This was the first time I encountered the vampire represented as a cat. A huge black cat:

I saw something moving round the foot of the bed, which at first I could not accurately distinguish. But I soon saw that it was a sooty-black animal that resembled a monstrous cat.

– Carmilla (Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu)

Very old vampires are anachronisms: they are living history, bringing the past right into the present, with all the traumas of the past.
– White Teeth, Red Blood (Claire Kohda)

That describes Sinners‘ Remmick to a T.

Something black and of the night
had come crawling out of the Middle Ages.
– I am Legend (Richard Matheson)

She rose among us where we lay.
She wept, we put our work away.
She chilled our laughter, stilled our play.
And spread a silence there.
And darkness shot across the sky,
And once, and twice, we heard her cry;
And saw her lift white hands on high
And toss her troubled hair.

What shape was this who came to us,
With basilisk eyes so ominous,
With mouth so sweet, so poisonous,
And torturned hands so pale!
We saw her wavering to and fro,
Through dark and wind we saw her go’
Yet what her name was we did not know;
And felt our spirits fail.

We tried to turn away; but still
Above we heard her sorrow thrill;
And those that slept, they dreamed of ill
And dreadful things:
Of skies grown red with rending flames
And shuddering hills that cracked their frames;
Of twilights foul with wings.

– “The Vampire”, Conrad Aiken

But first, on earth as vampire sent,
Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent,
Then ghastly haunt thy native place,
And suck the blood of all thy race.
– “The Giaour” (Lord Byron)

In the moonlight opposite me were three young women…they threw no shadow on the floor…Two were dark, and had high aquiline noses, like the Count, and great dark, piercing eyes, that seemed to be almost red…The other was fair…with great masses of golden hair and eyes like pale sapphires…All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips…burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips…The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive…I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth…I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited, waited with beating heart.

– Dracula (Bram Stoker)

You are the night and the night alone understands you
and enfolds you in its arms.
– Interview with the Vampire (Anne Rice)

Eumenes had been with her more than 400 years, Lollia nearly as long. Until now not one of her transformations had failed to last 200 years. Was she getting worse at it, or was the strength of the human stock in decline?

– The Hunger (Whitley Strieber)

Or words she murmured while she leaned!
Witch-words, she holds me softly by, —
The spell that binds me to a fiend
Until I die.
– “The Vampire” (Madison Julius Cawein)

So turn off the television — in fact, why don’t you turn off all the lights except for the one over your favorite chair? — and we’ll talk about vampires here in the dim. I think I can make you believe in them, because while I was working on this book, I believed in them myself.

And all around them, the bestiality of the night rises on tenebrous wings. The vampire’s time has come.

As the stranger came closer, Dud understood everything and welcomed it, and when the pain came, it was as sweet as silver, as green as still water at dark fathoms.

– ‘Salem’s Lot (Stephen King)

The vampire tore his pointed fangs from his victim’s neck and fixed his agate-black eyes on Ciri. “There are occasions,” he said in an explanatory tone, licking blood from his lips, “when it’s simply impossible not to have a drink.”

– The Lady of the Lake (Andrzej Sapkowski)

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