Fangs for the memories.
A New York-based dental technician is giving wannabe vampires a taste of what it's like to have sharp canine teeth a la Dracula.
His name is Father Sebastiaan (sic) and he's been offering his custom-made cuspids for more than 20 years. And he joined us for the HuffPost Weird News podcast to talk about his life in the vampyre community.
"My mother was my first customer," Sebastiaan told The Huffington Post. "She is my muse. She introduced me to Tom Cruise when she showed me an article about how he was losing weight to play Lestat in 'Interview With A Vampire'. That's when I fell in love with vampire culture."
Although Sebastiaan's mom introduced him to vampires, dentistry is also in his blood.
"My grandfather was an orthodontist, my aunt is a practicing dentist and I'm a trained dental technician," Sebastiaan said in the video above.
Sebastiaan isn't adding fangs to an existing pair of choppers: He creates prosthetics that fit over existing teeth.
"You really shouldn't wear the caps for more than 12 hours at a time," he told HuffPost. "You shouldn't eat or sleep with them on, but you can smoke, drink and have great sex in them."
Currently, Sebastiaan offers four basic styles of fangs to his clients: Classic, Lilith, Sabre and Beast and then molds them to his customer's teeth -- and their belief system.
"The Lilith style used to be called the 'Lost Boy', but I changed it as an experiment. Now that style gets more females ordering it," Sebastiaan said. "I offered silver teeth in the 1990s, but when I started traveling around Europe after Sept. 11, I decided to keep the line simple."
Getting the custom-made canines can take a bite out of your savings, between $130 and $260, depending on the model. But Sebastiaan says the experience isn't something to just chew up and spit out.
"When people come and get these fangs, it's a collaboration between me and them," he says in the video. "We're sharing passion, sharing love. It's not some hippie thing, man. It's a primal connection. I transform them."
