Vampire 101

This seems like a good place to interject a bit of vampire education, a course of Vampire 101, if you will. Like you, I've watched the movies and read the books, so I thought I had a pretty good handle on vampire lore. That was all very useful...Sort of. Some of the legends are nonsense, some are true, and some fall between myth and reality.

I'll start with the most import fact. Sunlight kills vampires. Period. Sunglasses, sunblock, hoodies, tinted windows--none of it protects them. They need to be behind wood, metal, stone or dirt when the sun comes up, or they are going up like a Roman candle. Other types of light are a little more dicey. I've tried UV lamps, incandescents, blacklights and infra-red to no avail, however, fluorescent lights and laser pointers seems to irritate the heck out of them. The laser seems to be the equivalent of jabbing a person with a needle, and a well-placed laser flash can buy you enough time to escape.

Other classic vampire killing methods have been somewhat twisted over time. You've heard of the stake through the heart, the silver spike through the heart, the severing of the head with a silvered blade and so on...Let me simplify it for you. Destroy the brain or the heart and the vampire is dead, no matter what you do it with. I usually try to do both--why take a chance? Vampires do have regenerative powers, it's true, but the head and the heart have to be intact for those powers to work.

Here's a little side note on the whole religious thing. Can a cross or holy water stop a vampire? It depends on how he was raised. I'm dead serious (okay, poor choice of words). If a vampire was a devout Christian in life, the cross will give him pause and maybe even drive him back. Incidentally, the theory applies with other religions, too (Tim swears he drove back a vampire in Skokie with a Star of David.). Here's my theory on this. I think when religion is a central part of someone's life, that memory remains after they go undead, and serves as a link to their humanity. I've noticed younger vampires, the ones who've turned in the last decade or so, are pretty much immune to religious symbols of any kind, in much the same way that people in general seem to be immune to religion these days. I'm tempted to hold up a cell phone or a picture of Kim Karsashian's butt to see if it has the "cross effect" on the more recent generations, somehow linking them to their humanity.

Garlic is an interesting little myth. It kind of works, but not in a "hang it from your windows to keep evil away" application. You have to eat something heavy in garlic. I have a theory on this, too. Drinking someone's blood is a pretty intimate act (think of every other act in which bodily fluids are exchanged and I'm sure you'll agree, they require a degree of intimacy). Imagine the smell of someone who has just eaten pizza loaded with garlic and imagine pressing your face to their neck and holding it there for several minutes. Pleasant? It's probably not pleasant for the vampire either. Just a thought, but I have seen vampires pass on many a garlic-laden meal in favor of someone tastier.

In my next post, I'll talk a bit more about something that's always fascinated me--the epidemiology of vampires.