Tag Archives: dead blood

Within the canon of the Vampire Chronicles, can vamps get sick?

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Sick meaning: the flu, viruses (like HIV), and cancer? From my understanding, no, Ricean vampires are not susceptible to these kinds of diseases. In Only Lovers Left Alive, those vampires have arrangements w/ mortal agents to get clean blood rather than risk taking victims, whose blood could be tainted w/ modern disease or drugs, which OLLA vampires are vulnerable to (but they don’t go into much detail about it). I can’t think of any other vampire media that even touches on the issue of blood diseases and/or other physical illnesses. 

@anton-mordrid makes an excellent point here [X]: #1 how the fuck can you not associate HIV/AIDS with vampires, you personally literally made it a blood disease transmitted by explicitly sexual acts between your gay male protagonists.

I’m not educated enough to go any further on this issue, but if you want more on this, go to @vraik and @anton-mordrid. 

Sick meaning: physically repulsed to the point of having a visceral reaction? Yes.

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[^Horror Vacui, Exploring the darkness (2/?) by @sheepskeleton]

In TVL, Lestat tosses his cookies (ok he vomits some blood, no cookies tossed) at the sight of a pile of dead bodies the night he’s turned. (He also hurls as he’s escorted down to the Children of Darkness meeting).

“In a deep prison cell lay a heap of corpses in all states of decay, the bones and rotted flesh crawling with worms and insects. Rats ran from the light of the torch, brushing past my legs as they made for the stairs. And my nausea became a knot in my throat. The stench suffocated me.

He also says that vampires can’t stand to be around the dead bodies of their kills, either:

Revulsion at the sight or smell of death seemed part of my nature. I couldn’t watch executions any more than when I was that trembling boy from the Auvergne, and corpses made me cover my face. I think I was offended by death unless I was the cause of it! And I had to get clean away from my dead victims almost immediately.

Dead blood is not poisonous to them, just distasteful. In TVL, Lestat goes to Armand in Paris for help after Claudia and Louis try to assassinate him a second time, and Armand throws him in a locked cell with a dead mortal for dinner: “Sometime in the dark, I discovered a mortal victim there. But the victim was dead. Cold blood, nauseating blood. The worst kind of feeding, lying on that clammy corpse, sucking up what was left.”

^So clearly dead blood is not bad in the sense of being poisonous, just icky 😛

Explain to me why vampires cannot drink dead blood, but vampires (which are dead) can still drink the blood of other vampires?

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IDK about other vampires, but I would say that Ricean vampires are not in fact poisoned by dead blood, they can drink it, it’s just very distasteful to them. I’m not going to use all the equivocating language like “may,” and “might,” this is all my very strong opinion on this topic so as always #your headcanon may vary, don’t take it personally if we disagree.

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{{Oh Louis, bb, we know, it gets cold so quickly…}}

The huge difference between dead mortal (human or animal) blood and vampire blood is that the *~vampiric parasite~* in vampire blood keeps them alive/undead. Ricean vampires aren’t 100% dead (though they may poetically feel that way), they are metamorphosed into a supernatural accident. 

Lestat does say in the movie (and this is probably where the confusion about the supposed lethalness of dead blood comes from, too), “You let me drink *dead* blood?!” and it might seem like he means that the deadness of it was the lethally poisonous aspect of it, when in actuality he knows he’s been drugged, it was the absinthe & laudanum combo that’s incapacitated him. Still, those drugs are not poisonous to a vampire; he asks to be put in his coffin like a mortal might want to be put to bed, to sleep it off. Claudia did it to bring his defenses down so she had a chance at killing him. He couldn’t fend her off as well in that drugged state.

In TVL, Lestat goes to Armand in Paris for help after Claudia and Louis try to assassinate him a second time, and Armand throws him in a locked cell with a dead mortal for dinner:

“Sometime in the dark, I discovered a mortal victim there. But the victim was dead. Cold blood, nauseating blood. The worst kind of feeding, lying on that clammy corpse, sucking up what was left.”

^So clearly dead blood is not bad in the sense of being poisonous, just icky 😛 It must still have some minimal nutritional value since he feeds on it anyway.

Hit the jump for a little more, cut for length.

Lethal/poisonous blood is not about the blood itself, but is about the moment of death of the victim: What movie!Lestat warns Claudia about in Vampiring 101: (and he warns Louis in the book!IWTV) is that she must stop drinking before the victim’s heart stops, at least in the beginning, or else the victim could take her down with them in death. That’s more about the soul separating from its body at the moment of death. Older/stronger vampires can keep drinking and slurp the impact of the death down, too. Lestat describes doing it in TVL against his maker’s advice bc of course he goes against his maker’s advice:  

“…and when the blood came it was
pure voluptuousness. In fact, it was so exquisite that I forgot
completely about drawing away before the heart stopped. We were on
our knees in the snow together, and it was a wallop, the life going into
me with the blood. I couldn’t move for a long moment. Hmmm,
broke the rules already, I thought. Am I supposed to die now?
Doesn’t look like that is going to happen. Just this rolling delirium.”

Also worth noting is that when mortals are turned in canon, they describe vampire blood as being extremely delicious, satisfying in more than a physical way: “And it was not merely the dry hissing coil of the thirst that was quenched and dissolved, it was all my craving, all the want and misery and hunger that I had ever known.” – Lestat (TVL). Strong words! AR has equated the Dark Gift to childbirth and I think the act of the fledgling feeding on their maker is very much like an infant at its mother’s breast. That kind of nourishment is physical AND emotional.

Personally, I’ve tasted dead blood very recently, I just had chocolate blood pudding a few days ago at the Feeding Hannibal dinner (with @mferret9​, @sarah-thetrappedcat, and @thatironstring​!) and it was yummy but it does not produce that kind of satisfaction. At least not for me!

Was the notion that dead blood is bad ever dispelled? I was rewatching IWTV [for what feels like the billionth time] and Louis drinks rat’s blood from a wine glass. Isn’t that blood technically dead? Does it not count as dead because it was drained from a beating heart? I’m just not sure if this was ever settled, or if this is me just over analyzing things.

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Hey, not overanalyzing! I love #vampire physiology, and this is a big topic in that. Fortunately, it’s an easy answer. 

No, dead blood is not bad (as in lethally poisonous) to Ricean vampires. It just tastes like nasty old coffee *spits*

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{{Oh Louis, bb, we know, it gets cold so quickly…}}

You’re right that movie!IWTV was not explicit on this, I will explain u a thing based on the movie & canon ;}

The rat blood: is just as drinkable as the whore lady’s blood in the crystal glass later on in the story (the rat is dead, but the lady is still alive, when their blood has been poured into glassware, and in neither scene are the vampires poisoned that way). Blood extracted from a body is not bad in itself, but it cools with the exposure to air, and cold blood tastes bad as I will explain under the cut. When a vampire feeds from the victim directly, there’s no air contact with the blood, and it stays – preferably – hot. More than that, there’s also the entire multi-sensual experience of the act of killing which is way more fun than just the consumption of the nutritional value of the blood. 

Lethal/poisonous blood is not about the blood itself, but is about the moment of death of the victim: What Lestat warns Claudia about in Vampiring: 101 (and he warns Louis in the book, too) is that she must stop drinking before the victim’s heart stops, at least in the beginning, or else the victim could take her down with them in death. That’s more about the soul separating from its body at the moment of death. Older/stronger vampires can keep drinking and slurp the impact of the death down, too.  

Hit the jump for canon stuff, spoilers in there…

In TVL: Lestat goes to Armand in Paris for help after Claudia and Louis try to assassinate him a second time, and Armand throws him in a locked cell with a dead mortal for dinner: 

“Sometime in the dark, I discovered a mortal victim there. But the victim was dead. Cold blood, nauseating blood. The worst kind of feeding, lying on that clammy corpse, sucking up what was left.”

^So clearly dead blood is not bad in the sense of being poisonous, just icky 😛

AR answered the dead blood question at a booksigning ages ago, that dead blood is like “old coffee that’s sat out for awhile. Just distasteful.”

Lestat does say in the movie (and this is probably where the confusion about the supposed lethalness of dead blood comes from, too), “You let me drink *dead* blood?” and it might seem like he means that the deadness of it was the lethally poisonous aspect of it, when in actuality he knows he’s been drugged, it was the absinthe & laudanum combo that drugged him. Still, those drugs are not poisonous to a vampire; he asks to be put in his coffin like a mortal might want to be put to bed, to sleep it off. 

Claudia did it to bring his defenses down so she had a chance at killing him. He couldn’t fend her off in that drugged state.

Who knows why director Neil Jordan didn’t clarify this, and why he had the line 

“You let me drink *dead* blood?” My guess is that he wanted to underscore Claudia’s betrayal, she had made a “peace offering” that was actually a Trojan horse, designed to enter Lestat’s system and weaken him from within. 

Which is really upsetting, especially from a daughter to a father. That moment when she convinces him she wants peace, he looks at her with the most tragic expression, as Amy Nicholson wrote in her book Tom Cruise: Anatomy of an Actor, 

“When Claudia starts her assassination plot by bringing him a human gift, Cruise’s eyes show Lestat’s surprise that someone has finally done something nice for him for the first time in the film… In that moment, we realize that while Lestat is capable of love, he’s never been loved back.”