Last year, Marvel Comics quietly introduced a whole new twist on vampire lore that has the potential to redefine the Blade franchise for the MCU. In folklore, most vampires weren’t human at all; rather, they were demonic creatures who drank the blood of humans. Curiously, the idea of people being turned into vampires is – historically speaking – something of a new development. It only really developed in the nineteenth century, and it had nothing to do with legends and mythology.
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Nowadays, everyone knows how someone typically becomes a vampire. In most modern stories, a human drinks a vampire’s blood in an inversion of the normal vampire’s feeding, and is then killed so they can be reborn as a vampire. Some stories have even added a degree of pseudo-science to it, suggesting the potential vampire needs to be killed quickly enough for the drunk blood to remain active. But what nobody expected was for a subtle twist to be revealed in a random comic last year, and overlooked by all.
Blade Stumbled On A New Way Of Making Vampires
In 2024’s Blade: Red Band #3, by Bryan Hill and Carlos Fabian Villa, Blade clashed with a powerful and ancient vampire named Pontious Van Helsing. He used a disturbing tactic to recruit vampires; he simply replaced some of the blood used for transfusions at a hospital with his own. In this case, he then launched an attack on the hospital and killed a few people, so they would be raised as his own personal vampire army. But the truly chilling aspect of this is that he didn’t really need to.
Logically, vampires could easily capitalize on this approach by simply contaminating a blood bank. While many who had transfusions would survive, it’s logical to assume that some would naturally die and be reborn as vampires. Blood banks often service several hospitals in their geographical vicinity, so vampire hunters like Blade would wind up rushing from hospital to hospital dealing with newborn vampires who were naturally very hungry indeed.
Even more disturbing, though, it’s worth remembering that not every vampire story runs with the idea that vampire blood is only active for a short period of time. Marvel could easily switch this up, which would mean that absolutely anybody who had undergone a blood transfusion at one of those hospitals would turn into a vampire when they eventually died. Vampires would spontaneously rise for years or decades after a vampire used this technique.
This Technique is Perfect for the MCU
Vampires have officially been part of the MCU bestiary for a long time, even referenced by Korg in Thor: Ragnarok. The MCU has since begun to explore the supernatural, even if Marvel has been slow to make a new Blade movie. It’s surely only a matter of time before the focus lies upon Homo nocturna (Marvel’s official name for the vampire subspecies). Given that’s the case, it’s interesting to speculate what approach Marvel will take.
Marvel has always liked to dabble in pseudoscience, even when dealing with magic and the supernatural. Doctor Strange used quantum mechanics to explain away sorcery, while Thor claimed to come from a world where science and magic were one and the same thing. It would be easy for Marvel to incorporate some pseudoscientific tactics into their own version of vampire lore, and that could easily include something like this disturbing way of creating vampires.
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