16 Blood-Curdling Facts About Vampires

On the off-chance that Morbius would be any good, we've been thinking about vampires. That included Morbius himself, now played by Jared Leto, but also Robert Pattinson's Edward (and his Batman).

It turns out the world has many kinds of vampires, with many weaknesses and various origins. The media previously lied to us about vampire traditions and relics. And famous vampire stories could have been very different from what we got—Dracula was censored, and we might have even got vampires in The Room. 

Here's a look back at some of the facts we learned. The links all lead to full articles with much more info, so click every one that interests you, as that's the only way to ward off the hungry bats.

1. The '90s Spider-Man cartoon couldn't show blood. 

So instead of sucking blood, Morbius touched people with a hand that looked like it was covered in buttholes.

2. Chinese vampires are too stiff to walk, so they get around by hopping. 

Balkan vampires, meanwhile, form when you leave a watermelon out for too long. 

3. Tommy Wiseau's The Room almost had vampires. 

Wiseau wanted his character, Johnny, to reveal himself to be a vampire by driving a car off a roof into the sky. 

4. Those 'real' vampire-hunting kits from history were a joke. 

They weren't for real people scared of vampires. They were gag gifts made in the 20^th century, some as recently as the '70s. 

5. Jared Leto ran what he called a cult.

Could have been just a publicity stunt. Still, it makes for a hell of a contrast with, say, Tom Cruise, who really does represent Scientology and yet acts like much less of a douche than Leto. 

6. Someone in a Texas The Batman screening released a live bat as a prank. 

7. Bram Stoker's Dracula tried to sell itself as a true story. 

The publisher figured British readers might panic, so he rejected the manuscript till Stoker removed the claims that the story was true. 

8. Errol Flynn stole John Barrymore's body from the morgue. 

That's famous actor John Barrymore, also known as Drew Barrymore's grandpa, and the goal was to throw him one last rager. 

9. Morbius almost appeared in Blade. 

Actually, the full history of who owns Morbius and why is pretty weird. 

10. One superstition says to burn off your baby's toenails, to keep it from becoming a vampire. 

Another says that if your baby is born with a spoon in its mouth, you must burn the spoon and feed it the ashes. 

11. Scotland has its own special myth of beautiful hooved female vampires.

12. Sick Americans were mistaken for vampires, and things got ugly. 

We call the disease tuberculosis. New Englanders thought it was vampirism, and they dug up dead bodies and ate the diseased organs as a precaution. 

13. A Transylvanian metal can give you long-term garlic breath. 

It's called tellurium, and if you eat the toxic element, you'll breathe out dimethyl telluride, which smells like garlic. 

14. Staking a vampire's heart was a misunderstanding. 

The tradition was to stake dead bodies to the ground, to keep them from rising, not to stab walking vampires. Stabbing would be dubiously effective against the undead. 

15. Robert Pattinson is (kind of) related to Vlad the Impaler. 

Distantly, through a common relative … Prince Charles. 

16. Vampire bats pee on you while they feed.

And then they vomit up the blood and let other hungry bats eat the blood vomit right out of their mouth.

Want to get more roundups like this? Subscribe to the weekly Saturday Morning Cracked newsletter:

[newsletter]