ZOMBIE vs. VAMPIRE, the analysis
This is the kind of email exchange my father an i occasionally have. Please read with tongue planted firmly in cheek.
Dad:
Question of the day:
If a zombie meets a vampire, who wins? Or do you get a vambie/zompire that sucks your blood and then eats your brains?
Me:
Well, you must define "win", and you also have to define, to a certain extent, what universe we live in for each.
Vampires generally are said to be sickened by, or possibly even killed by the blood of the dead, though for some reason non-fresh blood drank from donor bags or saved in a fridge is okay. I guess rotten blood to them is even worse than rotten meat is to us. Many vampire series say that if they continue to suck your blood as your heart stops, it will kill them.
So since that's pretty universal, the vampire would have no interest in biting the zombie, except in self defense.
Vampires are usually preternaturally fast and strong, too, whereas zombies mostly are not strong or fast, except that they don't have to worry about injuring themselves by overusing muscles. Even fast zombies (like 28 Days Later), though, aren't particularly faster than humans. They're just relentless and overwhelm with numbers. I donât think we can include government-experiment corpse-monsters, magical necromancy monsters, or demon-possessed Nazi corpses in this, since thereâs so much variation in strength and powers, and theyâre not really part of the traditional zombie definition.
So assuming we're talking more about a battle to the death, I think the vampire wins if it's night time. If it's daytime, and the zombies happen to find his tomb, he might be fucked.
There's also the lore that zombies generally aren't interested in eating other zombies -- they alternately either are able to smell the living, or just sense living flesh (or braaaains), and know that they're the good eating. Would the zombies thus not be interested in a vampireâs dead flesh, thinking it was one of them? The vampire might be able to just walk through unnoticed. Or because a vampire is a completely different, and arguably magical/demonic thing, would it be noticed in a different way? Unknown.
Where it gets interesting though: the different vectors for changing humans into either zombies or vampires. What would happen if a vampire was somehow caught unaware or overwhelmed by zombies (unlikely, unless theyâre caught during the day)? Would the vampire's accelerated healing abilities and inability to decompose fight off the zombie infection? I would guess so, but it's also an unknown.
Similarly, if for some reason a vampire decided it wanted to convert a zombie into a vampire, could whatever version of vampirism we're talking about (drinking vampire blood mostly, though sometimes a bite is enough, or just being killed by a vampire at all, though in one fiction being drained and sleeping in their grave with them during one day) be used to convert a zombie to a vampire? I think that yes, it would work, but why would you want to do that? Vampirism traps you in the state you're in when you're changed, so we'd be talking about a vampire with no mental faculties still, partially decomposed, and trapped at point forever.
In some universes, though, a zombie getting enough of the vampire blood, from the zombie biting the vampire, would be enough to transform them, so even if the vampire was fine after the bite, the zombie might become a hybrid. In others, simply being bitten at all by a vampire, even though that would not kill a zombie, would be enough.
In some legends of vampires, too, this is actually a default state -- that if you are bitten, you always change, but if you are not shepherded into the vampire world by your maker, you wind up awaking in your coffin days later, and starve into a mindless, shambling insanity for months as you slowly claw your way out. That's why, in those legends, there are both the mindless corpse monsters AND the sophisticated, opera-loving vampires who wear tuxedoes.
Dad:
I never knew there had been so much researchâŚ
Boy, it must really suck (pun not intended) for someone who was a NASCAR/shit-kickinâ country music fan when human, after he gets turned into a vampire: gotta learn to love opera, gotta figure out how to put on a tuxedo, gotta learn how to seduce women elegantly.
Me:
Well, there ARE options for biker and hick vampires, at least in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer universe. But that one's full of all sorts of monster and demon options, though oddly no zombies that I know of.
Dad:
If it becomes a hybrid, does that mean it would get better blood mileage?
Me:
Well, I think at least it would stop rotting, and therefore be eternal, as long as it doesn't get staked or burned or had its head cut off. Though as a zombie, it might just wander into a tree branch and therefore stake itself.
And if it's killed with a vampire-specific method like staking, does it revert to being just a zombie, or did the vampirism take over entirely, so that it is now dead-dead, or even explodes into dust or glitter? Unknown.
