The best surprise vampires

polygon.com:

You know what’s cooler than a vampire story? A story that’s not a vampire story, but surprise — it has vampires.

The surprise vampire is a rich tradition, unfolding across many different media intended for all kinds of audiences. Sometimes it is a prominent part of a story that’s made richer for the unexpected presence of a bloodsucker.

Sometimes it is subtle, an easily missable detail that rewards only the most observant. In the best version, the vampires are always there, in the background, waiting for you to discover them — just like in real life.

Here are some of our favorite examples.

If Baldur’s Gate 3 was your introduction to the Forgotten Realms of Dungeons & Dragons, you might be shocked to find out about a lot of stuff that’s tucked away in the world’s most famous tabletop role-playing game. The great thing about Baldur’s Gate 3 is how it centers all that weird stuff — like Astarion, a haughty elf that you can either play as or recruit to your party very early on, and guess what? He’s a vampire! And dealing with his vampirism is a huge part of the game, should that be something you want to do.

Like a lot of ideas in the Matrix movies, a seemingly throwaway line leads to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene with wild implications for everything you’re looking at. In The Matrix, The Oracle tells Neo that things that go bump in the night are in fact real, the result of a program misbehaving, an error in the virtual world of The Matrix. In The Matrix Reloaded, we meet some of those misbehaving programs in the form of the Merovingian’s henchmen. The Merovingian’s wife, Persephone, notes that they are very hard to kill — before she kills one of them with silver bullets. While the twin ghosts get significantly more