Unique vampire concepts

ooh ooh ooh the grain of rice thing is really interesting with its origins in folklore! another take on that from I think Germany(?) similar to that is the idea of vampires being compelled to untie knots so they'd bury bodies with like nets or whatever with the idea that it would take them one year to untie one knot in the net (it was something like that I can't remember the exact specifics though. there might have been something about the knots being really complicated too?). 

Other cool folklore vampire things is that you're prone to becoming a vampire if you were a bad person in life or if you were a drunk or if you committed suicide or were murdered or had a generally untimely death. 

Also cool idea is that some folklore said that if you ate an animal, like a cow for example, that a vampire drank from previously then you would become a vampire.

As for a modern idea on vampires, I think I've seen a tumblr post going around with the idea of sunlight not killing vampires but showing their 'true' age of what they would be if they were still alive, so if they were just turned they would look normal, if it was like decades ago they'd look older, if it was centuries they would then die and turn to bone, etc. Which I've found that a really cool idea.

Something I've been playing around with too is that since the idea of vampires not being able to be seen in mirrors comes from mirrors with silver backing i think, sometimes I wonder if vampires would show up on film photography or not since photos are essentially silver reacting with light to form a picture. As a writer i'm a bit torn since it's a cool idea to have them not show up on film photography and video, but at the same time its also fun seeing old photos or videos of vampires in the past doing their thing. 

@Zaz i haven't heard of that net concept but thats really neat too! 

The idea that living a bad life leads to vampirism sounds like a pretty cool concept honestly, feels like a very unique version of hell in a way, 

The sun showing a vampires true age is really cooll, and honestly makes alot of sense, like i never really thought about why vampires would turn to dust in the sun so that being the explanation is really smartt

I also heard about the silver backing in mirrors thing thats such a clever idea, and yeah i get what you mean about trying to decide what you wanna add, it can be so hard deciding between concepts to favor for a specfic story because there can be so many cool ideas to pick from, especially when it comes to vampires. I've always struggled with picking specfic abilities for vampire characters because theres literally so many to pick from and adding all of them sometimes feels like too much