Who doesn’t know that the best way to kill a vampire is to drive a stake through it’s heart, or to give it a good dose of Mr. Sunshine and watch the creature of the night burn up?
We all know that, don’t we? Easy-Peasy. Just look at Buffy.
So imagine my surprise when I read Dracula by Bram Stoker and there’s Dracula pursuing his enemies — in broad daylight!
Couple that with van Helsing telling us that the only thing daylight does to the vampire is limit its incredible supernatural power.
Whoa, Nelly! That’s a shocker.
What that means is the vampire is one heck of an apex predator. Not one I’d care to tackle. Buffy notwithstanding.
Bram Stoker’s monster is a super villain par excellence. A killing machine with no equal. Although, like all predators, he does have his weaknesses.
A reviewer of my vampire story, Metamorphosis, wondered how the vampire, the Reverend Oliver Smith, could be about during the day. The answer’s simple: it’s what real vampires can do.
So where did the this sunlight stuff come from anyway? It came from the 1922 silent film Nosferatu.
FW Murnau, the director, and Henrik Galeen, the writer, had a problem on their hands: how to get rid of Count Orlok. Simply put: he’s too powerful.
In true German Expressionist fashion, Murnau and Galeen created a sentimental solution. Orlok could be destroyed by a pure-hearted woman who distracts the vampire, whiles he’s feeding on her, long enough for the creature to be caught in the rays of the rising sun. Sort of like a mother’s love saving a certain wizard.
And that’s how all this sunlight destroying vampires nonsense got started.
I suppose the nonsense continues because it’s a convenient and easy way to get rid of the creature of the night. Lots of symbolism there, as well. The problem is that the vampire is not just a creature of the night.
The vampire is an undead monster possessing incredible supernatural abilities. He has the strength of 20 men. He can shape shift. Even turning himself into mist. Not even Superman can do that. Dracula also had incredible powers of hypnotism and telepathy.
But even apex predators can be taken down, because they have weaknesses.
We all know about garlic and crosses and the Host. But Dracula could not cross running water. In addition he had to sleep on his native earth; and when asleep, he was as if he was dead. And that is how the good guys in Dracula dispatch the Count.
They catch up with the men hauling Dracula’s last coffin enroute to his castle. The good guys chase off the vampire’s helpers, open the coffin, and drive a stake through the helpless vampire’s heart just before the sun sets.
So the next time you encounter a vampire, have your cross, garlic, and Host wafers at the ready. Because they will probably protect you.
But don’t rely on Mr. Sunshine. Because the vampire will only laugh and put on his sunglasses as he or she sucks your blood.
Comments are always welcome; and until next time, happy reading!
CW
Threads that Bind 
3 responses to “Here Comes the Sun — But it Won’t Help”
A most enlightening post, good sir. Through all my formative, monster-loving years, vampires were about the least interesting to me, and so of course I didn’t know a great deal about what you’ve posted here… and now that I know that Twilight is truer to the archetype than Buffy, I’m really put off by them! Really, though, I’m much more into the Buffy/Angel version than good old Bram’s. Buffy’s vamps are savage, evil, terrifying things; Dracula feels more like a bad date. While we’re on the subject, where did Mr. Stoker come down on the ‘having to be invited in’ trope that our favorite vamp slayer espouses?
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Murnau & Galeen were apparently not well-versed scientifically. The Moon doesn’t produce any light of its own, it reflects sunlight; so if vampires can’t be out and about when the Sun is up, then they also can’t be out and about when the Moon is up. Thus they would be a danger only during a New Moon, which would severely curtail their activities.
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I think it’s a bit silly to dismiss a fictional trope about a fictional creature as “nonsense” because later authors adapted that trope to their versions of that creature. Yes, it’s fair to acknowledge that Murnau invented this trope to give his film a thrilling conclusion. However, it’s a trope that has some precedent in that the vampire had often been associated with the night and nocturnal predators in earlier fiction and folklore. For that matter, Dracula also includes that association. It’s just that like any nocturnal predator, sunlight doesn’t actually kill a vampire if it’s awake during the daytime. Some later authors have made good thematic use of this trope.
I think a more important takeaway from this is that a writer needs to think about any “rules” they use for any creature they employ. Those rules should make sense within the world the author has built and not simply exist because someone else did it. The author doesn’t necessarily need to explain every nuance of why a rule exists, but it does need to be internally consistent and believable within the world.
Finally, just because I’m a professional astronomer, I think it’s worth noting that light from the full moon is some 500,000 times weaker than light from the sun. In the real world, strength of radiation matters. Even a human will get burned sitting out too long in the sun, but is unlikely to get a moonburn at night! Also, a fun vampire trope that didn’t take off, is that in Varney the Vampire, Lord Francis Varney is actually healed by the light of the full moon!
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