In this guide

A Victorian reader opens a penny dreadful and finds a woman with scales who drinks the blood of sailors. A modern one scrolls through a streaming service and sees a vampire who can breathe underwater. The two creatures have been trading attributes for more than a century, but the relationship between mermaids and vampires is not a modern invention. It is a slow fusion of two separate folk traditions that began in the 19th century and has never stopped.

The relationship between mermaids and vampires is one of borrowed traits and shared symbolic territory. Both are undying predators who lure humans to their deaths through seduction, both feed on human vitality (blood, breath, life force), and both occupy a liminal space between the living and the dead. The modern conflation of the two creatures is a literary and cinematic development, not a folkloric one, but it rests on older foundations than most readers assume.

Where the Two Creatures Actually Come From

Where the Two Creatures Actually Come From

Mermaids and vampires originate in entirely separate folk traditions. The mermaid appears in the oldest recorded myths. The Babylonian goddess Atargatis (circa 1000 BCE) transformed into a fish-tailed being out of shame after killing a human lover. The Greek sirens began as bird-women and became fish-tailed only in medieval bestiaries. Vampires appear much later in European written records. The first documented use of the word “vampire” in English comes from 1734, in a travel account by the Austrian diplomat Johann Heinrich Zedler, describing reports from the Balkans of corpses that rose to drink the blood of the living.

The two traditions ran parallel for centuries. A fisherman who drowned was said to have been pulled under by a mermaid. A villager who wasted away was said to have been visited by a vampire. Both explanations served the same function: they gave a name to sudden, unexplained death. But the creatures themselves did not meet in folklore.

The 19th Century: When the Waters Turned Red

The fusion begins in literature. The key text is “The Mermaid” (1837) by Hans Christian Andersen, but not for the reason most readers think. Andersen’s little mermaid does not drink blood. She trades her voice for legs and feels every step like walking on knives. The story is about sacrifice, not predation.

The real shift happens in the penny dreadfuls and Gothic poetry of the 1840s through 1870s. “The Mermaid” (1845) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson describes a creature who “would be a mermaid fair” and sings to lure sailors to their deaths. The song is the trap. The death is the point. This is the first clear literary link between mermaid seduction and mortal danger of the kind vampires had already perfected in John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819).

Then comes “The Siren” (1886) by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, a Symbolist story in which a siren literally drinks the blood of a man who loves her. The line between siren and vampire collapses entirely. By the 1890s, French Decadent writers were routinely describing mermaids as blood-drinkers. The mermaid had become a water-dwelling vampire.

What the Two Creatures Actually Share

The symbolic overlap is not accidental. Both creatures occupy the same structural position in folklore: they are the beautiful dead who call the living to join them.

The lure of the voice. The vampire does not sing in most traditions, but he speaks. He charms. He persuades. The mermaid sings. Both use sound as a weapon that bypasses rational thought. The victim does not choose to follow. He is compelled.

The kiss as death. The vampire’s bite is a kiss. The mermaid’s kiss in many later stories drowns the victim or steals his breath. Both creatures transform the most intimate human gesture into a death sentence.

The inability to survive in the other’s world. The vampire cannot cross running water in many traditions. The mermaid cannot survive on land for long without pain. Both are trapped in their element and fatal to humans who enter it.

The hunger that never ends. Neither creature can stop feeding. The vampire must drink blood. The mermaid must drown sailors. Both are driven by a need they did not choose and cannot refuse.

The 20th Century: Cinema Makes Them One

The film “The Lure” (2015, Polish: Córki dancingu) is the most explicit modern treatment of the mermaid-vampire relationship. Two mermaid sisters join a nightclub band in Warsaw. They feed on human blood. One falls in love with a human and tries to stop killing. The film is a direct adaptation of the mermaid-as-vampire idea that began in the 19th century.

But the fusion had already happened in popular culture decades earlier. The 1984 film “Splash” gave the mermaid a harmless, romantic image that the vampire did not share. The 1989 film “The Little Mermaid” (Disney) completed the sanitization. Meanwhile, the vampire in film grew more monstrous. The two creatures seemed to have diverged again.

They had not. The mermaid-vampire hybrid reappeared in “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” (2011), where mermaids are explicitly predatory, dangerous, and capable of killing with a kiss. The film’s mermaids have teeth designed for tearing flesh. They drag sailors underwater to drown them. They are vampires of the sea.

The Deeper Connection: Blood, Water, and the Undead

The symbolic logic that binds mermaids and vampires is older than either creature. Blood and water are the two great fluids of life in premodern medicine. The humoral system taught that blood and water (phlegm) were two of the four bodily humors. An imbalance in either caused death. A creature that drains blood and a creature that drowns in water are doing the same thing: they are taking the fluid the victim needs to live.

This is why the mermaid-vampire hybrid feels natural rather than forced. Both creatures represent the same fear: that the thing you desire will kill you. That beauty is a mask for hunger. That the kiss and the bite are the same gesture.

Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838-1889). His story “The Siren” is the first clear literary text in which a water-dwelling creature drinks blood. The story is short, brutal, and unambiguous.

Jules Michelet (1798-1874). The French historian wrote “La Mer” (1861), in which he describes mermaids as “the vampires of the sea.” This is the first use of the phrase in a non-fiction context.

Bram Stoker (1847-1912). His “Dracula” (1897) contains a moment often overlooked. When the Demeter runs aground at Whitby, the ship’s log describes a creature that moves through the water like a mermaid. Stoker was aware of the connection.

Anne Rice (1941-2021). Her “Vampire Chronicles” include a character named Pandora who describes the vampire as “a creature of the sea” in a metaphorical sense. The line has been cited by later writers as a bridge between the two traditions.

What People Get Wrong About the Relationship

The most common misconception is that mermaids and vampires have always been linked in folklore. They have not. The connection is entirely literary and cinematic. No pre-19th century folk tradition treats mermaids as blood-drinkers. The mermaid of folklore drowns her victims. She does not bite them.

The second misconception is that all mermaid-vampire hybrids are the same. They are not. Some are mermaids who drink blood. Some are vampires who can breathe underwater. Some are entirely new creatures that combine traits from both. The relationship is a spectrum, not a single type.

The third misconception is that the connection is recent. It is not. The first clear literary fusion happened in the 1880s. The connection is over 140 years old.

FAQ

Are mermaids considered vampires in any folklore? No. No pre-modern folk tradition treats mermaids as blood-drinkers. The connection is a literary and cinematic development that began in the 19th century.

What was the first story to combine mermaids and vampires? Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s “The Siren” (1886) is the first clear literary text in which a water-dwelling creature drinks human blood.

Why do mermaids and vampires feel similar? Both are undying predators who lure humans through seduction, both feed on human vitality, and both occupy a liminal space between the living and the dead. The symbolic logic of blood and water as life fluids also binds them.

Can a vampire be a mermaid in modern fiction? Yes. Modern fiction and film frequently combine the two, most explicitly in “The Lure” (2015) and the mermaids of “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” (2011).

The mermaid and the vampire are not the same creature. They never were. But they have been telling the same story for over a century: the story of the beautiful thing that wants you dead. That story is not finished. It changes every time a new writer or filmmaker picks it up. The blood and the sea will keep meeting as long as we keep telling stories about what we desire and what that desire costs.

For more on the creatures that haunt the boundary between life and death, see our guide to mythical creatures and the glossary entry on liminal beings. You may also find our guide to the vampire in folklore useful for understanding the older traditions that the mermaid-vampire hybrid transformed.