Vampire Babies: Could They Exist in Real "Vampire" Life? (The Latest in Weird Online Obsessions)


Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson's cinematic "Twilight" odyssey continues today with the release of the duo's latest vampire-love collaboration, "Breaking Dawn." In this installment, the crazy kids follow a well-tread, familiar path to hetero-normality: First came love, then came marriage and then--SPOILER ALERT--comes a terrifying monster baby in a baby carriage (or, in this case, a big pregs stomach, blood-sucking from the inside).

Sounds happily ever after-ish, right?

But here's the thing: Twi-hards are obsessed with the new Bell-ward creature spawn, or at least the idea of it. In fact, according to numerous blogs and our own Yahoo! search results, queries about "vampire babies" have been spiking all this week and online debates have grown heated, pitting fan again fan in commenting forums. The issue at the center of these debates is: Can vampires make vampire babies?

Twilight Saga Answers says: "Whether vampires can have babies depends on what sort of vampire lore you're talking about. In much recent fiction, they certainly do. In J.R. Ward's excellent Black Dagger Brotherhood novels, the vampires reproduce the same way humans do (but the gestation period is much longer). "Twilight" author Stephanie Meyer drew upon tales of the supernatural seducer known as the incubus (reputed to feed off of its victim's life force, but not necessarily to drink blood) in creating the circumstance of the vampire Edward fathering a child (half vampire, half human) with his human wife Bella."

The Los Angeles Times blog Zap2it explains that Meyer isn't the first fictionalize vampires impregnating human ladies. In "Grave of the Vampire" and "Lost Souls," a women gets impregnated by a vampire. Apparently, the correct term for a vampire baby is a dhampir. Dhampirs, from Balkan folklore, are supposedly adept at finding and killing vampires. Ahem.

On Yahoo! Answers, commenters weighed in with the following insights:

"Vampires have evolved greatly from when they first came to existence. Two vampires could not have a child but a vampire and human could (half breed) There are several scientific books out there on vampires that explain this in better detail."

"No. Life begets life. Vampires are actually zombies. Their corpses don't rot and, apparently, they're mentally 'all there' (well, that depends) but I think their internal organs don't function what-so-ever. They're considered 'monsters' b/c they 'live' by taking blood."

So who's got the right answer in this serious argument about things that are pretend? We may well never know. But, man, we can't wait to see the movie.
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