Fictional vampires are dark, dangerous, and, crucially, sexy. From Bela Lugosi’s hypnotic stare in the first Dracula film to the tortured emo vibe of Edward Cullen, the silver-skinned heartthrob of Twilight, the undead have often been seen as the apex predators of the dating pool. That’s because their monstrosity is balanced by a seductive, often genteel charm. “There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive,” describes Bram Stoker’s protagonist, Jonathan Harker, in the original novel Dracula, capturing the essential vampire paradox in a single sentence.

But in the 2020s, the ultimate “bad boys” appear to have undergone a catastrophic software update.

Enter Bryan Johnson: the centimillionaire biohacker who has turned a quest for eternal life into a grim, spreadsheet-driven slog. Johnson, the Silicon Valley founder behind the well-publicized brand Don’t Die and the subject of a 2025 Netflix documentary (Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever), has spent millions trying to become immortal and transform his body into a temple of biological data. He takes ninety-one pills a day, performs shock therapy on his penis, measures his erections, and once engaged in a “multigenerational plasma exchange” in which he siphoned the blood of his teenage son. He is, by any objective definition, a vampire, but one who has traded the cape for wearable sensors and the Transylvanian castle for a Wi-Fi-enabled home laboratory. What he lacks is any semblance of seduction — bloodthirsty but strangely bloodless.