TVD: How to Make/Kill Your Own Vampire

This is TVD week! To celebrate the season 3 release on Tuesday, every post this week will concern vampires and The Vampire Diaries tv series. Be wary of some spoilers, although I will avoid anything uber important from season 3.

Today we’re going to learn how to make your very own vampire!

Now for the most part, I’m open to interpretations on vampires. There is one thing though that has always driven me batty, and that’s any version where new vampires are created through a single bite.

Why? Because vampires are NOT zombies!! Let’s consider the dark alley test.

Single zombie=funny

If I happened to meet a zombie in a dark alley, I wouldn’t really be too freaked out. I’d say “shit, son!,” back away, and then go find somebody to handle that situ. One zombie by itself isn’t really a big deal. The danger with zombies is in the number.

If I bumped into a vampire in a dark alley, well at that point I’d be hoping like mad that I recently updated my will. I’m going to assume there will be no happy ending to this encounter. A single vampire is deadly on its own.

Unlike zombies, vampires don’t need to have a psychotic repopulation rate in order to be scary. And logistically, if every single human bit by a vampire became a vampire, we’d already be extinct. That’s why in zombie movies there’s an underlying fear that the entire human race is going to die out and there’s no way to escape this fate. With vampire movies, it’s normally more focused on a specific character and situation without a wider concern for the world.

Movies like Blade and John Carpenter’s Vampires have always filled me with an inner rage. On the other hand, I love that in Daybreakers they address the fact that if every person bitten becomes a vampire, you’re going to run out of humans to eat.

The more standard way to turn people into vampires involves vampire blood being ingested. The details can vary – how much, time of day, extra steps needed, but the blood is the main thing. Think of vampire blood as your prescription to create your vampire. Generally everyone’s taking the same thing (the blood), but the doctor might switch up the dosage and the directions for your specific vampire.

The Vampire Diaries sticks to this general prescription idea, but it’s in those dosage descriptions that it becomes fantastic. Yes, you need to have a nice vampire blood night cap. But that alone won’t make you a vampire. In TVD, what matters is what happens while the vampire blood is in your system. If you’re on the verge of dying and you get some blood, you heal. If you have vampire blood in your system and you die, you start to turn into a vampire.

Which sets up the potential for all sorts of accidental vampires. Say you have a vampire lover, and one day you are attacked and almost die, so they generously raise a vein to your health. You leave, heading home, and get hit by a car. It’s vampire time, baby!!

What makes this even better though is that this just starts the vampire transformation process. To complete it, you have to drink human blood. So in TVD vampire creation is generally 1 part vampire involvement, 1 part personal choice. You have less vampires running around against their will. So to make your vampire, you should ideally have a volunteer. Although of course it could happen where somebody shoves some vampire blood in their mouth in their sleep, kills them, then shoves some human blood in their mouth when they’re starting to wake back up and rather drowsy. Therein lies the danger of sleeping with your mouth open (that and bugs).

So now that you’ve made your brand new vampire, how do you kill it? Inevitably, you probably will want to, so best be prepared to do the deed. The good news is that unlike True Blood, your vampire won’t explode into a gooey mess. You just have the normal body disposal issues.

With TVD vampires, you can stick to your usual execution methods. Stake to the heart, overlong sun exposure, possibly using an Audi (see example below), and removing the head are acceptable ways to kill (most) TVD vampires.

But they also introduce a whole new method to help in the process!

It’s called vervain. Apparently, it’s a real thing. The plant vervain, that is, not its effect on vampires. I absolutely love that they added this twist. Vervain has many uses in TVD. It can protect you against vampire mind control (yeah, they do that). It can reveal who is a vampire based on their reaction to it. It can be used for some light afternoon vampire torture. Most importantly, it can knock a vampire out, making it far easier for you to properly kill them (it’s a lot easier to kill things when they’re not moving).

Now when it comes to killing your new vampire, just be sure to check that they’re dead-dead. Keep in mind that with TVD vampires you can do things like snap their necks, think they’re dead, and then they pop back up a few hours later with a heck of a vendetta.