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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doug McCrae" data-source="post: 6915589" data-attributes="member: 21169">You're quite right, vampires are often depicted as harming their victims rather than outright killing them. Gradually draining life over time. However I think in the classic depictions such as Bram Stoker's novel and the Hammer Horror films this is a process that inevitably leads to the victim's death or transformation if something isn't done to stop it. The vampire seems to select a single victim and return night after night.It's a reasonable extrapolation that a vampire could behave differently. They could attack a different victim each night and not allow their victims to die or become vampires. A particularly good vampire could even drain the blood of consenting hosts only. Those ideas are sensible and logical, and certainly help to humanise the vampire if that is one's aim.The original vampire legends, Stoker and the Hammer films, seem to treat vampirism as primarily a disease. In Stoker there's a strong emphasis on the idea of it spreading, with Dracula creating a whole harem. If every vampire acted this way then it would be unsustainable as the whole world would become vampires.</blockquote>