. I know I used to run home from 4th grade elementary school to watch. I later caught the show when they did some reruns on cable decades later and there are no bedroom scenes. A few nightgown scenes but no “sex” scenes.

If you head over to fanfiction.net, you can find some sex scenes in the fan-written stories that have been written since the series ended.

Then Josh Whedon came up with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy killed vampires, right up until she fell in love with one named Angel. He was hot, sexy, and so darned emo that he was not only tortured but also torturing the viewers at times.

Then Buffy met Spike. Everything that Angel wasn’t, an English bad boy in leather, with an attitude and gelled hair. She spent several seasons trying to figure out which one to choose. She didn’t during the show but at a convention, the actress, Sarah Michelle Geller, let it be known she would have chosen Angel.

From there, television has gone from semi-innocent with some violence to full-on TV-MA or even soft X-rated.

The 1990s and early 2000s saw the rise of the sexy Canadian vampire.

The first was Forever Knight with Geraint Wyn Davies as Nick Knight, an 800 year old vampire who works as a homicide detective. This was the advent of the vampire detective who is looking to find a cure for vampirism. He’s aided in his search by the city Medical Examiner Natalie Lambert. He’s making progress when two old friends come to town. Lucien LaCroix and Janette DuCharme have come to see if they can coax Nick back into the vampire life. LaCroix is played, deliciously, by Nigel Barrett. There’s some sexy scenes but nothing really past the “hot” stage, instead focusing on Nick’s life over the centuries in the way of flashbacks.

In the US, the spring of 1996 had a very short-lived series called Kindred: the Embraced. This show had 8 episodes before it was cancelled. The network said that the plot was slow and confusing. But to fans of the role playing game (RPG) Vampire: the Masquerade, Kindred was a fun look at how the universe would work. The Masquerade is vampires passing as human to protect themselves. Break the masquerade and you get a death sentence. The clans are there, but the ratings weren’t. It’s a shame because there was a lot to work with, including some fine romances.

Blood Ties didn’t get the audience it deserved. The show had 22 episodes in 2007 but never caught on before it was cancelled. I liked the character of Henry Fitzroy, the bastard son of King Henry XIII (yes, THAT King Henry of lost heads and Hermit’s song.) Henry is in Toronto (see a theme here?) and working as a graphic novelist. He meets a former police officer named Vicki Nelson who had to quit the force due to her failing eyesight. She’s working as a private investigator. Henry begins to work with her, being her eyes and protecting her. The romance was there, steamy but no bedding. There was, at the end, somewhat of a budding romance, but that was complicated by Vicki’s ex-partner on the police force who was also her lover. The story didn’t progress enough to see who she would choose in the end.
Kyle Schmid played Fitzroy and yes, he was quite convincing.
This is also a show made from a book. Tanya Huff wrote the Blood Ties series and it’s still available.

This, however, is probably one of the best, early on, television shows with vampires. Based on Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Series, True Blood’s 7 seasons were sexy hot, even when it was ridiculous. Unfortunately that last couple seasons the story went WAY off the rails.
But it gave us some really sexy thrills with some great scenes, both in clothes and out of them. You had vampires, lots of vampires. Werewolves came in with Alcide Herveaux (omg, hot Joe Manganello), and there was enough sexy to go around.

In the books, Lafayette died really early on. But Alan Ball liked the character and so did the fans. Lafayette was unapologizingly gay and he had some of the greatest scenes (watch this one, it’s a great one).

Mixed in with the sexy were some really messed up scenes. Vampires explode when they are staked, with all the showering of blood and guts. People got killed, often enough that it’s a drinking game.

Four of the greatest “ewww” moments were:

1. Bill and Lorena–She’s his maker, killed his wife and children after she turned him at the end of the Civil War. She shows up again in Bon Temp and goads Bill into having sex. It wasn’t a nice coupling and ended with ….you can watch it here. Be advised, it’s very disturbing on several levels.

2. Bill and Sookie–they were all the time having sex, when she wasn’t having it with Eric or Alcide. The one I’m thinking of is in Season One, Episode Eight when she thinks Bill is dead and buried. She goes out, at night, into the cemetery and puts flowers on his grave. As she’s leaving, Bill show up, coming out of the grave. The big ewww is here for you to enjoy.

3. Eric and Talbot–The big blond Viking vampire is having some angry sex with Talbot, the companion/paramour/lover of a bigger bad evil vampire named Russell Edgington. Eric has nursed this grudge with Edgington since the guy killed all of Eric’s Viking family way back in the day. So, Eric and Talbot start to have sex and things get…a little out of hand.

4. Russell with the television audience–Needless to say, Talbot’s death has tipped Russell’s mind into nothing but revenge. He shows up at a television studio to tell the human population that the vampires aren’t the nice people they have tried to portray. and will rule over the lesser beings (humans). How does he get the audience’s attention? Then it gets…. well, go here and watch it, it’s all there.

Bonus Scene: 5. The last one isn’t so much of an “ewww” as it is funny. Vampire blood (or V as it’s known) has some really potent powers for any human who takes it. Jason Stackhouse (Sookie’s brother) is arrested on suspicion of murder and rather than go to jail for an added charge of possessing V (which is a felony), he digs out the vial and drinks it down while he’s in the police car. Later, he ends up calling Sookie’s best friend, Tara Reed, to take him to the hospital to tend to the after effects. Yeah, this scene is that good.

And one bonus picture: The fourth season of True Blood had a witch named Marnie Stonebrook. During the 11^th episode, the Soul of Fire, the end scenes have a fight between Marnie and the vampires. In that fight, a character named Roy tries to defend Marnie. Eric Northman kills him by pulling his heart out of his chest. In probably one of the funniest parts of the entire series, Eric then uses the heart like a bloody sippy cup.

True Blood has enough of all the fun to give you sexy dreams for quite awhile.

There are a lot of teen movies. Not as many good vampire teen movies. More teen shows like Vampire Diaries, The Originals, and Legacies take sexy to less extremes. Yes, there’s romance but that’s about it. Hot, but not too hot. Then there’s the Twilight Saga (I’m still not fond of “sparkly” vampires).

I’m not going to go into the whole thing here but if you put in “teen vampires” in your search engine, you’ll get things like:
Vampire High (200-2002)
Shadowhunters (2016)
Van Helsing (2016)
Being Human (2008-2013 UK and 2011-2014 US
Lost Boys (1987)
Castlevania (2017)
Morganville Vampires (2014)

And something called “I Kissed a Vampire” (2012). That one’s billed as a Rock Opera and the reviews say “Imagine Glee meets Twilight). Oooookaaaaay.

So, there you have it, sexy vampires do exist and they’ve only gotten more ‘expressive’ as time has gone on. I’m not one who knows much about X-rated movies but I’m quite sure there are some X-rated vampire movies out there. They probably have names like “Coming Out, from Inside the Coffin” or “My Maker’s A Machine”.

The Fangs & Halos series has sex in it. Right now there’s not much (books 3-4 and upcoming Book 5) but I’m quite sure that subject is going to be revisited sooner than later.

Until then, sexy dreams of bloody vampires, both male and female.

References:

Books:

Vampire Classics–4 books in one–Dracula by Bram Stoker , Dracula’s Guest by Bram Stoker, The Vampyre by John William Polidori, and Carmilla by J. Sheridan LeFanu

Varney the Vampire or The Feast of Blood by James Malcolm Rymer

Vampire Diaries by L.J. Smith

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

Mortal Instruments (Shadowhunters) by Cassandra Clare

Morganville Vampires Series by Rachel Caine

Vampire the Masquerade by Graeme Davis (Kindred: the Embraced)

Forever Knight books: A Stirring of Dust and Intimations of Mortality by Susan Sizemore

Forever Knight–These Our Revels by Anne Hathaway-Nayne

Dark Shadows by Marilyn Ross (3 complete volumes and several more by various authors)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Jordie Bellaire ( 3 volume collection and other titles by various authors)

Blood Ties Series–Tanya Huff

True Blood (Southern Vampire Series) by Charlaine Harris