The Batman is often referred to as a creature of the night, a title shared with the vampire Dracula , although of the two of them, the Dark Knight has shown himself to be a far more dangerous vampire. Batman becoming an actual creature of the night sounds like everything he could ever need to fight crime forever, but his bloodlust eventually became a much bigger problem than any criminal.
Back in the 1990s Doug Moench and Kelley Jones looked into what would happen if Batman lost his humanity, quite literally, in a series of graphic novels known as the Batman & Dracula trilogy. The trilogy included Batman and Dracula (1991), Batman: Blood Storm (1994), and Batman: Crimson Mist (1999). They were some of the first books to debut in the Elseworlds brand of comics and did very well for the time, they also gave us a terrifying look into just what would happen if Bruce stopped pretending to be a monster and actually became one.
In order to defeat Count Dracula, who has recently come to Gotham to feed, Batman is infected with vampirism by Tanya, a vampire who is hunting Dracula. Due to this infection, Batman gains a whole host of new abilities, such as highly enhanced strength and speed, as well as the ability to sprout actual batwings he uses to fly throughout Gotham. Unfortunately, this also comes with a strong desire for blood. Batman is able to resist this for the longest time due to a serum Tanya makes that acts as a type of synthetic blood. Using his newfound powers along with the help of Tanya, Batman is able to hunt down and kill Dracula, impaling him on a destroyed telephone pole after a lengthy fight. Once the battle finishes Batman returns to Gotham City, using his newfound powers to hunt criminals in the night. But it would turn out that Batman would become an even more dangerous vampire than Dracula ever was.
After being infected and trying to control his bloodlust, Batman eventually gives into it and kills the Joker, draining him of all his blood. This wouldn’t be the last person Batman kills after giving in to his bloodlust. He goes on to massacre every villain he comes across, setting up their decapitated heads outside of prison as a warning to the remaining criminals, a trait he may very well have picked up from Dracula, who was also known as Vlad the Impaler. Batman goes a step further in “Red Rain: Blood Lust,” a story by Kelley Jones and Peter Johnson set in the trilogy’s universe. With his hunger for blood in full control, he even ends up killing a mother and father, right in front of their son. This alone goes to show just how much humanity Bruce has lost to put someone else through the trauma he faced as a child. Bruce’s darkness doesn’t end there though, as seen in other universes where Bruce is infected, he is always the most dangerous vampire, far more than Dracula was who simply wants to feed and mostly be left alone.
In Flash Forward #3 written by Scott Lobdell with artwork by Brett Booth, readers see another version of a vampiric Batman, one that ends up infecting all of the Justice League to create the Blood League. These now bloodthirsty superheroes wage war across the universe, trying to consume everything. For as awful a vampire Dracula may have been, he was only ever a threat on Earth, when Batman became a vampire, he became a threat to the entire universe.
