vampire-freaks-revival

did you know there’s a VampireFreaks revival?

(spoiler alert: there is, and i joined)

by avalon 21.05.2026

oh man who else remembers VampireFreaks?!

as an alt girl who’s been in and out of online alternative circles since 2009 or so, let me tell you: i was actually stunned to find out that this legendary social network was still up and running until a few years ago.

…and also pretty excited to have stumbled on a little revival community called VampFreaks, dedicated to being a space for alternative folks to hang out on forums and live chats, as well as giving members the ability to customise their profiles and write blogs.

talk about nostalgia!

for those of you who never got on VampireFreaks or have never heard of it, a quick recap:

running from 1999 until as late as 2020 (which came as a surprise!), VF was one of the biggest places for goths, emo kids, vampire lovers, and alternative folks in general to hang out online.

VampireFreaks was MySpace before MySpace, basically. for alt folks, at least. And managed to outlast it by a decade.

originally, VampireFreaks was ‘devoted to gothic industrial culture’ and affectionately referred to its users as ‘freaks’ (in true early 2000s style). there was an active forum, live chatroom, places to post your pics (before the word selfie had even been banded about the internet), and news about the goth and alt scene being regularly updated.

behold, the VampireFreaks home page as it was in the year 2000. i would have been 8 years old at the time of the OG site, so…probably a bit young for the platform lol. but i remember the internet looking like this!

by 2004, VampireFreaks had well and truly taken off, with there being not only an active main forum, but regular photo contests, ‘cults’ (smaller forums around certain topics and interests), the ability for members to customise their own pages, and an online clothing store.

by 2009 there were two million registered members and, at its peak, i believe VampireFreaks had something like a few hundred thousand active users (which was huge for its era, and with thousands of users active at any one time the equivalent of a fairly active subreddit).

there were other popular goth forums around, but VampireFreaks was a real melting-pot of alternative subcultures in the 2000s - and for a lot of alt kids it had everything you needed: news, community, customisable spaces, and a place to hang with other misfits.

the community absolutely thrived, with goths, angsty emo teens, queer young folks, and other weird kids finally finding their people.

i did some digging on the WayBack Machine and found examples of the cheekily-named ‘cults’ - forums within the larger VampireFreaks site dedicated to various topics. there’s one here for queer women, one for people interested in HTML, a dedicated space for folks into wicca - and, of course, a My Chemical Romance forum.

the VF homepage in 2010. compared to its 2000 design it’s come a long way! the internet developed rapidly in those 10 years and the increase in more complex CSS here reflects that.

(also…holy side fringes, batman)

VF in 2016, 10 years ago, with a still-active userbase.

i went down a bit of a rabbithole for this blog post (which was no trouble for me whatsoever, since the old internet is a special interest of mine lol) and found users from back in the day recalling fun times: including queer kids getting to find other queer kids in an era where the word ‘gay’ was considered a perfectly fine insult to throw around irl. community and friendship were strong points.

but it didn’t come as a surprise that, just like every social media platform that explodes in popularity, there was also plenty of toxicity circulating on the OG VampireFreaks site.

including gross adult men grooming underage users and demanding that women send nudes (and getting angry when they didn’t get them), outright white supremacists - and, predictably, the ranking system rapidly devolving into a popularity contest that was not kind to users who weren’t conventionally attractive, and where alternative girls and women were aggressively messaged by men who apparently expected free sex work (inc from minors, which is even more yikes).

so…the same problems we have on today’s platforms, basically. the same problems that have plagued the internet from AIM and MySpace to Instagram and Discord. problems we really shouldn’t have, but we live in a society where men being vile online rarely meet the consequences they deserve.

there were also plenty of folks in Reddit threads whose experience was a lot more positive: waxing nostalgic about discovering cool new music via VF, enjoying the profile customisation, and making real friends that they still keep in touch with to this day - a few people even meeting their partners through VampireFreaks back in the day. I came across at least 4 separate people on Reddit saying that they’re married to a person they met on VF!

i was never a VF member myself, but i did lurk on occasion as an 18-20 year old in the early 2010s and found it all a bit overwhelming. i was used to much smaller forum communities of like 40 people nerding out about Lord of the Rings and Doctor Who fanfiction, and this site was…a lot bigger, and a lot more driven by popularity. i was never going to be that cool lol. but i did enjoy reading through the blog sometimes, which featured interviews and exclusive behind-the-scenes tour blogs with famed alt performers like the Cruxshadows, HIM, Nightwish and Emilie Autumn.

today, VampireFreaks is still around, but only as a large online stockist of goth + alt clothing. the social network aspect, which had run for over 20 years, was finally closed down in 2020. i had no idea it was even still running by that point, since all the big social media platforms had well and truly taken over the internet by then. i actually have no idea how VF’s social network stayed alive for so long.

(i’m sure there’s a joke to be made about vampires and immortality in there somewhere.)

so when, out of curiosity, i googled vampire freaks a few months ago and came across a small revival forum, it was a pleasant surprise! i finally took the plunge and signed up last week, consumed by nostalgia for the old web experience (when am i not, tbh?) and curious as to how this new incarnation of an internet classic was going to go.

my current impression on joining VampFreaks is that it’s a small but welcoming space: with forums, a live chat, and ability to blog (much like the old VF!). it’s not as rapid-fire as social media, but that’s largely because it’s a site designed for more intimate and intentional community, not an app with millions of bored people scrolling on it at any given time.

and i definitely haven’t seen signs of the toxicity that seems to have eventually plagued the OG VampireFreaks yet! the mods are genuinely committed to keeping the place safe and welcoming - including not allowing explicit sexual content, since it’s a mixed-age community.

it’s quite clear that VampFreaks is not about reviving the laissez-faire, poor moderation of early web forums that led to so many issues. i think it’s genuinely about creating community for alt folks in an age where we’re all just…tired of the big apps, with the constant data surveillance and lack of real connection.

and everyone’s just been really nice so far.

lately i’ve seen millenials online missing the old web, a lot of younger folks being curious about what the internet used to be like, and a lot of …well, everyone burnt out by social media and the ad-pushing, AI slop of it all. more people are voicing interest in old-school forums, and in learning HTML + CSS to make their own websites and express themselves outside of social media. with the growing discontent it will be super interesting to see whether more forums and small communities take off as part of the web revival movement.

that would be really cool to see!

in the meantime i’m actually really enjoying the old forum experience: reading discussions, commenting on blogs, puttering about and thinking about how i’ll customise my page and forum signature, jumping on the chat to say hi to people. it’s fun!

between slowly finding alternative platforms to hang out on and maintaining this little website, the internet is beginning to feel just a little more like home.

the sight i’m greeted with when i open VampFreaks. when i first stumbled on it i remember it had a little bit more purple as a throwback to the OG site.