The big problem I always had with vampires was one of mathematics. If one vampire bites someone and that someone becomes a vampire who bites someone who becomes a vampire and so on, eventually, there would be no more people--only vampires. Obviously that never happened, so you must draw one of two conclusions: Either vampires don't exist or the assumptions about how they reproduce are wrong. I'm here to tell you that vampires are real and therefore, the latter is true.
As a fan of horror movies and literature, I've seen the way that this subject has been approached in the past and with most legends people come up with to explain what they don't understand, there is truth and fiction involved. In the Anne Rice novels, you had to not only be bitten by a vampire, but also drink their blood. I've never actually witnessed that, but I have heard that it is part of the transformation, not necessarily causing it, but strengthening the fledgling vampire. More on that later. In the original Dracula, there seemed to be a lot of preparation that went into making a vampire, with Dracula visiting Mina over several nights and slowly drinking her blood. This appears to be part of it too, because the shock of too much blood loss from a vampire bite seems to lead to death and nothing more.
This is as good a place as any to talk about vampire bites. There is nothing romantic or elegant about a vampire bite. It is the animalistic tearing of flesh with the goal of causing the blood that gives you life to spill. Now it is in a vampire's best interest to not call attention to itself by leaving a lot of corpses around with gaping neck wounds, and the smart ones--the OLD ones, realize this. They also realize that it's wasteful to kill someone to drink their blood because the amount of blood they can actually consume in one feeding is relatively small compared to the amount of blood in the body. They make the smallest wound they can, in the hopes that the victim will survive and heal. The newer vampires just launch themselves at people and keep tearing until they find the jugular, then rip it open as wide as they can to get to the blood. That's why some older vampires will actually hunt for a fledgling vampire, taking blood from a victim and allowing the young vampire to drink from the older vampires own regenerative veins. By the way, speaking of vampire bites, there is another vampire myth has some truth in it--vampire bites, at least the smaller, careful ones, do seem to heal a little more quickly than they should.
So, just to sum up, if a vampire bites someone they don't drink all of their blood, but they may do so much damage that the person bleeds out anyway. If the person lives or dies, either way, they do not become a vampire. That leads us back to the central question--how does one become a vampire? The truth is, I don't know. The ratio of bite to change is small, though--maybe one in 20. Maybe the vampire does some special type of bite, or maybe it has to be a special type of vampire, or maybe they have to take just the right amount of blood over a long time period (like in Dracula). I think it's genetic. I think some of us carry the "Vampire gene" and some don't. Maybe if we have that gene, it stays dormant, hidden in our genetic code, only activating when experience severe blood loss. If that theory is correct, maybe someday we could isolate potential vampires and treat them, "Deactivating the gene." I don't know. The hole in my theory is that vampires seem to know when someone is going to turn--it's almost like a conscious selection process. Do they recognize the ability of someone to become a vampire, or do they actively groom that person to become a vampire? I guess I'll have to ask one someday.
