Vampire's Harem

Things to do when you're dead.

"He was beautiful, magnificent, like an archangel. I was mesmerized, but I knew that couldn't be right. I mean, I'm a full blown fucking dyke, and here I was drooling over this... Man. I couldn't help myself, because I wasn't really me. I was a slave. I was one of his brides, there to serve his every depravity, and it was like that for decades. It was like being trapped inside myself; I was aware of who I was, who I used to be, and I could do nothing about it."

—Duke, Bit

It's very common in fiction for vampire lords to target and seduce women (and it seems always women) and recruit them into the ranks of the undead. Whether to ease loneliness or attraction, these women are treated as the vampire's consorts, his brides. Typically, he is accompanied by more than one, often three at the very least, and The Heroine is the one most subject to his attention in the story. The brides nearly always have completely identical personalities and are interchangeable except perhaps for hair color and the like. If a human woman is turned and added to the harem, she inevitably loses her original personality and becomes just like the other brides.

This trope traces its origin back to Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, referring to a trio of female vampires that live alongside Dracula in his castle and are popularly referred to as his "brides", even though this was never explicitly confirmed. That didn't stop them from being used this way in fiction; Victorian-era vampires were used as allegories of sexual impurity and deviancy. Which, nowadays, can be seen as more awesome than horrific after decades of Values Dissonance. While the male vampire/female victim pairing is the most common form of this trope due to being based on Dracula, gender-inverted or same-sex variants do occur, they are just rarer. (Hence, the gender neutral name instead of being "Vampire Bride").

Subtrope to Immortality Promiscuity. May overlap with Unholy Matrimony should the relationship work out.

Compare with I Have You Now, My Pretty, I Love You, Vampire Son and Vampires Are Sex Gods (which often leads someone joining said harem). Contrast with Romantic Vampire Boy (when a heroine has a consensual relationship with a male vampire). See also Vampire Episode, where this can likely happen as well.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Diva, the Big Bad of Blood+, is served by a circle of men she's turned called Chevaliers.
• Dracula Everlasting: In the third and final volume, Dracula begin reviving all the girls he bit up to that point as his vampire brides including one of the protagonists' own mother and likewise turns a few more girls as his own personal army just before the heroes show up at his castle to settle things.
• Ambiguous when it comes to the backstory in Hellsing. It's implied the "Dracula" story did happen as in the novel and Alucard, going by Dracula back then, had brides or "Draculina" as he calls them and tried to make Mina his before being stopped. Only partially succeeding in turning her evident when Millennium had used Mina's corpse to collect the vampire DNA within and create their vampire army. Seras is a modern day Draculina though Alucard had given her the choice to become a vampire after shooting through her to take out an enemy.
• In Interspecies Reviewers, a vampire friend of Zel lets his undead harem operate as a brothel due to the fact that he spends years sleeping in his coffin. Said harem consists of zombies, ghosts, skeletons and other vampires (including a Chinese Vampire), the former of which the titular Reviewers have issues with.
• Dio is usually surrounded by half-naked women in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders, and frequently feeds off of them. It’s also implied that he had at least two male lovers, maybe more.
• Deconstructed with Rosario + Vampire in the case of Issa Shuzen. Head of the Shuzen Family and powerful figurehead in the Monster World, Issa Shuzen is a polygamist and is married to Akasha Bloodriver (a powerful Shinso Vampire and one of the three Darklords) and Gyokuro Shuzen (official matriarch of the Shuzen Family and commander-in-chief of Fairy Tale), and even had a daughter in an affair. While Gyokuro loves her husband, she resents Akasha, eventually orchestrating her imprisonment within the dormant Alucard and having Issa locked away so that he would not interfere in her plans to Take Over the World. When he finds out that Tsukune - the guy who is dating his daughter Moka - actually has his own Unwanted Harem, he points out that he is not one to judge and warns him that such a thing can go sour very quickly if he is not careful.

Comic Books

• Army of Darkness Furious Road: Dracula is flanked by three brides (diversified here as his brides consist of a Caucasian, a black woman and an Asian woman) and helps in the war against the Deadites, being instrumental in driving them off from the last stronghold of humanity in exchange for blood. Unfortunately, the Caucasian bride is too much of a Big Eater and, when captured by the Deadites, sells them out for blood... only to end up getting staked along with her fellow brides not long after.
• Dracula, Motherf**ker!: The story is about Dracula's brides turning against him after learning he pits each one against another, let's their power grow then takes their power for himself.
• Gold Digger: Vlad and Natashia, the vampire king and queen respectively, have three vampire women as their main servants. Unlike most examples though, they're not very trustworthy and one of them is always conspiring to take the throne for herself.
• Grimm Tales Presents Van Helsing: Liesel Van Helsing fights three of Dracula's brides in Issue 2 of the story, managing to kill two before the surviving one wisely flees. In the final issue, we see that Dracula has amassed at least a dozen women as his brides though he orders them to let Liesel pass so they can confront each other.
• A Love Like Blood: Lord Karkossa has a retinue of vampire concubines to accompany him everywhere he goes.
• Rick and Morty: #37 had Morty turned into a vampire. When Rick and Beth confront him, he's amassed quite a harem. #38 had the villain vampire trying to make Summer into his bride.
• Santa Versus Dracula: The brides, depicted here as party girls, are among Dracula's conglomerate of monsters he has gathered to raid the North Pole.
• The Tomb of Dracula: Count Dracula has collected a number of women across the ages, but he also sought a number of superheroines like Storm and Sif.
• Victorian Undead II: Sherlock Holmes vs Dracula: The brides show up in Issue 3 and 4 with a turned Lucy Westerna leading them.

Films — Animation

• Scooby-Doo! Music of the Vampire: Daphne gets kidnapped by Valdronya, a centuries old-vampire, in order to become his bride. Subverted as it turns out Valdronya is no real vampire, but a book writer in disguise trying to stage a "vampire wedding" to create his own new tourist attraction, and to sell more books.
• Scooby-Doo! and the Reluctant Werewolf: Dracula has a female assistant named Vanna-pira with him most of the time, though the movie makes it ambiguous if she's a vampire or human since she never displays any powers or characteristics (though the gold eyes and the elongated nails point to the former).

Films — Live-Action

• Bit: Vlad had turned many lovely women who caught his eye, then kept them as concubines for years. Duke finally rebelled and broke free, destroying Vlad as well aside from his still-living heart.
• Blacula: When Dracula reveals his true colors to Prince Mamuwalde and has him subdued, he's flanked by his vampire brides, two of whom he sends to capture Mamuwalde's wife.
• BloodRayne: Leonid, a vampire, is shown to have a group of beautiful, naked young women around him in his castle.
• Bram Stoker's Dracula: While the Brides are present (one is played by a young Monica Bellucci) and their connection with Dracula remains unspecified, he actively seeks out Mina Harker and it's implied that Lucy might have been his bride too, since Van Helsing says that she welcomed him willingly.
• The Brides of Dracula: While the title is self-explanatory, Count Dracula is not present, instead it's a new villain, Baron Meinster, seeking out beautiful women to be turned into his servants.
• Bordello of Blood: Female example with Lilith, whose bordello is filled with vampire strippers to lure men to feed on.
• Count Yorga: The titular vampire seems to actively seek out an army of undead women with his brides outright serving as an Amazon Brigade.
• Dracula (1931): The original Bela Lugosi version has three vampire brides present in Dracula's castle in Transylvania.
• Dracula 2000: After arriving in New Orleans, Dracula starts converting various women to become his new brides. One of them (Solina) was one of the thieves who initially stole his coffin and accidentally set him free. The second one, Valerie, is a news reporter trying to cover the plane crash that brought Dracula to New Orleans. The third, Lucy, is the roommate of Mary.
• The parody Dracula: Dead and Loving It has a couple of vampire brides appear for one quick scene, where they attempt to seduce Renfield before being shooed away by the annoyed count.
• Horror of Dracula: Dracula has only one bride at the start but she's staked by Harker at the beginning of the movie. So Dracula targets his sister, Lucy, both for revenge and her replacement.
• The Invitation (2022): Walter Deville takes brides from each of the lesser vampire families who serve him. Since his Alexander bride had killed herself nearly a century past, he's been left without one. Getting her great-granddaughter Evie was his plan to replace her.
• Lifeforce (1985): Inverted. The Space Girl Vampiress has two Pretty Boy vampires following her around; all three of them are constantly nude since they don't care about human conceptions of decency.
• Manos: The Hands of Fate: "The Master" has a harem of six vampire brides. At the end of the film he adds the heroine and her eight year old daughter to it.
• The Monster Squad has Dracula abducting three beautiful uniformed teenage schoolgirls on a field trip (presumably during daylight?) to turn them into his vampire brides. One also shows up at the beginning when Van Helsing and his fellow vampire hunters raid the castle, feeding on a possum she caught before she's staked. A deleted scene was suppose to feature another attacking a hunter at a camp.
• Subspecies: Radu, the evil vampire son, targets Michelle and her friends, Lillan and Mara, to feed on simply to spite his brother Stefan who took a liking to Michelle. He succeeds in turning her friends and making them subservient to him. But his turning of Michelle is incomplete before he can really make her his.
• Van Helsing: Dracula's brides Verona, Aleera and Marishka. He also expresses interest in turning Anna into a new bride.

Literature

• Parodied in Constance Verity Destroys the Universe. Duke Warlock, the vampire that lives in Connie's apartment, has six ex-wives that he has to deal with and has given up Unholy Matrimony for the foreseeable future. When he needs "comfort", it usually involves brief flings with modern goth girl vampires.
• A Dowry of Blood: Dracula keeps three vampiric spouses that he sired personally. These are two women named Constanta and Magdalena and a young man named Alexei.
• Dracula is the Trope Codifier, though it's something of an Unbuilt Trope since the three female vampires are merely implied to be his wives, but never outright confirmed. If anything, it's heavily implied they might be blood-related since two of them share the same physical resemblance to him. Of course, this doesn't cancel out the other alternative, since vampirism is used as an metaphor for sexual deviancy in the book.
• The Dracula Tape: The brides are present as it covers the original story and even named (in this case, Melisse, Wanda and Anna. The blonde and brunettes respectively). But, in contrast to Dracula's Adaptational Heroism where he was just looking to move to London and make new friends, here the brides are presented as wholly villainous having let the power go to their heads. Melisse even outright tries an assassination attempt on Dracula near the end of the story. Dracula mentions he doesn't really remember why he turned them (save a vague remembrance of them being kinder back then) and planned to abandon them outright in the castle. At the end of the story, he does gain Mina as his mate after letting her live out her normal life and dying of natural causes. The vampirism kicks in after she's buried and regresses her back to when she was younger to which Dracula happily greets her after she rises from her grave. This was a mutual turning by the way.
• In The Empire of Fear by Brian M. Stableford, vampires live openly (and have ruled most of Europe since the vampire Attila converted Aetius and they established the Twin Empire of Gaul and Wallachia) and the most common configuration is a male vampire leader with an entourage of women he has converted. This is one of the things that leads one of the mortal characters to theorize that the common story of being made a vampire by being bitten is just superstition and that vampirism is actually spread by sexual contact.
• Fledgling has a variant: the Ina are a vampiric Human Subspecies that form a symbiotic bond with groups of humans. The Ina gets a blood supply, the humans get prolonged lifespans, and both get a strongly close-knit "family" — albeit one enforced by addictive venom that overrides their usual sexual preferences to be compatible with the Ina.
• Gotrek & Felix: Ulrika Magdova, Felix's love interest, is turned into a vampire by Adolphus Krieger in Vampireslayer due to expressing interest on her.
• Immortals After Dark: A vampire's beloved is referred to as their Bride. When they finally meet them, they regain the ability to breathe, their hearts beat again and they become even stronger.
• Overlord 2010: Shalltear Bloodfallen is accompanied by two female vampires that are explicitly referred to as her brides. She also counts as a rare female example.
• Strike the Blood: A powerful vampire is known as a "Progenitor", and they usually amass enough power to become a sovereign nation unto themselves. In addition to this, it's standard for a Progenitor to gain a number of mates. In the case of our hero, Kojou, even when he shows no interest in doing so, other groups manipulate events to create an Unwanted Harem for him. And, in a Call-Forward via Time Travel, we learn that he's had children with at least more than one of these women.
• C.T. Phipps' United States Of Monsters: In Straight Outta Fangton and the Morgan Detective Agency, vampires are practically required to have harems. This is due to the fact that it is better to drink lightly from humans regularly than drain humans completely if you're trying to live as part of regular society. The Kiss of the Vampire is so sexual (and frequently accompanies sex) that these harems are usually literal. In addition, vampires are described as almost all practicing Polygamy and tend to have multiple marriages to each other.
• Vampiros do Rio Douro:
  • Inverno covets Eliana as his "queen and bride" after she accidentally reanimated him with her blood.
  • Sétimo picks two beautiful young women Paola and Aléxia to be his brides when building his vampire army. They are an villainous version of Betty and Veronica with one seductive and proactive and the other demure and submissive.
• Vampire Hunter D: Count Magnus Lee chooses Doris Lang as his new bride in order to stave off boredom, and she enlists the titular protagonist to destroy the vampire and save her from becoming a vampire.
• Wayward Children: The Master of the Moors likes to claim pretty young girls, raise them as his "daughters" and compliant victims, and turn them into vampires when they turn eighteen. It's described in very similar terms to a sexually abusive parent. His current daughter, Jill, is desperate to become a vampire, because she's built her life around appeasing him and she doesn't know how to be anything else.

Live-Action TV

• Buffyverse:
  • In the backstory to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, Angelus had Darla, Drusilla, and Spike.
  • Likewise the actual brides from the novel show up briefly in the episode "Buffy vs Dracula" where they nearly seduce Giles before Riley scares them off.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022): Lestat de Lioncourt turned Louis de Pointe du Lac into a vampire specifically to be to be his Eternal Lover. They're crazy about each other, but in a dysfunctional, The Masochism Tango sort of way. Before long, Lestat also has a side chick, Antoinette Brown. He's a proponent of Immortality Promiscuity, saying that an open relationship will help him and Louis stay interested in each other over the long-term. There's no question that Lestat loves Louis more, but a case could be made that he likes Antoinette better — they get along more easily, and they don't constantly fight (although that's because Antoinette is a lot more compliant than Louis; she quickly backs down when she notices Lestat is getting angry, e.g. "I didn't mean to make you mad"). In the Season 1 finale, Lestat talks about upgrading this Bisexual Love Triangle to a more overt harem setup, promoting Antoinette (now a vampire) from The Mistress to his second spouse ("Antoinette will be much more agreeable to our life together") while Louis is his Gender-Inverted Top Wife. Louis loathes Antoinette — he's jealous of her and wants her dead — and he would never accept the idea of having to live under the same roof with her and both having to share Lestat's bed (or coffin). For Louis, this is a far more insufferable arrangement than if she had remained as Lestat's paramour, and it's the final straw in terms of what he's willing to endure (along with years of Domestic Abuse). His outrage at the thought of Antoinette joining their household boosts his determination to kill Lestat.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The Ravenloft setting:
    • Strahd's obsession with his brother's fiancée Tatyana led him to kill his brother and drive Tatyana to suicide, crimes that caused him to be Cursed with vampirism. The 5^th Edition Curse of Strahd module continues Strahd's attempts to claim Tatyana's Reincarnations; in the Bad Ending, he captures her latest reincarnation Ireena, turns her into a vampire spawn, and seals her in his crypt. He also has four female and one male consort, and might claim some of the Player Characters as consorts if he likes the look of them.
    • Elder vampires in 2^nd Edition can choose to create a "Bride": a free-willed Mindlink Mate. Since a progenitor vampire can only have one Bride (or Groom) at a time, doesn't have the usual mental control over it, and suffers terribly if it dies, it's generally only done out of genuine care for the victim — or some darker obsession.
  • In the module I2 Tomb of the Lizard King, the Lizard King Sakatha is a vampire who has a bride: a female lizardfolk whom he changed into a vampire. She will fight the Player Characters if they enter her room.
• Vampire: The Masquerade and Vampire: The Requiem both have the Herd Background/Merit, which reflects the vampire having a stable of regular individuals to feed upon. Given certain influences, this is often a stable of sex partners, but it could also be a group of blood cultists, the tenants of a hospital ward, or even a literal herd of cattle.

Video Games

• Castlevania:
  • In numerous games, Dracula takes women to make them his brides, some of them Belmonts' fiancées, which motivates them to go after the Lord of Darkness. One exception is Lisa, who becomes Dracula's second wife without being converted and stays with him for love. They have a son called Adrian Tepes (Alucard) and her death would cause his war against humanity as seen in Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse, in which even his own son Alucard goes after him (plot expanded with the Castlevania series by Netflix).
  • Furthermore, the Dracula novel is confirmed as canon in this universe, implying that the three "Brides" in the novel existed. More than likely, they were Succubi, who appear in numerous games as some of the most prominent members of Dracula's army. In some games, it's made clear that Dracula employs them as his personal concubines, when they aren't menacing humans.
• Demitri Maximoff, the current vampire character of Darkstalkers series and one of the protagonists, is usually seen with a vampire harem that follows him wherever he goes, usually seen in some of his win poses and in his own stage.
• Legacy of Kain: Vorador kept an harem of vampire ladies that likely served as his concubines, indicated by their their beauty and diaphanous clothing.
• Moonrise: Subverted. If the player sides with the Masquerade, Sati recruits them to retrieve xer wives from Dracula's castle. The four of them appear genuinely in love.
• In Mordheim: City of the Damned the Undead warband is led by male vampires who can be accompanied by the female "Vampire Thrall" units.
• Nosferatu: Similar to Castlevania, the main plot is a vampire kidnapping the hero's girlfriend and him braving his castle to get her back before he turns her (which can indeed happen both in the game over screen and if you used continues too many times.).
• Resident Evil Village: Lady Dimitrescu's "daughters", Daniela, Bela, and Cassandra are clear allusions to this even if the household's head vampire is their supposed "mother", not their spouse. Dimitrescu herself is a Gender Flipped version of Dracula, after all.
• Suikoden: After becoming governor of the Lorimar region, the vampire Neclord demands that the people sent him one girl every year to be his bride. The village chief's daughter Tengaar is selected, but the heroes mount a rescue mission to besiege his fortress and save the girl.
  • It's implied that Viktor's lover Daisy committed suicide rather than become one of his brides.

Visual Novels

• In Havenfall Is for Lovers, Dracula appears as an antagonist in the routes of vampire love interests Diego and Antonio. Siniang Li (first introduced as an antagonist in Vanessa Helsing's route) is identified as one of his brides, and Antonio mentions two others. The second bride is revealed in Diego's seventh and Vanessa and Antonio's third seasons as Necahual, the native Central American vampire who originally turned Diego and Antonio. The third bride hasn't been introduced yet, but according to Vanessa's third season, she has the power to raise the dead.

Web Comics

• Clan of the Cats: Dracula turns a few women during his story arc; including the protagonist's mother.
• Dracula: Ruler of the Night: Drac's three brides as usual (here named Winnoa, Maria and Ursa). But Lucy also ends up joining as well due to Dracula saving her from being staked after she turned. What's more her mother, Minerva, becomes a bride as does Van Helsing's mentally ill wife, Milly.
• School Bites: The main big bad, Dante, has two vampire girls in his harem named Babette and Josephine. He seeks to add the protagonist, Cherri, to his ranks as well.
• Total Undead Drama: Storm inadvertently starts one after landing on Camp Wawanakwa and biting Sadie when Katie and she end up in the cave he's in. Storm had only meant to feed on Sadie, but her boy-crazy and easily influenced nature made her fiercely devoted and, after Katie is turned who likewise had the same mentality, he decides to just go with it.
  Katie: Time to, like, make Stormy proud and add more girls.
  Sadie: I know right, like, totally must obey our cutie patootie master.
• Walking in the Dark: Big Bad Ian has at least three girls in his crew among his main minions, one of which is a young-looking girl who was turned a long time ago, making her the oldest among the bunch.
• Zombie Roomie: One of the main characters' friends is a vampire who runs a nightclub with most of the employees being strippers who willingly let him turn them.
• Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic: The vampire leader of the Fraternity of the Un-Deceased has a group of lingerie-clad female vampire minions who share his crypt. He refers to them as brides, although he seems to prefer forcible recruitment.

Web Animation

• In the Mashed short "Bloodsuckers", after Kirby sucks up Dracula and ends up turning into... something akin to a vampire. He tries to suck up Simon who grabs onto a loose plank of wood in the hall they're in. As he holds on, we see flashes of him thinking what Kirby will do after he kills him: draining some of the other Smash fighters into husks while turning a few of the female ones (Rosalina, Isebella, Nana, and Princess Peach) into his undead harem.
• In the first video of The Vampair, the Duke spends his time toying and tormenting with the hapless human Missi before magically transmuting her wardrobe into a gothic brothel dress with every intent of making her his bride. While he fails to seduce her — her tricking him into a compromising position before opening the curtains and destroying him — she does become a vampire due to the effects of his magic cane.

Western Animation

• Duck Dodgers: Played with in "I'm Going to Get You, Fat Sucka" when Cadet is lured into a room and is confronted by three vampire women. It's revealed they're actually Count Blood Count's daughters.
• Johnny Test: Inverted when Mary and Susan accidentally turn themselves into vampires in "Fangs A Lot Johnny". They seek to make their crush, Gil, as their male mate.
• Monster Force: Present in the first episode with three women serving as Dracula's minions. They manage to chase the wolfman of the team into a trap, find and turn an associate of the team scouting the area for them and later confront the team when they come looking for their wolfman comrade.
• Sally Bollywood: In "Fangs a Lot", Sally and Doowee suspect one of their friends, Lee, of being a vampire when he makes a threat to the school bully, Bob. When Doowee is forced the continue the investigation on his own he finds that Lee supposedly turned one of the female classmates. When they meet with Sally at the park, another girl has joined them... and then Sally reveals she was turned as well. Of course it turns out it was just a prank to get back at Bob. Doowee even plays along when he catches on what Sally is doing.
• Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends has an appropriately titled episode "The Bride of Dracula" where he tries to make Firestar his.
• What's New, Scooby-Doo?: "The Vampire Strikes Back" centered around this alot. The Hex Girls are making a video about vampire brides and both Velma and Daphne takes turns dressing as a potential bride to lure out the supposed "vampire".

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