Funny thought occurred to me a few days ago. A lot of time, in vampire movies or TV shows, we're told that they don't breath and that their hearts don't beat. This comes up in Buffy as well as the LARPG Vampire: The Masquerade. They also usually can't be poisoned, because if your blood doesn't flow and you don't breath, what could poison do?
Logically, that must mean that all of a vampire's autonomic functions are 'dead.' They could, for example, swallow a whole meal and the food would just sit in their stomachs, undigested. But they must be able to consciously flex their muscles because they can move. And even though they can't breath, they can talk which requires consciously compressing your diaphragm.
Here's the problem, though. Vampires are often highly sexual creatures. Anne Rice, Blade, Underworld, even the original Dracula has a fair bit of vamp sex, either explicitly or implicitly. It's a highly eroticised legendary creature. The bite of the vampire is almost always characterised as a kind of rape combined with consumption. But without autonomic functions, a male vampire cannot achieve an erection, which is sort of required for most sex acts with men. These highly sexualised figures can't get it up.
Makes you wonder why he really chose the name 'Spike.'
Addendum: July 31st, 2006
Evidently, Anne Rice has already addressed this issue in one or several of her seventy-four vampire novels. Because they can't have sex, vampires fall back on 'other means of satisfaction,' mostly involving torture. The women can fake it, but even then, it's not particularly satisfying. Considering how sexualised vampires usually are, it's interesting to consider that their violence could be partially due to sexual frustration. It's an almost Freudian reading. The vampire represents repressed/unexpressed sexual desires coming out in the form of depraved violence.
Posted by orion at July 6, 2006 11:54 PM