Victims of vampires do not immediately become vampires. A period of transition occurs, whether it unfolds over minutes, days, or weeks. In Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), the Count not only drinks Mina's blood, but also shares his own, making her sup from an open wound on his chest. During a slow transformation, Mina can feel what Dracula feels, see what Dracula sees, and hear what Dracula hears, even though vast geography separates them. She is a “poor soul in worse than mortal peril.” The process of becoming is underway, for her character in the fin de siècle, just as it would be for the screen vampire during the Roaring Twenties.

In 1921, The Nation pointedly asked readers, “What shall be done with the vampires?”:

Here the question had to do with the negative effect that screen vamps could have on American youth. As Reverend William F. Crafts preached that same year, “I would rather have my son stand at a bar and drink two glasses of beer that have him see that [movie] vampire woman … he could not forget that vampire woman until he was 80 years old.”

These sentiments were not new. In 1916, a newspaper editorial declared that it was “time for movies to move” beyond the vamp era. The following year, Motion Picture News published the following “sage” advice from the public to the producers: “we don't approve of vampire women nor of vampire men either.” Then, in 1918, another writer demanded that Hollywood “bury in oblivion the superfluous screen ‘he vampire.’” Women's organizations condemned vamps during the late teens, even as one company manufactured vampire dolls with “roguish eyes.”