"I was actually at Woodstock. That was a weird gig. I fed off a flower person and I spent the next six hours watching my hand move."
— Spike, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "School Hard"
Vampires may have their differences across media, but most of them have something in common: they drink blood. They drink blood from humans (or whatever species they once were) usually. So, what happens when they feed off of someone with drugs, alcohol, or poison in their system?
Why, they get high, drunk, or poisoned of course.
This can be Played for Laughs (unless it's poison) since stoners and drunks are funny when they make fools of themselves. This is also the only logical way for vampires to get intoxicated since their diet mainly consists of blood.
In extreme cases, the vampire might actually get addicted to the tainted blood and deliberately seek out drug users or drunks.
As an extension, this can also apply to those who feed on humans, but aren't vampires. See Emotion Eater or To Serve Man for example. The latter overlaps with Assimilation Backfire.
Compare and contrast Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth and Supernaturally Delicious and Nutritious. And no, this isn't about using blood with spikes as a weapon.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- An attempt was made to do a variation of this in Hellsing. The forces of Millenium know that Alucard will feed on the spilled blood from the massacre of London, both to recharge his vampire powers and add everyone that died to the legions of souls that he controls and can call on in battle. In the middle of Alucard's feeding, Schrodinger allows himself and his own blood to be absorbed by Alucard, then uses part of his powers to wink Alucard out of existence. It almost kills off the infamously invincible Alucard, as it takes Alucard 30+ years before he can manifest himself normally on Earth again. (The Major, the head of Millenium, explicitly compares this to a human drinking drugged or poisoned wine.)
- Samurai Pizza Cats: In "The Big Cheese's IQ Corral", one of Bad Bird's robots uses an "energy assimilator" on a drunken Guru Lou, resulting in the robot acting drunk. In the English dub, due to alcohol references being banned, this was explained as the effects of MSG in the food he'd been eating.
Blogs
- According to What If? (xkcd), drinking enough blood to get drunk would cause problems
preventing you from drinking that much blood in the first place.
Comic Books
- Hellblazer: Nergal's daughter gets rid of her invulnerable uncle this way: as entertainment during a feast, she has a few humans dance, which the uncle can't resist and starts devouring, then succumbing to the poison the dancers were given (they'd have died of the poison in a few minutes).
- There's also when John is at a practically low point in his life, and the King of the Vampires comes by to taunt him. John invites the King to bite him and end his life... forgetting that he has the blood of Nergal running in his veins. The King's jaw melting off is enough to inspire John to fight back and drag him into sunlight.
- Morbius: In his first solo series, Morbius feeds off a man who just used drugs and ends up tripping balls. Time slows, he can't think straight, then he gets shot in the leg and is distracted by how beautiful the blood seeping from the wound looks.
- Runaways: The protagonists come across a vampire named Topher who tries to turn the girls of the group. However the one he bites, Karolina, has solar powered blood which ends up destroying him soon as he gets a taste. The ironic thing is that Karolina wasn't even aware of this fact and his death was just pure dumb luck.
- Superman: A vampire hypnotized Superman and went to drink his blood. Unfortunately for the vampire, drinking the blood of a solar-powered Kryptonian acted something like eating an explosive.
- Teen Titans: One iteration villain Brother Blood could drink the blood of others to take their strength for himself. He immediately retches after trying this on Cyborg and swallowing the synthetic oil that runs through his veins.
Fan Works
- One drunken racist in The Vampire Spawn with the Green Hand and a Tadpole insults the Herald of Andraste and secret vampire Astarion one time too many before he decides that nobody would miss him. After draining him dry, Astarion gets drunk—too drunk to properly hide the body. Leliana winds up doing it for him, claiming that he died of alcohol poisoning.
Films — Live-Action
- Love at First Bite. Dracula feeds on a wino and feels the effect the next day.
Dracula: What was that maniac drinking!? Tastes like the Volga river at low tide!
- In the 2001 horror film Mermaid Chronicles Part 1: She Creature, the titular mermaid gets drunk after she eats a drunken sailor.
Literature
- Bloodsucking Fiends: The first sequel, You Suck: A Love Story, has vampires attempt to drain coffee junkies to help start their morn... their evening. And Jodie, who really misses fries, considers feeding on her boyfriend immediately after he eats an order of them.
- The Bloody Red Baron: The vampire Edgar Poe tends to feed on drunks. He's suffered from writer's block since turning, and hopes that getting a secondhand stiff drink will enable him to get back on the horse (the implication is that it's sobriety, not vampirism, that causes Creative Sterility).
- Books of the Raksura: Fell poison is deadly to the predatory Fell species but harmless to nearly everyone else, so some people in high-risk areas consume the poison regularly so that if they happen to be killed by Fell, their flesh will kill them.
- Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil has vampires able to get drunk or taste hints of their victims' most recent meals through their blood. Its initial appearance in the story is played for laughs at first, before a drunken stumble and fall onto a broken stool leads to an almost fatal revelation of the Attack on the Heart weakness vampires are subject to.
- Callahan's Crosstime Saloon: Pyotr is a vampire who siphons off nutrients and toxins from patrons' blood, getting drunk as a result. He originally did this after driving them home. Because he drank the alcohol from their bloodstream, his "victims" usually had the beneficial side-effect of waking up without a hangover.
- Certain Dark Things (2016): Atl's Vampire Variety can only be nourished by healthy blood — if she drinks from someone who's ill, it gives her a nasty case of indigestion and comes straight back up. Other vampire species have less stringent dietary requirements, with the Necros and Nachzehrer even able to feed from corpses.
- In Courtship Rite, se-Tufi poisons the leader of the Mnankrei, and in accordance with Getan custom his body is served at his funeral feast, but the poison is still potent enough to kill those who partake of his flesh, taking out the entire clan leadership at once.
- Discworld has several examples:
- In Going Postal, Mr. Gryle the banshee (who on the Disc are more like harpies) eats an Ankh-Morpork pigeon, which due to the unbelievable pollution levels in the city are described as "effluents with wings", making him loopy enough to be defeated by Moist.
- In Carpe Jugulum, this is how Granny Weatherwax ultimately manages to defeat the Magpyrs, who have trained themselves to become immune to the traditional vampire weaknesses. Rather than overpowering them, she takes advantage of their desire to turn her as well as her immense skill at Borrowing, infusing her own blood with... well, Essence of Weatherwax. Before too long, the vampires find themselves unconsciously adopting her mannerisms and temperament, alongside the sudden development of a craving for tea. Unlike most examples of this trope, it takes them a while to notice, and even longer to figure out what happened.
Nanny Ogg: She ain't been vampired. You've been Weatherwaxed!
- The Doctor does this at least thrice in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe: off-page in Doctor Who New Adventures: The Room With No Doors, on it in Eighth Doctor Adventures: Vampire Science and in Death Comes to Time. Always in dead seriousness, since there's an enmity betwixt Time Lords and vampires.
- The Dracula Tape: In the Dracula novel A Matter of Taste, Dracula notes that alcohol, cocaine, and other common drugs (and even garlic) produce interesting tastes in the blood but don't really affect the vampire drinking it. However, there is a Borgia anti-vampire poison: A breathing human who drinks the stuff gets high, and the vampire who drinks the human's blood gets poisoned.
- Dust Devils: Cody defeats the vampire Dragomir by tricking him into drinking the blood of the Sheriff Bittner, Cody forced Bittner to eat bluebell flowers before he was fed upon by Dragomir, and bluebell flowers are toxic when consumed by vampires. This means that Dragomir ends up indirectly consuming the Bluebell flowers and dying as a result of them being poisonous.
- Variant in the Heralds of Valdemar novel Storm Breaking: a character who can channel the voice of the land recommends dealing with a dangerous monster by drugging it this way (feeding it a cow which has been eating datura flowers) and then dispatching it while it sleeps.
- In the Morganville Vampires novel Carpe Corpus, this tactic is used to defeat the vampire who's taken over the town, Bishop. His rivals intentionally poison themselves, so that when he drinks said blood as part of a public execution, he gets infected and severely weakened as a result of obtaining the poison.
- Sabina Kane: If a vampire feeds on a drug addict, they can wind up addicted to the same substance due to experiencing the effects of the drug in their victim's blood. On the other hand, Sabina comments that the occasional pothead is "a fun snack".
- This happens to vampires who drink from drug users in the Bret Easton Ellis short story "The Secrets of Summer" (part of the book The Informers).
- The Shambling Guides: At one point, Phil drinks hobo blood, explaining to Zoë that the high alcohol content in it is the closest vampires can get to being drunk.
- Sunshine:
- There's an In-Universe urban legend that vampires won't target severely intoxicated people in order to avoid the second-hand effects. Rae doesn't believe it and suspects that some vampires would enjoy the extra kick.
- An enemy vampire cuts Rae in an unsuccessful attempt to tempt Constantine to lose control of his Horror Hunger. When Rae doesn't heal for weeks, she learns that the cut was also poisoned to cripple or kill Constantine if he drank from her, and only her magic is keeping her alive.
- Tales of MU: Mack, a half-demon, gets drunk by drinking the blood of a drunk guy. It's explained as a magic thing.
- In Those Who Hunt the Night, a character kills a vampire by injecting himself with a lethal dose of silver nitrate (silver being fatal to vampires in this setting) and allowing the vampire to drain him before he succumbs to the toxic effects of the silver nitrate.
- The Vampire Chronicles: The vampire Lestat drinks the blood of two boys who, unknown to him, had been fed a lethal dose of absinthe and laudanum, leaving him weak and delirious. Claudia had poisoned the boys to create an opportunity to attack him.
- Vampires: To get the edge on a group of vampire when the team is unable to use their standard tactic of blowing up the building they're in, the send down a fish tank filled with pig's blood and laced with tons of drugs.
Live-Action TV
- Angel (1999):
- The title character has been drinking pigs' blood, but Wolfram & Hart spike it with human blood in an attempt to make him Ax-Crazy. The same trick is used in Season 5 by a vampire trying to frame Harmony for the murder of a human.
- Faith sedates Angelus by taking a near lethal dose of a Fantastic Drug, then tricking him into feeding on her. "Orpheus" consists mostly of their resulting shared hallucination.
- In "Release", Wesley and Faith find vampires drinking the blood of human junkies in a back room of a Bad Guy Bar. Wesley explains that it's a mutual means of getting each other high — the junkies get the thrill of the Kiss of the Vampire, while the vampires get high on the heroin-laced blood.
- In the series finale Angel takes out Archduke Sebassis by secretly poisoning the slave whose blood Sebassis regularly drinks.
- The page quote comes from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "School Hard" when Spike is introduced. He ridicules another vampire for claiming he was at the Crucifixion by pointing out how many vampires make that claim and saying it would have been like Woodstock if they were all telling the truth. He then says he was actually at Woodstock and this trope happened to him.
- Dracula (2020): She didn't do it on purpose, naturally, but Zoe's cancer causes her blood to be poisonous to Dracula.
- Interview with the Vampire (2022):
- "A Vile Hunger for Your Hammering Heart": Claudia is inebriated because her latest victim was likely an alcoholic. When she stumbles in front of Deputy Habersham, he assumes that she has access to illegal spirits.
Claudia: So much wine in his blood. And beer and whiskey.
- "The Thing Lay Still":
- As Louis de Pointe du Lac outlines to Daniel Molloy, because Lestat de Lioncourt had a tendency to withhold information from him, his maker's tongue loosened on a blood-drunken night in Baton Rouge where Lestat divulged to his fledgling how a vampire can die.
- Claudia poisons Lestat with laudanum and arsenic via Tom Anderson, whom she correctly predicted Lestat would attack first at the after-party because of the latter's petty nature.
- "Don't Be Afraid, Just Start the Tape": In 1973, Daniel's bloodstream contains cocaine and Quaaludes, so when Louis drinks from him, the drugs enter into his system. Louis is clearly high when he argues with Armand.
- "Detroit": After almost draining Baby Jenks to death, Lestat becomes intoxicated because of the cocktail of drugs she ingested a few minutes earlier.
Lestat: I have a blind spot when it comes to blood poisoning. You'd think a vampire of my stature would know better, but then there's that old saying, "You fool me once, shame on me. You fool me twice, MDMA and LSD are excellent drսgs."
- "A Vile Hunger for Your Hammering Heart": Claudia is inebriated because her latest victim was likely an alcoholic. When she stumbles in front of Deputy Habersham, he assumes that she has access to illegal spirits.
- Conversed on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert's 10/29/21 episode. One Halloween card in the "First Drafts" segment had a vampire saying "I vant to suck your blood." The "first draft" showed the vampire bedridden after having fed on an anti-vaxxer.
- Stargate Atlantis: The Wraith are basically vampires Recycled IN SPACE! who feed on life energy rather than blood. The Hoffans develop a drug that immunizes humans who take it and kill Wraith that feed on it, though the side effects are almost as lethal to the humans.
- The Strain (2014): In the fourth season, Eph and Alex spike a shipment of blood for the Strigoi with blood thinners. It manages to kill an entire house full of them. This inspires Setrakian to take an entire bottle of them before his final encounter with Eichhorst. When Eichhorst feeds off of Setrakian, the blood thinners immobilize him badly enough for Setrakian to deliver a lengthy "The Reason You Suck" Speech before slicing his head off.
- The Tales from the Crypt episode "The Reluctant Vampire" defies this. Donald, a vampire, normally drinks the blood stored at the blood bank where he works as a security guard and alters the records not to show missing inventory. One day, he discovers that the manager took the records home and now he has to replace the blood. He finds a mugger and is about to take his blood when he asks if he's an IV drug user, has any blood born illnesses, or has recently had dental surgery. When the mugger says no to all three, Donald takes his blood. When Sally asks him to make her a vampire, he goes to bite her, but stops and asks if she's had recent dental surgery.
- The housemates from What We Do in the Shadows (2019) take Baron Afanas out for a night on the town, get drunk when they feed at a bar, then get high when they feed on some ravers. This ends up proving fatal for the Baron; he dances around the house instead of getting into his coffin, and gets burned to death when Guillermo opens the front door and lets in the sunlight.
Nandor: [wearing a traffic cone on his head] We drunk the blood of some people, but the people were on drugs, and now I'm a wizard!
Music
- Loco Loco's "It Burns! Burns! Burns!" has a G-rated version when Joe eats some chicken covered in hot sauce and a mosquito drinks his blood, which has become extremely spicy, and the two of them turn red.
Tabletop Games
- Changeling: The Lost: In the second edition ruleset, Changelings of the Gristlegrinder Kith gain the ability to swallow objects and people whole. However, if the victim happens to be poisoned at the time, the Gristlegrinder will suffer the effects of the poison as well (unless they have some form of protection from poisoning, of course).
- Vampire: The Masquerade and Vampire: The Requiem:
- Vampires can experience the effects of drugs through the blood of people they feed on. This can be an unpleasant surprise for some Kindred, but others seek out those high on their drug of choice.
- There's also specific notes for what happens in a crossover game. Drinking werewolf blood causes them to be extra-energized but much more prone to entering a homicidal rage. Changeling blood will cause them reactions similar to several possible hallucinogens and bizarre, unexpected "flavors" (with the note that if this becomes widely known in the Vampire world, Changelings' lives are bound to get even worse). Drinking a mage's blood may temporarily imbue them with the magical sight of a randomly-chosen school of magic known to the mage, which vampires don't have the training, experience, or usually the psychology to handle well. Any that know of this tend to be too freaked out by the experience (assuming they survive the bad trip) to ever want to repeat it.
- Vampires in Requiem can learn Blood Magic to transmute their blood into poison, causing lethal damage to any vampire (or anyone else) who drinks from them. Human ghouls can also learn the rite, though they lack the Required Secondary Powers to survive the effects.
- Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: In the Old World Bestiary, the Clan Eshin Master Poisoner Rikkit'tik advises dealing with vampires by taking an expendable minion, feeding him powdered warpstone (solidified magic, and one of the few things that can "poison" the undead), and giving him to the vampire to feed on.
Video Games
- Baldur's Gate III: The vampire spawn Astarion takes acid damage if he bites Gale, due to the Netherese Orb in his body, and fire damage from Karlach, since her Infernal Engine makes her whole body too hot to touch. Similarly, Araj Oblodra's experiments with her own blood rendered it foul, and he will visibly hurl if forced to drink it.
- Choice of the Vampire: The player character can choose to specify that they enjoy feeding on drunks because the intoxication is carried through their blood, giving it a certain flavour.
- RuneScape: In order to retrieve the blood diamond in Desert Treasure you have to kill a vampyre named Dessous. In order to lure him out of his coffin and weaken him before you fight him, you have to offer him blood that has been poisoned by placing it in a blessed silver pot and adding garlic and spices to hide the garlic smell.
- The Sam & Max: Freelance Police episode "Night of the Raving Dead" has a point where the duo face off with the vampire Jurgen in a music contest. Before the performance, Jurgen always sucks some blood from Max to aid his work. Before issuing the challenge, you can have Max drink holy water which causes Jurgen to gag during his performance after sucking Max's blood.
- South Park: The Fractured but Whole: If you use Mosquito's Bug Bite Barrage on Red Wine Drunk Randy, he will say he is starting to get a little woozy off Randy's blood. In actuality however, he's just a kid playing pretend while using ketchup packets as blood.
- Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines: Victims of the Mystical Plague spread by a vampire Apocalypse Cult have tainted blood. In theory, vampires can catch it and spread it through their bite; thanks to Gameplay and Story Segregation, it just gives the Player Character a nasty but temporary debuff.
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has Geralt deal with hematophagic foes in such a manner sometimes.
- There is a specific Witcher's potion called "Black Blood" that confers no benefit to the witcher that imbibes it, but renders their blood poisonous to whatever vampiric monster attempts to drink it. This is seen in effect in the "A Night To Remember" launch cinematic. Why would a Witcher drink something so blatantly poisonous? Because they can.
- One quest, in particular, has Geralt get intoxicated to lure out "The Oxenfurt Drunk", a vampire that preys exclusively on drunks.
- In World of Warcraft, this is a boss mechanic in the Atal'Dazar instance: Priestess Alun'za has an attack where she drains health from the group members, but stepping into the pools of Tainted Blood that spawn will give the player a Damage Over Time effect and cause her to lose health instead.
- One way to kill the vampire bat in Gast: The Greatest Little Ghost is to allow another character currently with you to eat garlic which results in him getting a very nasty surprise after biting said victim.
Web Animation
- Hunter: The Parenting: At the end of episode 1, the family manages to beat a vampire who was in the process of draining Big-D to death thanks to the fact that Big D decided to go vampire-hunting while high on DMT. The spiked blood breaks the vampire's concentration, thus also breaking the spell that was immobilizing the rest of the family and allowing them to stake him.
Kitten: As expected of Sir-D, he knew that putting narcotics in his system would befuddle the vampire!
Big D: That is definitely why I did that!!
Webcomics
- Sluggy Freelance: In one arc Torg and Sam the Sam-Pire go out drinking, Torg chugging beers while Sam slurps from a drunk girl's neck and gets just as drunk. It takes a dark turn when they wake up the next morning and find the girl's corpse.
- One strip in Vampire Bites had Rantz and Chloe biting a citizen who had just left a coffee shop and was drinking a pumpkin spice-flavored beverage which in turn transferred to her blood much to their amusement.
Web Videos
- L.A. by Night: Eva the Tremere prefers to feed from humans who are on drugs (ranging from painkillers to narcotics). In Season 4, we even see her giving a tab of LCD to a human at Nelli G's Hollywood party, and after feeding on him she is tripping for the rest of the episode.
Western Animation
- Avengers Assemble (2013): In "Blood Feud", Dracula manages to suck blood from the Hulk, which causes him to hulk out and make him stronger. However, it also severely harms Dracula due to Hulk's blood containing gamma energy, which is also what cures Black Widow of her vampirism.
- In the Fanboy and Chum Chum episode "Fangboy", Fanboy, thinking he's a vampire after mistaking a mosquito bite on his neck for a vampire bite, tries to bite Chum Chum's neck to make him a vampire, but he doesn't have one. They visit Dr. Acula (who is very clearly Dracula) to get Chum Chum a neck, and upon accidentally biting Fanboy's head, the doctor remembers that he already bit him before and the first bite made him contract Fanboy's ditziness and want to do nothing but play video games and drink frozen beverages all day. When he feels himself getting dumb again, he tries to escape only to fly out in broad daylight and be destroyed by the sun.
- A variation occurs in the Futurama episode "The Problem with Popplers". After Lrrr (an alien king from the planet Omicron Persei 8) is persuaded to spare Leela's life, Free Waterfall Jr. insists that humanity should pay for eating the Popplers (the larvae of Lrrr's species). So Lrrr just eats him instead. Lrrr then tries to make a speech to the people of Earth, only to get too high due to consuming traces of psychedelic drugs that were inside Waterfall's body.
Lrrr: I think there was something funny in that hippie.
- During the last segment of The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror XXI" ("Tweenlight"), Dracula and his son Edmund decide to feed on Homer's blood, only to both get poisoned and pass out due to all the cholesterol it contained.