It's a big year for vampires, and after Nosferatu got the year off to a flying start, there was the announcement that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is coming back, and we've got the upcoming vampire-centric Sinners with Michael B. Jordan.
While European folklore is steeped in stories about vampires and their blood-sucking abilities, they're thankfully confined to the fiction of Bram Stoker's Dracula and the Twilight movies...or so we hope.
Alongside the idea of turning into bats, having to avoid sunlight, and their pointy fangs, the concept of vampires surviving on blood is one of their most iconic traits. We've heard a lot about diets where people attempt to live solely by eating meat, but the question is, could you really survive on just blood?
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A new video from Zack D. Films explains what would happen if you tried to exist on a diet that was made up entirely of blood.
The YouTube short explains that a pint of blood contains around 700 calories, and although we're advised to drink between three and four pints of water a day, that seems quite a lot of blood.
Even though blood has the calorific potential to keep us alive, the video says that being trapped in a blood bank could have a deadly effect on our bodies. Zack D. Films explains that as you drink more and more pints of blood, the iron in the blood already in your body would build up and cause damage to the heart and liver.
You could apparently live for about six weeks on a blood diet, although we're not sure why you'd be trapped in a blood bank for that long or why you'd want to try a blood-only diet elsewhere. After that time, your organs would shut down, so unless someone plans on resurrecting you as a vampire, it's not a good idea.
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It's true that there are real-life vampires, and in a 2015 interview with The Guardian, a founding member of Atlanta’s Vampire Alliance confirmed the modern vampire will typically be like anyone else you'll pass on the street.
Not all will feed on blood, but if they do, it typically involves a medically trained professional making inch-long incisions on a donor and lots of paperwork to ensure no blood-borne diseases.
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Responding to the Zack D. Films video, one fascinated viewer wrote: "Dracula been real quiet since this dropped."
Sounding like they're a wannabe vampire, someone else added: "So in moderate to controlled uses I could essentially and possibly live past that 6 weeks theoretically right?"
Joking about the calories in a pint of blood, someone else concluded: "Dracula bouta go on a diet after this one😂."
Elon Musk has joked about being a '3,000-year-old time-traveling and a vampire alien', while biohacker Bryan Johnson previously injecting his son's blood feels a little vampiric. While we'll keep vampires in the 'fictional' pile for now, that video has suddenly put us off having that extra portion of black pudding with our cooked breakfast.