Vampires

one of the wierd ones is the vampire feeds on said humans, but have to feed its blood to turn them. and in SPN they have a magical cure for vampirism, if the infected hasnt fed yet. castlevania also does it this way. Also in the same show, apparently you can absorb magic powers through biting the victims, in this a "god's power spirit energy. also the wierd part of vampire evolution is in various genre, they can be made immune to sunlight, mostly through magical rituals or given magical power by a more powerful vampire. akasha giving sunlight immunity, or the short lived blade series on spike, or

Cool rather than ridiculous. Trinity blood (anime). Basically, it introduces a new type of creature that feeds on a vampires' blood (and doesn't hurt humans), a vampire level 2 of sorts. Light novel and manga (which I haven't read) go into further details, and it involves alien bacteria and an apocalypse.

The one where they can play baseball in the daytime as long as it's cloudy.

Vampires don't necessarily live in castles. Count Dracula only did because he was a count.

Also, vampires can see themselves in most mirrors as long as no silver is used as the reflecting surface.

The whole "they need to be invited in before they can enter your home" always struck me as a weird one. What would happen if a vampire just ignored that and entered anyways? What if someone considered a forest their home? What if squatters moved in to the vampire's home? Or some official declared it belonged to someone else? What if they are invited by someone who doesn't live there?

The counting objects thing was funny when they used it in that X-Files episode. Basically trying to make a lot of the goofy lore seem plausible through science, so the vampires all had OCD and they slow one down by just dropping a box of pens or something that the vampire had to stop and pickup while counting. lol

The other one I've only seen used twice (Buffy the Vampire Slayer the movie and in Soul Reaver) is that vampires can't cross running water. In Buffy, she stops a bunch of vampires chasing her by turning on a hose which prevented them from crossing the stream of running water along the ground.

Can't see themselves in a mirror but Dracula always had a perfect parting (from Karl Pilkington of course).

If they kill someone once a day to feed and turn them into a vampire in about a month everyone on Earth today would be a vampire, so the maths said they can't be real.

The one that never made sense to me was the whole "Unable to cross running water."

So you could trap Dracula with a garden hose?

I mean, if we're going to avoid the sparkling fucking vampires, then it's gotta be mirrors. Makes no sense within the mythologies surrounding vampires imo.

Running water is about the purifying nature of it supposedly, as other "evil" entities are also unable to.

Wooden stakes being needed to pin them down or be a death blow, there's links between wood and life that make sense within that framework. It wasn't originally just any wood, it was (iirc) dogwood and ironwood. Something like that.

Garlic, also a purifier.

You gotta realize, most of the early written vampire stories did come from existing legends, and those legends did usually have an internal consistency to some degree or another. But not mirrors. Stoker pulled that out of his ass due to not understanding his sources, so it doesn't really match with much.

The idea is that vampires lack souls, and thus fear mirrors, depending on what set of myths you're working in. But there's also supposedly a tie back to real people with rabies being easily startled, with mirrors apparently being something that would do so even easier, but I'm not sure it holds up to scrutiny since the tie to rabies is weak as fuck to begin with, and there's no record of that being a specific thing. It seems more like a hypothesis being projected rather than something with provenance.

But we got being invisible in mirrors.

Now, some people have decided that the mirror thing is because of the silver in mirrors, and add silver being potent against vampires in some cases, but neither is based in any of the known vampire mythology as it existed pre-stoker. And there's arguments there that kinda make sense if you buy into some of the supposed mystical and magical properties of silver. It's tie to the moon in some beliefs would maybe give it sovereignty over most creatures of the night, and is supposedly why it's werewolf killing.

I can't even remember exactly when silver started being common against vampires in books. I know that the Blade trilogy made it seep into pop culture, but it did exist before that.

Most of the stuff around the older books does make a kind of sense, but not that one

Not ridiculous but unexpected is the story of the TV show "Caro Nostra".
This story is about ogres, not vampires but at the same time it is definitly a vampire story. The vampire who want to be close to the human world, the girl that is somehow special, the forbiden love story that cause a broken balance in the equilibrum of the vampire world, the police looking at a weird murder spray that seems to go back to 50 years ago, the old acquintaince that actually grow old... This is definitly a vampire story.

But at the same time, since it is not vampires, the mythology behind the monster feels totally new and that's very catching.