Vampire lore

[ILLYRIAN]

How does a being become a vampire and how do you kill a vampire.
What was the original lore? And what do you think the lore was?

They keep changing look of the vampires.
The look of a vampire was nothing like the original vampires.

And before you say about the limitations of those days, in the original Mummy
the Mummy was in make up for eight hours at a time.

Take the look that Joss Whedon specified.
The one on Vampire Diaries
the one in Twilight.

How did they drink blood? In the early days of Dracula when a vampire
didn't spill much blood. It was just as well that vampires don't breathe
as they would probably drown in all the blood loss in True Blood.

So why did they change so much?

 

[Ethan Reigns]

I think a lot of producers / directors / screenwriters have decided that since there is no such thing as a vampire in real life, they are free to write the activities and appearance of vampires any way they please. In the Buffyverse, we have enough continuity errors within the story to concern ourselves let alone differences from other depictions of vampires. At the time Buffy was on, the networks had an aversion to showing large quantities of blood and particularly arterial spray. Since that time, this aversion has disappeared to an extent, so True Blood took advantage of that and made things as gory as possible. BtVS was largely a suburban environment whereas True Blood was intended to be the bayou, so the surroundings were a lot more organic - a clean vampire kill in a swamp does not have the impact of a clean kill in the 'burbs.

There are other items of lore such as in "Interview with the Vampire" from 1994 where a vampire will die if the blood he is drinking comes from a dead human. There is no history of vampires drinking animal blood whether from a rat or a butcher or blood from a bloodbank as on BtVS.

In the original lore of Dracula as depicted by Bram Stoker, a person is turned into a vampire by having the vampire drink on three successive nights from the same victim. I am not sure the original lore was ever consistent from author to author. After all, we are talking about an imaginary being.

 

[Skanky Vamp]

I don't know where or when the whole vampire dying in daylight came about as that was not always the case. Same with casting reflections. The very first vampire (I'm speaking of the Polidori text based off the writings of Byron) was pretty much just a dead human who had to drink blood to live.