The Vampire Realities in Real Life and Science
In Hugo Lunny’s unsettling mockumentary We Regret Nothing (2019), a near-whispered voice recounts a candlelit ritual in rural Langley, British Columbia. The camera pans slowly to a pale young man, face half-hidden, as he describes the liturgy of blood: a crossed ritual knife, wine goblet, and murmured chant, “We regret nothing.” This young man is a member of the so-called Hammet cult, led by Edgar Hammet, a loner who convinced himself he was a real vampire. According to Lunny’s synopsis, Hammet “became obsessed with the notion that humans can achieve eternal life” and recruited followers to donate “their blood and ultimately their bodies to achieve his sordid ambition”[1]. As one pamphlet for the film dryly notes: “A deranged loner convinces himself he’s a real vampire, creating a cult of murderers that consume human blood”[2]. The tagline of the movie sums it up: “Vampires don’t exist… Humans do”[3].
Section Index
Lunny’s Hammet cult is fictional, a thought experiment in the form of a docu-drama, yet it draws on chilling real-life precedents. In fact, the Guardian reported in 2003 a true “vampire cult” in Scotland. There, a 22-year-old named Allan Menzies lured a friend into a ritual murder, drinking his blood in a bid to “become a vampire”[4]. The article grimly details how Menzies even believed a celebrity vampire character promised him immortality. In another case that same year, a 17-year-old in Wales stabbed an elderly woman 22 times, removed her heart, and “drank [her] victim’s blood in a quest for immortality,” leaving the heart on a plate like a grotesque ritual offering[5]. These sensational crimes underline the dark currents of vampirism in modern youth culture, a point a forensic psychologist in the article underscores, noting that teen “obsessions” with Dracula and related media are often hidden from parents until something terrible happens[6].
Don’t forget to check out “We Regret Nothing” Behind The Screenplay page for more information on the writing inspiration and process.
It’s tempting to dismiss all this as pop-culture fanaticism gone awry. Yet the roots of vampire lore run deep. Some historians trace the idea back centuries in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, where corpses were sometimes staked to prevent them rising[7]. Bram Stoker, drawing on local legends and a friend’s tales of Transylvania, wired his fictional Dracula to real history: the mythic count is loosely modeled on Vlad the Impaler, a 15th-century Wallachian prince who made a terror empire from impaling enemies[8]. In folklore, vampires were blamed for plagues and unexplained deaths. Both medieval and modern cultures share the notion that a vampire has no soul or reflection: mirrors played a curious role. Ritual customs even say that mirrors in a home of the recently dead must be covered, lest the departed’s soul become trapped or tormented by its own reflection[9]. As one psychologist wryly observed, the mirror in vampire myth symbolizes the soul, “no reflection, no soul,” a belief possibly inspired by people burying victims of contagious disease as if they were undead[10][9].
The Hammet Cult and We Regret Nothing
Lunny’s We Regret Nothing leans into this gothic history while blurring fact and fiction. The film intersperses pseudo-interviews (actor performances) with ominous scenery: ancient cemeteries, midnight bloodletting, and cult interiors lined with crucifixes and garlic. We meet Edgar Hammet (played by Hugh Jacques), whose reclusive childhood and heavy Bible quoting have spiraled into a Calvinist extremism of blood rites. In one scene, a girlfriend-narrator explains how Edgar convinced her that “vampirism is real, and if we want eternal life, we must consume blood.” Elsewhere, black-and-white home-video clips show youths in hooded robes chanting, “We regret nothing!” as they sink knives into a sacrificial lamb.
The film’s own marketing highlights these themes. Its poster, a screaming red mouth with pointed canines, bears the stark slogan “Vampires don’t exist… Humans do.”[3] It’s an intentionally confrontational tagline, meant to unsettle as much as it cheekily nods to the true-crime material that inspired it. (Broken English Films, the outfit behind We Regret Nothing, also released a novella compiling the “Hammet cult interviews”[11].) Whether Hammet’s story is real or an elaborate hoax is ambiguous, but the movie is presented as a documentary, and it places itself in the tradition of true crime and cult investigation.
Such media-savvy urban legends tap into our collective obsession with the undead. Consider how many forums and fan sites are dedicated to living vampires, an underground subculture far larger than most people know. As one scholar quipped, vampire lore may have once been the realm of isolated folklorists, but now it’s a web-wide social scene: young people swap stories online, self-insert as modern Draculas, join Gothic “vampire societies” that role-play scenes from favorite films[6]. For most it’s cosplay or fantasy, but, as Lunny’s film suggests, a few turn fantasy into frenzy. The Hammet cult’s purported rituals (blood consumption, mock entombments, argot of “blood brothers”) echo fringe groups documented by police. By taking this to its extreme, We Regret Nothing reflects on an unsettling truth: myths can motivate murderous acts when reality and illusion merge.
Yet behind the theatrics lies a sobering reality: many putatively supernatural traits have natural counterparts. Vampires’ aversion to sunlight, eternal youth, fangs, even mirror phobia, these have been mapped to real diseases and psychological disorders. To demystify Lunny’s fanciful cult, it helps to review the science and medicine hidden beneath the horror.
Sunlight and Shadow: Xeroderma Pigmentosum and Vampire Lores
One striking parallel is Xeroderma Pigmentosum (XP), a genetic condition sometimes sensationalized as “children allergic to the sun.” XP is a rare recessive disorder in which the body’s cells cannot repair ultraviolet (UV) damage to DNA[12]. Biologically, sunlight exposure leads to uncontrolled mutations in skin cells, so victims suffer severe sunburns, blistering, and pigmentation changes after just minutes in daylight[13][14]. In fact, XP patients must avoid all UV light, not just direct sun, but even ordinary fluorescent bulbs, or face a lifetime of pain and cancer risk. A child with XP typically spends its days swathed in clothing, gloves, UV-blocking goggles, even veils or aluminum foil on windows. As one recounting put it, “we lived in the dark for a little bit,” making everyday life a nocturnal ordeal[15].
The numbers underline the rarity: in the U.S. and Europe XP affects about 1 in 1,000,000 people[16]. (By contrast, it is far more common in regions with high consanguinity, e.g. 1 in 22,000 in parts of Japan[17].) But for those unlucky few, the analogy to vampires is uncanny. One journalist noted that XP “strictly forbids” any sunlight, even indoor incandescent lights emit enough UV to cause severe burns[13]. Patients’ eyes also “become irritated and appear bloodshot” with sunlight[18], adding a horror-film patina.
Historically, XP patients were sometimes dubbed “moon children” or sawbones in lore. Some have drawn more sinister connections. A popular (though largely debunked) theory of the late 20th century proposed that 19th-century European “vampire” superstition may have sprung from XP and its cousins. Patients develop deep freckling and black lesions on sun-exposed skin. In a continent fond of superstition, they could appear “blighted” or undead. While expert consensus now leans towards porphyria (below) and rabies as prime suspects for vampiric symptoms[7][19], XP remains a dramatic real-world analogue to the clichés of gothic horror.
From a molecular standpoint, XP is caused by mutations in any of roughly ten genes that code for DNA repair enzymes[14]. When UV hits skin cells, these enzymes normally excise the damage; XP victims’ enzymes fail, so mutations accumulate. Not surprisingly, this spells high skin-cancer risk: XP patients develop potentially lethal tumors often by their twenties. Indeed, one XP campaigner noted her son’s cancer risk is 10,000 times that of normal[16]. Parents must treat daylight like poison: one mother reported having to install UV-blocking film on every window, covering lamps, and having her son wear sunscreen indoors[20][21]. It is, in effect, a forced immortality of darkness, yet without any of the glamour.
Autophagy and the Undead
If XP is “sun allergy,” autophagy is the cell’s self-cannibalism. The term literally means “self-eating” (from the Greek auto- “self” and phagein “to eat”[22]). Discovered and named by Nobel laureate Christian de Duve in 1963 and later elucidated by Yoshinori Ohsumi (Nobel 2016), autophagy is the process by which cells package up damaged components into double-membraned vesicles (autophagosomes) and ship them to lysosomes for recycling[23][22]. It is fundamental biology: when nutrients are scarce, cells will literally digest their own mitochondria and proteins to release energy and raw materials. Ohsumi’s work showed that this internal recycling is crucial during starvation and infection, and that failures in autophagy underlie diseases from cancer to neurodegeneration[24][25].
The metaphorical appeal to vampires is obvious: autophagy is a kind of “cannibalism” at the cellular level, a self-sustaining cycle. While nobody has researched whether drinking blood triggers autophagy, the idea has cropped up in speculative fiction. In Bram Stoker’s novels and many myths, vampires are described as never aging or sickening, essentially “biologically immortal.” In reality, scientists study autophagy as one route to longevity. Excess autophagy (particularly when regulated by key genes called ATGs) correlates with longer life in model organisms[24]. Some longevity enthusiasts even fast intermittently to induce autophagy, hoping it will ward off age-related decline. In this sense, the vampire’s gift of endless life might be imagined as an eternal activation of autophagy, a continuous self-recycling that bypasses normal death (though, alas, for humans this remains science fiction[24]).
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh found that tweaking a liver-signaling pathway not only relieved porphyria (see below) but also “fine-tuned” autophagy, helping cells clear toxic build-up[25]. The press headline gleefully hinted at gothic resonance: “Hunt for a cure to the disease that gave rise to vampire legends”[26]. The study itself made no fantasy claims, it was basic science on enzyme inhibitors, but it underscores the sly ways modern medicine traffics with our old myths. Science is slowly closing the gap between legend and living tissue.
Fear and Reflection
Vampires are renowned for one very specific phobia: mirrors. In folklore, a vampire’s lack of reflection is not just a quirk but a rule, a vampire “has no soul” and so cannot imprint on glass. Coincidentally, actual mirror-phobia exists, albeit very rarely. Psychiatrists call it spectrophobia (Greek spectro- “image” or Latin catopto- “mirror”), alternatively eisoptrophobia or catoptrophobia[27]. Sufferers experience intense anxiety even at the sight of a mirror or reflective surface, as if the reflection itself were somehow dangerous or other. One review notes patients fear that “the person looking back is not really them” or that a spirit might be watching[28]. Another explains spectrophobia as the dread of one’s own reflection or ghosts appearing in mirrors[27].
This fear is rooted in the same symbolism that fuels vampire lore: many cultures truly do believe mirrors harbor souls or spirits. It was tradition in some places to cover all the mirrors when someone died, to prevent the deceased’s soul from getting trapped or “stolen” by a mirror[9]. The Victorian euphemism “mirror of the soul” hints at a deep-seated anxiety that seeing yourself might somehow kill your spirit.
This mirror folklore may feed spectrophobia. In some rare cases, a traumatic mirror event (a child first spooked by a peeping Tom in a mirror) can trigger a lifelong glass terror[29][30]. Whether born of trauma or imagination, spectrophobia is pernicious: therapy guides warn that even thinking about seeing oneself can cause panic. “This condition is very rare, but it can also be quite serious,” one psychiatrist writes, noting victims can disrupt their entire life to avoid reflective surfaces[31]. The lived reality is grim, for such a person, even polished car hoods or sunglasses can provoke anxiety[32].
Notably, fear of mirrors is also one symptom of rabies (the word rabies literally means “madness”). Victims of hydrophobia (rabies) become photophobic and frenetic, they sometimes attack anything bright or reflective. A classic neurology text reported that rabid patients “refuse to look in mirrors” and fear light, as if haunted[10][19]. Some historians think rabies outbreaks gave birth to vampire myths in the first place: people fleeing a biting, foaming victim could easily imagine a demonic affliction[10]. In short, what begins as virus could morph into vampire in the collective imagination.
Porphyria and the Legend of Dracula
In 2020, University of Queen’s professor Michael Hefferon published a detailed survey of vampire history and medicine. He observed that many classic vampire tropes are eerily mirrored in porphyria, a group of blood disorders inherited through the ages of European aristocracy[7]. Porphyria patients have defective heme synthesis, leading to porphyrins buildup. This causes extreme sun sensitivity, their skin can blister and scar under sunlight, akin to burning vampires of fiction[33]. Their gums can recede, giving the appearance of elongated canines (fangs)[34]. Even the dark urine of porphyria, once (mistakenly) thought to be blood drinking, adds to the dread. Indeed, doctors in the 19th century sometimes prescribed animal blood to porphyria sufferers as a remedy[35]. (Folklore likely saw dark urine and thought, “they must have drunk blood.”) Garlic aversion has an explanation too: some forms of porphyria are triggered by sulfur, and garlic is high in sulfur compounds, which can precipitate acute pain attacks in patients[36].
Perhaps most telling is the mirror motif: in advanced porphyria, poor oxygenation leads to tissue death and facial collapse[37]. Patients often avoid mirrors simply because they look grotesque. Hefferon notes that “in the mythology, a vampire is not able to look in a mirror,” not because of magic, but because the porphyria sufferer’s face has deformed[38]. In fact, Hefferon writes, porphyria was so intertwined with vampire lore that some scholars literally call it “the vampyre disease”[7]. Bram Stoker himself claimed no medical knowledge of porphyria (it was only classified eight years before Dracula was published), but it’s tantalizing that many of his fictional phobias (garlic, crucifixes, mirrors) reflect porphyria’s symptoms. Even the regime of covering mirrors at wakes may have been meant to keep a shivering porphyria patient’s spirit at rest.
While porphyria is a compelling link, skeptics note it can’t explain every detail of vampire myth, and historical “vampires” come from pre-porphyria eras. Nevertheless, its tale shows how easily legend and biology entwine. Medieval villagers, with little science, might well conclude that someone who hides from daylight, sleeps upright (due to abdominal pains), and hates garlic must be cursed by demons. Thus the vampire took flight in literature and film, mutated by modern writers but still rooted in real pain.
Mirrors of Meaning and Folklore
The intersections between myth and medicine run deep. In everyday culture, vampires remain potent symbols. Teenagers writing vampire fan fiction today echo Menzies’s writings: “The blood is the life… I have seen the horror”[39]. That blurred line (demonology in one case, psychology in another) is fertile ground for storytellers.
Lunny’s We Regret Nothing leans into these blurred boundaries. The Hammet interviews in the film feel real, right down to uneven video quality and stilted speech. It asks us: what if they’re humans, not monsters? Similarly, science says vampires can’t exist, but it also shows us how human bodies can mimic the undead. Autophagy may give a glimmer of cellular immortality[41][25]; immune systems recycle at night just as vampire victims are reborn at dawn. XP patients know sunlight is poison; porphyria sufferers experience living death in daylight; spectrophobic souls will do anything to hide from reflections. What if those aren’t separate phenomena, but the same old story told in new ways?
In communities obsessed with vampire subculture, there are rituals (meeting in nightclubs, exchanging blood donations, reciting invented clan lineages) that mimic religious practices. The Hammet cult’s invented scripture (“We regret nothing,” “blood and faith”) echoes these. Lunny’s film even shows a “baptism” of blood, and after one murder the cult members toast with a chalice of blood and proclaim hauntingly, “With this drink, we are all one” (a baroque twist on Christian imagery). It’s folklore sculpted as theater. But real cults have used similar drama: the Scottish killer Menzies insisted he had “seen the horror” and was acting on supernatural command[42]. He recited lines from a vampire film, believed ancient texts spoke to him, and even asked a supermarket butcher how to remove bloodstains, not knowing his question was monstrously relevant to a murder he was plotting[43].
These stories reveal a hidden meaning: at heart, vampires are often about fear of death and yearning for control. A blood ritual is an attempt to cheat mortality; a fear of mirror is a fear of one’s own mortality. Scientific diseases (XP, porphyria) share that terror, they literalize death in daily life. The cults and films mix it all together.
As We Regret Nothing illustrates the vampire remains a canvas for extremes: our most desperate hopes and darkest fears. In contemporary terms, one could say we use myth to process trauma. A teenager with XP or porphyria lives trauma in silence; an occultist with spectrophobia lives it in terror; a cult leader like Hammet lives it in grandiosity. The folk customs (mirrors covered at funerals, seeds scattered to distract ghosts, sacred blood rites) are cultural waystations along that psychological journey.
The paradox is this: vampires do not exist, and we are the vampires. We haunt ourselves with the echoes of our own biology and beliefs. Science may kill the literal vampire, but in doing so it forces us to confront what vampires really symbolize. The immortal hunger of blood, the aversion to daylight, the fear of seeing one’s soul, these are as much human truths as gothic fantasy. Perhaps the final lesson of We Regret Nothing and of all vampire lore is a mirror held up to us: in our quest to become immortal, our most fearsome monsters have always been, indeed, ourselves.
