I don’t want to shock you, but Edward Cullen wasn’t the first Vegetarian Vampire to take a seat at the table. In fact, Edward comes from a long, storied line of ethically minded bros of the undead who all have one thing in common: while they might want to suck your blood, they’re really gonna try not to.
The Vegetarian Vampire, or leo lamia if you want to get fancy with it, is the one who either abstains from drinking human blood or finds alternative ways of getting it. And it turns out, they’re a staple of the Western Vampire Canon, a trope in their own right!
My relationship with vampires started in the ’80s and, like most kids in the western world, Dracula was my first. Not the real Dracula, but the version I met through cartoons and Sesame Street and my actual favorite The Monster Squad (*insert wolfman’s-got-nards joke here*). Because of this soft intro to the undead, vampires occupied a not-so-scary section of the monster world in my mind. Though the threat was there, it was hidden behind that Bela Lugosi-style caricature that all but obliterated the promise of danger.
I was on the cusp of becoming a teenager when the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie came out in 1992, but even that leaned into the idea that vampires were only slightly more dangerous than a bad hair day. For me, vampires didn’t acquire real teeth until Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire crashed onto the screen in 1994. It was even later than that when I read the book and others in the series. Suddenly, my imagination was populated with vampires who teetered on the edge of their own humanity, who struggled with and against it, who leaned into their dangerous power and tempted others to follow.
Lestat and Louis quickly became the standard against which I would compare all other vampires for the decades to come. In retrospect, I think it was also the beginning of the Vegetarian Vampire.
Lestat is arguably one of the greatest vampires in all undead imaginings (srsly, fight me), but it is his sadsack companion Louis I want to discuss. Louis, who clung to his humanity with every brooding fiber of his being. Louis, who drank the blood of rats rather than take human life. Louis, whose desperation for real sustenance eventually drove him to drink the blood of a dying child—an act that would haunt him for, well, the rest of his undead days. The key here is that Louis tried to maintain a connection to his humanity by denying himself the thing that vampires require in order to live: human blood.
Don’t worry, I won’t try to claim that Louis was the first to do this (if you have other examples, by all means, add to this list!), but he was the first popular vegetarian vampire.
The next was Angel of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its titular spin-off Angel. Angel and Louis were certainly cut from the same brooding cloth—they were both turned by blonde bombshells, they both equate suffering with the only emotion that means they are truly alive, and they both seek solace in sewers for some reason—the only difference was that in Angel’s case, he did not struggle with his humanity until he was cursed with a soul. While Angel has been known to imbibe a rat or five in his worst moments, (okay, so technically they’re not a vegetarian vampires, let’s call them free-range) he prefers a butcher or a blood bank where he can discretely source cruelty free hemoglobin.
Around the same time that Angel was skulking around Sunnydale and LA, another vampire was having a similar crisis on the page: Stefan Salvatore of The Vampire Diaries, which was a book series long before it became a glitzy, 8-season epic, also struggled with his lost humanity. In order to make amends for past wrongs (and to contain the bloodlust that threatens to overtake him if he has even a taste of human vintage), Stefan hunts only animals (at least, at first). Basically, he’s a vegetarian because when he’s on the good stuff, he’s an unrestrained serial murderer with fangs.
Finally, we come to the Cullens. Because in vampiretown, all roads lead to Forks.
The Cullens are arguably the most notorious of the Vegetarian Vampire squad, maybe because they’re so sanctimonious about it. They choose not to drink human blood and in doing so, have removed themselves from the greater vampire community. Similar to both Louis and Stefan, they occupy a space that makes them vulnerable in order to not become fully monstrous. And yet! Edward also struggles with a nearly overwhelming bloodlust that puts Bella in danger every time he’s near enough to smell her. To be totally honest, it’s this bridling gothic-hero power that is part of Edward’s charm. Because what’s more appealing than that moment your true love looks deep into your eyes and says, “It’s a good thing I ate breakfast, AMIRTE?”
Okay, but seriously, the real appeal here is that quintessential Beauty and the Beast moment of love being the thing that can overcome even the darkest power/magic/curse. This is at the heart of the vegetarian vampire’s allure—their most basic instinct might be to kill you, but love, that true, epic, ageless kind of love is the only thing that can help them control it.
Taken individually, all of these vamps seem to be locked in intensely personal struggles for their souls. By refusing to drink human blood, they fight off the monster within by maintaining the smallest tether to humanity. But when considered as a group, the pattern is even more interesting. At some point, every one of our vampire heroes has to confront the question of whether or not to drink human blood and when you get right down to it, their main conflict is one of consent.
In Louis’ case, his turmoil over having been turned into a vampire in the first place leaves him horrified by his own choices. Out of utter desperation, he feeds from a dying child (because like attracts like I suppose), loathing himself all the while. But not nearly so much as when Lestat shows up with that same little girl-turned-vampire as a pint-sized gift of eternal regret. Nobody consented to that. Similarly, Angel refuses to drink from Buffy until he is so ill that she forces the issue. Though it saves his life, he’s furious that the choice was made for him and it is this breach of trust that leads Angel to LA and his very own show. Meanwhile, Stefan and Edward are battle buddies who only drink from their lady friends under the most extreme duress and ONLY to save their lives and/or turn them into vampires for better or worse. They do their very best to only drink when consent is clearly given and even then they feel bad about it.
All of these vampiric softbois brood because their eternal life comes with a price: they must either take lives to fuel their own or step onto a path that leads to such reckless disregard for human life that they might take it without even noticing (see: Lestat any day of the week; see also: Angelus aka Angel without a soul; see also: Stefan on a bender; see also: Edward’s murderous brother Jasper).
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Vampires Never Get Old
And here is where the metaphor of the Vegetarian Vampire gets really good. These leading vamps are almost exclusively men, almost exclusively white, almost exclusively straight, hetero, cis, and able-bodied. In short, they’re good guys from good families who rarely have a reason to question their own privilege. But that changes when they’re turned. Suddenly, they’re so far outside the life they knew that the only way they can conceive of to hold onto it is by denying their place in the new hierarchy. They refuse to take something that hasn’t been offered to them, yet, their undead condition requires that they constantly struggle with the temptation.
In other words, becoming vampires was their cue to acknowledge the privilege their position in society affords them by ensuring if/ when they take human blood, they do so with the person’s consent. Their struggle was a struggle precisely because the act of taking was so easy. It was a struggle because all their vampire besties told them they were entitled to it.
And that’s the thing about privilege. It’s easy. It’s access. It’s community.
The vegetarian vampire reminds us that it’s also horrifying.
A few years ago, I started working with my friend and colleague Zoraida Córdova on a vampire anthology called Vampires Never Get Old. Our goal was to gather a collection of vampire tales that took familiar pieces of mythology in new, more inclusive directions. But as the stories arrived, we found that they weren’t only expanding and reimagining the mythology, but they were also engaging in this same conversation. In the hands of our authors the themes surrounding the vegetarian vampire had morphed into a vibrant discussion of agency, transformation, and monstrosity. Of consent, privilege, and colonization.
Monsters have always been a reflection of the things that scare us, but they’re also a reflection of the things we struggle against. The stories we tell about them also tell us about ourselves. And I suspect these creatures of the night have more to show us in the future.
Natalie C. Parker is the author and editor of several books for young adults among them the acclaimed Seafire trilogy. Her work has been included on the NPR Best Books list, the Indie Next List, and the TAYSHAS Reading List, and in Junior Library Guild selections. Natalie grew up in a navy family finding home in coastal cities from Virginia to Japan. Now, she lives with her wife on the Kansas prairie.
Let’s start the comments with the lowest possible bar.
“In the heart of Transylvania, in the Vampire Hall of Fame, yeah!
There’s not a vampire zanier than Duckula!“
@1 Bunnicula?
A good intro to the true evil of vampires is the 1922 movie, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. Nothing would make that vampire sparkly.
Weren’t the vampires in Underworld ‘vegetarian’ (or maybe drank synthetic blood or something similar). At least, the ‘good’ ones. I only ever saw the first movie…but that would be a rare gender flipped version of the trope.
Terry Pratchett deployed vegetarian vampires in his Discworld series with the League of Temperance, who wear black ribbons and follow the motto “Not one drop.” As the name might suggest, consumption of blood is treated as an addiction, and the League seems to function something like Alcoholics Anonymous. Note that while a compulsion to consume blood exists, it doesn’t seem to be biologically necessary- though vampires who don’t drink blood tend to develop other hobbies/obsessions to compensate.
I’m unaware of any Ethical Blood Drinkers predating Rice’s (some dhampir traditions have vampires’ children by humans as more or less normal people with sorcerous powers, but that’s not quite the same) , but I’d be interested to learn!
German children’s TV had real vegetarian vampires.
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint Germain (1978) popped up about the same time as Lestat (1976).
Tanya Huff’s Henry Fitzroy is, if not quite a vegetarian vampire, then at least an ethical one in that he only drinks blood from consenting partners.
I would like to offer Mick St John for your consideration, from the short-lived TV show Moonlight. He (mostly) drank bagged blood that his friend the mortician kept for him.
Hah. None other than Fred Saberhagen, in 1975, published the first in a series of memoirs that establishes the Count himself as an Ethical Blood Drinker – not, mind you, precisely a good one, but an ethical one – that being The Dracula Tape. That would appear to predate both Rice and Yarbro.
Now having said that, there’s a notable distinction to be drawn between the Saberhagen volume and those of Rice and Yarbro. Both the latter are writing what’s essentially romantic fiction in which the vampire is a principal, where Saberhagen’s tale is more purely a memoir – and indeed, is framed as a direct rebuttal to Bram Stoker’s version of the relevant events. And the memoir states its intentions directly only a page or two into the text:
For the purposes of his narrative, Saberhagen eventually stipulates that vampires don’t actually live wholly on blood – rather, Vlad theorizes, they get a portion of their nourishment from (of all things) an unknown form of solar radiation. What’s more notable, though, is the attitude this version of Dracula adopts toward blood-drinking. He may refrain from feeding on humans for the most part, but when he does, he doesn’t apologize. He may defend his decision – sometimes the subject is willing, in other cases it’s a matter of self-defense, and occasionally it’s necessary when the subject would otherwise be in mortal peril at someone else’s instigation. This is a wholly different attitude from that of the romance genre’s Edwards and Stefans. Yarbro’s St. Germain is perhaps a closer cousin to Saberhagen’s Dracula, but that series has arguably shifted its emphasis over time in order to enhance its appeal to the romantic-vampire readership.
Does anyone else remember Forever Knight? As I recall, the protagonist, Nick Knight, was a vicious, carefree vampire until he fell in love with a human and tried to turn her, but screwed up and killed her instead. After that, he basically became a tee-totaler, and swore to protect humanity while searching for a way to become human himself.
Lest we forget: Nick Knight of the Canadian show Forever Knight. “He was brought across in 1228.
Preyed on humans for their blood. Now he wants to be mortal again, to repay society for his sins,
to emerge from his world of darkness.”
Also Ian Thornton of Port Charles. Arguably, Stefan from Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson series.
This sort of vampirism also fits the disability metaphor. It can be brought on an individual unwillingly or unwittingly and make changes to that person’s life that they must work around or accept as part of their identity.
Under an addiction metaphor, the individual is struggling against a power that could ruin their life and the lives of those around them. This gives us the reluctant vampire, who is urgently seeking a cure from what possesses them.
Carrie Vaughn’s supporting character, Rick the vampire, was a Spanish conquistador who was turned against his will. My exact memory of details is a bit fuzzy, but I do remember him killing the group of nasty vampires who turned him. Later, when Rick and Kitty the Werewolf (series heroine) are friends, we learn that Rick will only drink animal blood. Eventually he becomes a member of a group of vampire monks out to help save the world. (A devout Catholic, he was very distressed to be excluded from church before that.) Carrie Vaughn published a book just about Rick earlier this year The Immortal Conquistador, but I’m ashamed to admit I haven’t read it yet! When I do my next reread of the series….
Robin McKinley’s Constantine, in Sushine, has chosen not to drink human blood. He can get by with dead animal parts, so not a vegetarian.
Sorry, that’s Sunshine.
In John M. Ford’s The Dragon Waiting, a scientific explanation is given for vampires. They are not supernatural beings, but suffer from a transmittable disease. They can venture out by day, but are sensitive to light. They can make do with animal blood, but a steady diet of it makes them ill. Like the supernatural sort, they heal quickly. The virus is transmitted through the saliva, so a vampire taking blood from another human can choose to transmit the disease, or not.
They are generally considered abominations. In the novel’s history, the Byzantine rulers Justinian and Theodora ruled for a long time, because they were vampires. The duke of Milan, Giangaleazzo Sforza, a despicable enough character in real history, is a vampire and employs them; in fact, the first vampire we meet is an (unsuccessful) messenger/assassin from Sforza to Lorenzo the Magnificent, wherein we learn the medically correct method of despatching one involves severing the spinal cord.
One of the ensemble of protagonists is a German armorer/engineer, Gregory, a vampire. He certainly qualifies as a “vegetarian” vampire per the description. He would rather die than take life (except when he’s attacked with deadly force), and manages to get human blood from willing female partners in exchange for sexual favors from time to time, using scalpels, pipettes, etc. so as not to infect his partners.
(Oh, by the way, besides being alternate history, it gives a sympathetic, even heroic Richard of Gloucester. He does have his nephews killed, but solely because they’ve been turned — and a vampire cannot be allowed to be king.)
I think arguably the earliest “ethical” or “remorseful” or “reluctant” vampire in popular media was Barnabas Collins on “Dark Shadows” in the 1960’s.
For some reason this article reminds me of this offering from Kari Maaren: https://youtu.be/7xjyRuSR7nY.
Also check out the original BBC series Being Human – really captures the angst of supernatural longing against a backdrop of just trying to be normal. And it has some good jokes. Brought Aiden Turner to TV attention before he went all period drama in Poldark.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_Human_(British_TV_series)
What book/movie/TV show is Cullen from?
I would argue that Louis is bisexual, at the very least. I can’t really imagine reading the books and watching the movie and reading him as straight.
The idea that existence as a vampire would be a terrible curse in which the vampire is forced to destroy what he most loves goes back at least to Lord Byron’s “The Giaour” (1813). And Sir Francis Varney, in the 1840s serialized *Varney the Vampyre* definitely qualifies as an angstful vampire who hates what he is and eventually does himself in. Lord Ruthven, the eponymous villain of “The Vampyre” (1819), may have lacked a conscience himself, but he was the model for the literary vampiric anti-hero before Dracula came along and stole his crown. Lord Ruthven appeared in numerous other works including stage plays and an opera. In Alexandre Dumas’ *The Count of Monte Cristo* (1844), the Count is compared repeatedly to Lord Ruthven and said to resemble a vampire–and of course, he was tormented by the thirst for revenge that forced him to destroy what he had formerly loved, and from which he longed to be free.
As Russell H. says, Barnabas Collins on *Dark Shadows* (1967) was the first angsty vampire who hated what he was in modern times, although he was not the first to seek a cure for his vampirism.
Twilight is like the tiniest tip of the iceberg when it comes to vampire tropes.
@19: Edward Cullen is from the Twilight book series by Stephenie Meyer.
P.N. Elrod’s Jack Fleming from The Vampire Files is pretty much a vegetarian vampire – he gets the vast majority of his sustenance from cattle at the Stockyards in 1930s Chicago. The one time he allowed himself to imbibe human blood, he discovered a side to himself he found both hard to control and very frightening to him.
My introduction to the “ethical vampire” was the Saga of Darren Shan as a kid. It’s got a pretty interesting set up, in all honesty – vampires used to kill people by drinking all their blood (letting them inherit a share of their memories/soul), but when they decided to stop doing that, a small group splintered off and considers killing people part of their spiritual practices. And even some of the “ethical” vampires are shown to be quite horrific – coercing children into becoming vampires, betraying their friends in some of the most awful ways, and there’s a fair bit of implied sexual violence on both sides.
What I personally find fascinating about the Saga that I haven’t seen in other vampire fiction is that while the protagonist initially condemned the splinter group for killing people, he later came to respect their views to a certain extent, and the series did debate the issue more than once without definitively agreeing with one side. Even when you disagreed with them killing people, the fact that they took their “responsibility” of carrying on their victims’ memories made quite the impression on me as a kid.
@Russel H: I agree with Russel that Barnabus Collins of Dark Shadows is the first of the remorseful vampires. It is also the first to add the trope of the female doctor who seeks to help the vampire become human. Forever Knight Nicholas Knight copies and picks up this trope in the TV Series. Though in the original TV movie pilot the doctor was a he. The TV series correct that ‘mistake’ and made it so much better.
Agreeing with Marie (comment 20). Louis is certainly bisexual, as is Lestat. My gay friends very much appreciated that when we first read Interview in the 1970s.
Spike from Buffy and Angel. When he was bad he was good but when he was good he was great! He was also the snarkiest ghost you could imagine.
Didn’t Jim Butcher have “sex vampires” of the, I think, white court, who did not drink blood but fed on human emotions? It’s been too long since I read those to be sure. I think they count as vegetarian, but not as ethical, by any means.
I really came here to mention Forever Knight, but #10 and #11 beat me to it.
I dunno about ETHICAL but there IS one LITERAL “vegetarian vampire.”
I cannot believe nobody mentioned the Sookie Stackhouse books or the series derived from it, TRUE BLOOD. Really? The whole point was that someone had developed what appeared to be a viable substitute for human blood (though finding out Sookie was ‘delicious’ from her fairy heritage explained some of her popularity among the vampire set).
Seriously, people, Bon Temps, LA is Vampire Central.
Lestat and Louis have set the bar for me too. Every other vampire will be weighed against them.
I was tremendously dissapointed when I saw the movie though.
Don Simon Ysidro from Those Who Hunt the Night. Not exactly vegetarian, but he’s tried it, settling after 450ish years into a “I kill humans to survive, not because I like it” approach. It’s implied that he tends to survive by drinking criminals when he can, and killing only often enough to survive. His polar opposite is Lionel Grippen, whose attitude is best summed up by the comment “He left the table cause he had no stomach for the feast”, referring to another vampire who died to save humans. Grippen glories in being a vampire, killing as often as he can while not drawing the attention of the police or the public. Most of the vampires portrayed in the series do, or did, enjoy being vampires. None of them, even Ysidro, are very nice people even though they may be likeable, like Ysidro.