The term "
energy vampire" is also used metaphorically to refer to people whose influence leaves a person feeling exhausted, unfocused, and depressed, without ascribing the phenomenon to psychic interference.
Dion Fortune wrote of psychic parasitism in relation to vampirism as early as 1930 in her book,
Psychic Self-Defense. Fortune considered psychic vampirism a combination of
psychic and
psychological pathology, and distinguished between what she considered to be true psychic vampirism and mental conditions that produce similar symptoms. For the latter, she named
folie à deux and similar phenomena. The term "psychic vampire" was popularized in the 1960s by
Anton LaVey and his
Church of Satan. LaVey wrote on the topic in his book,
The Satanic Bible, and claimed to have coined the term. LaVey used
psychic vampire to mean a spiritually or emotionally weak person who drains vital energy from other people.
Adam Parfrey likewise attributed the term to LaVey in an introduction to ''
The Devil's Notebook''. The English singer-songwriter
Peter Hammill credits his erstwhile
Van der Graaf Generator colleague, violinist
Graham Smith, with coining the term "energy vampires" in the 1970s in order to describe intrusive, over-zealous fans. Hammill included a song of the same name on his 1978 album
The Future Now. In the 1982 horror movie
One Dark Night, Karl “Raymar” Raymarseivich is the name of a Russian psychic vampire who gains power from the lifeforce of young victims by frightening them to death. This is done by demonstrations of
telekinesis which emanates as visible electrical currents of
bioenergy. How he dies is unclear, but his malevolence posthumously remains in his body. Effectively, Raymar is a
poltergeist in the mausoleum he is interred in, opening crypts (including his own), sliding out the caskets to the floor and randomly exhuming his fellow corpses to terrify unfortunate teenagers who have chosen the wrong place to have an overnight initiation. The terms "energy vampire" and "psychic vampire" have been used as synonyms in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union as part of an occult revival. The 2019 American comedy horror television series
What We Do in the Shadows includes the character Colin Robinson, a metaphorical and literal "energy vampire" who drains people's life forces by being boring or frustrating.
Vampire subculture Sociologists such as Mark Benecke and A. Asbjørn Jøn have identified a subculture of people who present themselves as vampires. Jon has noted that enthusiasts of the
vampire subculture emulate traditional psychic vampires in that they describe 'prey[ing] upon life-force or 'pranic' energy'. Prominent figures in the subculture include
Michelle Belanger, a self-described psychic vampire, who wrote a book titled
The Psychic Vampire Codex: A Manual of Magick and Energy Work, published in 2004 by
Weiser Books. Belanger details a vampiric approach to
energy work which she believes psychic vampires can use to heal others, representing an attempt to disassociate the psychic vampire subculture from negative connotations of vampirism. ==Sexual vampires==