1. You can’t choose your relatives, they told us, but my bestie and I tried, rubbed pricked thumbs together to blend blood.
2. Early accounts portray vampires as ugly, bloated and florid from blood consumption. In modern media, they’re charismatic, sexy antiheroes.
3. Licking a cut, what child doesn’t thrill to the rich iron taste of their interior brought forth?
4. Dracula is the main character in more films than any other except Sherlock Holmes.
5. To escape, throw seeds or rice. Believed to suffer from arithmomania, a vampire would have to count each grain.
6. Vampire imagery and language often intermingle with anti-Semitic tropes and the idea of blood libel. Jews are referred to as “parasites” that suck the life from societies where they reside. Jews, as well as Muslims, are forbidden to consume animal blood.
7. Many cultures have menstrual taboos, including segregating bleeding women, and a prohibition against touching men or sacred objects during that time. Some feminist scholars reframe this as a respite from chores and the demands of sex.
8. Blood-clouds in syringes. Then the sky.
9. On 9/11 we queued uselessly, wanting to help survivors with our blood.
10. While Slavic and Chinese traditions purport that a vampire is created when an animal jumps over a corpse, Russian folklore asserts that vampires had rebelled against the Russian Orthodox Church while alive.
11. The “One Drop Rule” withheld from any American with even one drop of African blood the privileges of whiteness.
12. Animal blood on a sheet can save a bride’s life.
13. In the late 1600’s, many people believed they could protect themselves from vampires by eating bread from flour mixed with blood of the suspected vampire, or drinking the blood