The Logic of The Little Vampire part 2: Tony's Nightmares/The Power of the Stone/Sympathizer Status

The magic act at the end of the movie is a result of a combination of will, mental ability, timing, and flashy lights, but it is ultimately performed by a nine-year-old boy who just a week ago was getting picked on relentlessly at school, and several months ago was living a normal life in San Diego with his parents. Tony as a seemingly normal nine-year-old boy should not logically be able to do something so complex and mentally demanding as magically turning twenty vampires into human beings. But Tony is no ordinary third-grader.

Tony is a sympathizer, and though it's never outright stated in canon, it's implied that that confers on him special powers and status within the vampire community.

It starts with the nightmares.

"I've dreamt it every night since I've been here," Tony says in class. "[...] The comet, the beam of light, the vampires, and the vampire hunter."

The movie opens with the ceremony and its interruption playing out in Tony's sleeping mind, and at first, all such dreams do is give him an obsession with vampires and cause him to tell all to his classmates (as, after all, it would not be reasonable to believe that a nine-year-old boy, acclimating to a new social setting, would of his own free will make himself sound insane if he knew it meant he would be ruthlessly picked on by his father's boss's two grandsons). Tony has the exact same dream nightly until he meets Rudolph, who ultimately reveals to him that the events of his dream really happened. At about that point, it evolves into visions.

The visions (of which there are two) begin when Tony shares a vision with Frederick, when both are in physical contact with each other and the amulet around Frederick's neck. This implies two things: one, that Tony is capable of having visions of events in the past connected to the amulet, and two, that only by contact with Tony and a magical object is any other vampire capable of seeing what Tony does.

The visions inform Tony that the Stone of Attamon is in his bedroom, and he assumes that that is why he's been having those nightmares in the first place, but this can't possibly be entirely true. Logically, if the stone had the power to give people nightmares, then nearly every other previous owner would have had a similar experience to Tony's. For three hundred years, this would have gone on, leading to a local legend and factoring into the Thompsons' decision to buy the home. Or it would mean that someone would have helped the vampires find the stone sooner, or both. Clearly, nothing even remotely close to this happens. That's why we have this movie in the first place, which is to say, that is the sole reason why the plot exists. No one else noticed anything unusual. This therefore means that something about Tony is fundamentally different from anyone else who may have come in contact with the stone between the events of the flashbacks and the events of the movie proper.

"He has a sympathy for our kind."

"Oh, lovely."

--Freda and Anna, commenting on Frederick's revelation that he and Tony shared a vision

Frederick, of course, skips over whatever implications the above quote may have on the situation with Tony coming (unceremoniously, I might add) into his home and his family's lives (unlives, rather) to get straight to the particulars of the vision, because of the time crunch the entire family is under. However, as soon as knowledge of Tony's sympathy becomes public to the vampire family, their dynamic with Tony changes at once. Frederick is still distrustful, until Tony saves his life, but he ultimately relents and allows Tony to assist in whatever way he can. Needless to say, Tony is never attacked again except by Rookery.

Being a sympathizer is treated as a good thing by Anna and Freda, demonstrated by their tone and word choice. Frederick is initially unsure and willing to hedge his bets against the chance that Tony would betray the Sackville-Bagg family by terrifying him enough that Tony wouldn't think to betray the Sackville-Baggs anyway. This agreement, if it can be called that, established that Tony not sell the family out to Rookery and that he help the vampires trace the crest from the vision. However, both before and after this scene, Tony willingly helps the vampires in other ways: saving them all from being crispy-fried by Rookery by throwing a rock at the hunter's giant light; helping a vampire who just tried to kill him find an alternative food source; just to name two of the most prominent examples.

On top of all that, Tony wants to be a vampire, as well, expressing the wish in spite of everything Rudolph has said anything against it. He articulates how awesome it would be to be a vampire ("great" and "doing the most aweseome stuff I've ever done in my life" are phrases he uses to describe what it would be like to be a vampire) and spends the first half of the movie harboring this wish, which, as an aside, mysteriously seems to vanish when he becomes immersed in the quest for the stone.

Tony's dreams and visions, his compulsion to talk about them to anyone who would listen (willingly or otherwise), his desire to help the vampires regardless of the circumstances, and his own desire to become part of the undead community are all components that play into his sympathy for vampires, which is very subtly implied to be a trait unique only to him. In fact, sympathy seems like a trait that certain people are born with, a psychic version of eye or hair color. Tony simply happens to be born with this characteristic, to completely normal, hapless parents and into a world that does not believe that vampires exist, save for a sadistic vampire hunter who freely causes property damage, commits several counts of attempted murder, one count of kidnapping, and is a racist against vampires as a whole; and a lord who "ha[s] worries" about "Elizabeth and her demon lover".

Though Frederick does not entirely trust Tony until the latter breaks Rookery's light which is slowly reducing him to a raisin, as soon as it comes out that Tony is a sympathizer, no other vampire makes a move to attack him, not even the vampire caretaker, if he ever came in contact with Tony at all. If sympathy truly is a rare trait which someone is born with, which gives that person supernatural powers and a desire to interact with and even be a vampire, along with the side-effect of needing to tell everyone he comes into contact with in an effort to help the cause, then this situation implies that a sympathizer occupies a "Do Not Touch" status within the vampire community. And it makes perfect sense. Why on earth would you try to kill someone who was trying to help you with your current problem, or someone who could help you in the future and shares your mental world? That would be the illogical decision. Since Freda knew exactly what it meant for Tony to share a vision with Frederick, and since Frederick seemed shaken by it, this implies that Tony is not the first such person. This also makes sense, because for a protocol to develop, you need multiple experiences of similar events. Therefore, there have been sympathizers in the past, and there have possibly been hunters pretending to be sympathizers to get close enough to vampires to try to kill them, which would explain Frederick's wariness of Tony's status.

Sympathy, especially the desire to be around vampires, has another side-effect: it causes sympathizers to sometimes be mistaken for vampires. To a vampire hunter, seeing a human in the midst of a group of vampires, especially when said human is not being sucked dry, would not add up very well and could very easily lead to suspicion. Especially Rookery, who has a tracking radar which led him to the barn, easily mistakes Tony for the vampire in question and goes along with it in spite of proof to the contrary. Even when Rookery comes around to Tony's sympathizer status, he still tries to kill the boy by shutting him up inside a coffin and leaving him to slowly suffocate. His excuse is that "He's one of them. I've seen them all together slithering in the night," and it's true. A sympathizer is the closest to "one of the clan" as a human can get, if this movie is anything to go by.

The final thing Tony's sympathy allows him to do is grant the vampires' dearest wish, which by that point may have become his dearest wish for them, as well. The ultimate magic act of the film is performed by a nine-year-old psychic with such a deep connection to the vampire clan and their needs that he is able to single-handedly perform so taxing a spell as to grant the vampires humanity, and still remain standing, albeit extremely depressed because all of his friends disappeared into clouds of smoke. Magic is highly multi-faceted and requires a very large degree of skill; people spend years trying to perfect it in the real world. That a nine-year-old is able to do this speaks to Tony's innate abilities as well as to the catalyzing powers of the Stone of Attamon when it comes into contact with sympathizers. Because the stone does serve as a catalyst. That's the best it can do and the only way to explain why there is a plot in the first place, as clearly it hasn't affected anyone the same way it has Tony. As stated, there is no legend about a haunted room in the castle that gives people strange dreams, there is no one who has helped the vampires before this, nothing akin to Tony's situation has happened prior to the events of The Little Vampire. Thus, Tony was incorrect in assigning his dreams to the stone's doing. Tony had it in him to have the dreams and the visions and the compulsions and desires the entire time, but the presence of the Stone of Attamon, and especially its proximity to him when he moves into his new room in Scotland, sparks that within him and sets things in motion.