7 Fictional Vampires I Reckon I Could Batter Without Breaking a Sweat

Most fictional vampires are all fangs and no follow-through.

Let me set the scene. I am not a hard man. The most violent thing I have done this year is aggressively unsubscribe from an email list, and I had to have a wee sit down afterwards. My cardio consists of walking to the kitchen during an advert break. My one martial skill is a withering look I have been perfecting since primary school, deployed mainly at self-service checkouts.

And yet, after decades of reviewing vampire fiction, I have reached a firm and slightly troubling conclusion. A worrying number of the undead are absolutely hopeless in a fight.

Not all of them. I would not go three rounds with anything Anne Rice wrote, and I would sooner read my own reviews aloud at an open mic night than square up to one of the feral things from 30 Days of Night. But some vampires are so structurally useless that I, a middle-aged Scotsman with dodgy hips, could take them apart before my tea went cold.

Here are the seven I fancy my chances against, counted down to the one I would most enjoy putting in the recycling.

7 Fictional Vampires, I Reckon I Could Batter Without Breaking a Sweat

7. Count von Count, Sesame Street

I know. He is a beloved children’s icon and I am a monster for even typing this. But the man has a documented, exploitable weakness, and it is basic arithmetic.

The Count physically cannot walk past a set of countable objects without stopping to tally them up, followed by thunder, lightning, and a laugh that suggests he needs to speak to someone. This is not a quirk. This is a clinical compulsion, and I intend to weaponise it.

My entire battle plan is one bag of dried lentils flung across a well-lit kitchen floor. He drops to his knees, starts counting, and somewhere around lentil number three hundred and eighty I have already staked him with one of Big Bird’s legs. I forgot to say prior to going up against the Count, I’ve already butchered Big Bird, and took a minute to stuff Elmo into a wood chipper, tickle me now you wee annoy bawbag.

6. Edward Cullen, Twilight

Edward is a hundred-and-something-year-old immortal who spent the bulk of that eternity loitering around a wet high school, watching a teenager sleep, and calling it romance. This is not a predator. This is a man who needs a hobby, a haircut, and a firm word from a mental health professional.

Sunlight will not kill him, of course. It just makes him sparkle, which is the whole problem, and also the murder weapon. I lure him into the function room of a Premier Inn, kill the lights, and switch on a disco ball I have surrounded with every spotlight I could hire.

He steps into the middle of it and lights up like a Poundland fairy display, and there, ringed by mirrors, he catches his own reflection from forty angles at once. A hundred years of brooding, and this is what he became. A sequinned nightlight in a budget hotel. He sees it. He truly sees it. And the last flicker of will drains out of him on the spot, felled stone dead by pure, undiluted cringe.

Cause of death: himself, at last, in high definition.

5. Grandpa, The Munsters

Grandpa is, we are repeatedly told, none other than Count Dracula himself. The actual Dracula. The Prince of Darkness. And he spends his afterlife pottering about in a Californian basement, mixing potions that never work and turning himself into a wolf he then cannot turn back from.

I do not need to lay a finger on him, because the man is a one-vampire industrial accident. I simply wander down to the lab, express polite interest in whatever he is brewing, and hand him the beaker on the left when he asks for the one on the right. That is the entire plan. He tips it in, mutters the wrong incantation, and the whole bench goes up in a green flash and a smell of singed cape. When the smoke clears there is a scorched patch, a monocle, and a small apologetic pile of soot insisting it was going exactly to plan.

Killed by his own experiment, which, let us be honest, was always how Grandpa was going to go.

4. Bunnicula

Bunnicula is a vampire rabbit who drains the juice from vegetables, leaving them white and withered. That is the entire threat profile. He is a menace to your salad drawer and to nothing else in all creation.

And that is exactly the flaw I exploit, because the wee man cannot help himself. He has to drain any vegetable put in front of him. So I put the wrong one in front of him. I leave out a single fat bulb of garlic, plump and glistening, right where he patrols, and I go to bed. He finds it. He cannot resist it. He sinks those tiny fangs in and drinks deep, and only halfway down does he remember that garlic is, for his kind, a spectacularly bad idea. By morning there is one withered garlic bulb and one very surprised expression, frozen forever.

I feel awful about this one. I sent flowers. But I would still make rabbit pie.

3. Count Orlok, Nosferatu

Now we are into proper horror, and I am aware I am pushing my luck. Orlok is genuinely unsettling, all rat teeth and grasping fingers and shadow creeping up the stairwell. In the dark, he ends me. I accept that without complaint.

So I make sure it is never dark for long enough. His one great flaw is that he becomes so lost in his ghastly bedside business that he forgets to leave before dawn. I simply give him something to be lost in. I sit down across from him at midnight and begin talking.

The weather. The trains. Whether that new place on the high street is any good, and how it is nowhere near as good as the old place, and did I mention the trains. I am Scottish. I can do this until the actual heat death of the universe. He never gets a word in, never gets to the murdering, and never notices the window going pale behind him until the first ray catches his shoulder and he crumbles into a tidy heap on the rug.

Bored to ash. A fate I have very nearly inflicted at several book launches.

2. Count Duckula

For the uninitiated, Duckula is the Cosgrove Hall creation who was meant to be resurrected using the blood of his enemies but got brought back with tomato ketchup instead, leaving him a fully fanged member of the undead with no appetite for biting anyone. He wants to be a showbiz star. He is frightened of his own butler. He is, structurally, a vampire who has formally resigned from the vampire industry.

And his weakness is showbiz, so that is where I get him. He insists on performing for me, of course, a big desperate song-and-dance number under the castle spotlight. I sit through the lot in total, crushing silence. Not one clap. When he finishes, breathless and hopeful, I stand up slowly and deliver a heckle so devastating, so precisely aimed at every insecurity a small theatrical duck could possibly hold, that it lands like the review that ends a career.

He goes to pieces on the spot. And as the feathers settle and the spotlight dims, the word hanging in the air over the whole sorry scene is the one no duck ever wants said about their final performance. An absolute roast.

The perfect vampire to finish off, because he never wanted a fight, he wanted an audience, and I gave him the worst notice of his life.

So there it is. Seven members of the undead I have seen off with a bag of lentils, a bulb of garlic, a Chinese takeaway, and a pub’s worth of antlers. If any of them are reading, I meant every word, and my address is available on request. Just come round after dark, when I know for a fact none of you can be bothered.

1. David, The Lost Boys

Ah, David. Kiefer Sutherland’s bleached mullet given sentience and a motorbike. The big scary leader of the pack, the coolest vampire on the boardwalk, and, on closer inspection, the single most try-hard undead being ever committed to celluloid.

Let us talk about the hair, because David clearly wants us to. That peroxide spike did not happen by accident. That is a man who has poured a century and a truly heroic quantity of product into getting it to stand up like that, and I refuse to believe a creature of the night keeps a styling routine longer than the film’s runtime. And then there is his big menacing set piece. His terrifying power move.

Does he tear out a throat? Does he command an army of the damned? No. He buys a Chinese takeaway and does a bit. He hands you the rice, goes wide-eyed, “maggots, Michael, you’re eating maggots,” then holds up the noodles like they are worms. That is the whole intimidation. He went to the trouble of ordering a takeaway specifically to ruin it with a prank my nieces pull with a bowl of spaghetti.

So I let him do the bit. I take the rice, look him dead in the eye, and say, “it’s rice, David.” And as the mystique drains out of his face I give him one small, firm shove, backwards, into the enormous set of mounted stag antlers I have thoughtfully positioned behind him, because Edinburgh pubs are absolutely hoaching with dead-eyed taxidermy and it would be rude not to use one. Straight onto the antlers he goes, exactly as the film itself always intended, still holding the noodles.

Impaled by his own scenery, done in mid-prank, and not one hair of that mullet moved. He would have hated that most of all.

But here is the thing, and it is why David is the one I would truly love to do in, above every other name on this list. He is the original sin. Before David swaggered onto that boardwalk, vampires were monsters. They lurked, they oozed, they smelled of the grave. Then along came this peroxide catalogue model turning bloodsucking into a moody perfume advert, and every teenager in the western world decided the undead were dead sexy.

That is the moment the rot set in. That is the crossroads where the road to a sparkling Edward Cullen in a Premier Inn function room first opened up. David did not just make vampires cool. He made them marketable, and we have been paying for it ever since. Patient zero for the entire glittering nightmare, and he did it while eating a takeaway.

And do not get me started on the soundtrack, because I have opinions and this is my website. The Lost Boys is very possibly the only reason anyone under sixty still remembers The Doors, the band that essentially invented elevator music and then had the cheek to look pleased about it. If David had never existed, that whole reverb-drenched dirge would have quietly slipped out of the collective memory decades ago and we would all be the better rested for it.

So when I am finished with him, I am not scattering David’s ashes to the wind. I am flying them to Paris, digging a modest hole right next to Jim Morrison, and tipping them both in together. Let David spend eternity down there in the dark, sharing a plot with the patron saint of dentist-waiting-room rock, condemned forever to haunt the one thing worse than sunlight. Elevator music, on a loop, until the end of time. He earned it.

So there it is. Seven members of the undead I could see off with a bag of lentils, a Chinese takeaway, and the natural advantage of being extremely dull. If any of them are reading, I meant every word, and my address is available on request. Just come round after dark, when I know for a fact none of you can be bothered.

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