Would the silver in modern dental fillings prevent many potential vampires from “rising” in the first place?
I mean, if they’ve got a mouth full of silver, that can’t be good.
And if sunlight kills vampires, what about more energetic forms of EM radiation, like X-rays?
I read a great Angel fanfic where the author used this concept. Angel would go into pawn shops, spot the jewellery that was authentic, buy it from the clueless SOB behind the counter, then take it to an expert who could recognize its worth. Do this often enough and, bada-bing, bada-boom, enough dough to keep him in hair gel and pinkie rings for the next few decades.
No he didn’t. Dracula does not mention that sunlight is at all harmful, much less fatal, to vampires, and the Count himself has one scene where he’s out and about during the day.
The notion that sunlight kills vampires does not appear to predate the vampire movie – namely F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent classic Nosferatu. And even then it’s not clear that sunlight alone is enough to do the job or whether it must be combined with the self-sacrifice of a “pure-hearted woman”.
Somehow this notion caught on and is now widely accepted as a crucial part of vampire lore. Some modern vampire stories and films (e.g. The Hunger, both book and movie) have gone back to vampires that walk by day, but this isn’t very common. This is kind of funny, since modern authors are often happy to ignore or work around the (much older) idea that vampires could be repelled by holy symbols, sometimes even having vampires laugh in the faces of those who attempt to ward them off with crucifixes. I’d love to read a story in which a vampire surprises a victim who thinks he knows all about vampires during the day…and explains that you can’t believe everything you see on TV just before going for the jugular. 
BTW, I think this recent popular idea that vampires must hide from the light of day was a big contributing factor in the rise of the whiny, annoying, melancholic, bad-poetry-writing vampire image. “Oh woe is me! I must never see the sun, nor the dew on the flowers! Not to mention the fact that when you get down to it, it’s really pathetically easy to kill me, I can’t hold down a regular job, and it’s really hard to meet nice girls!”
There’s got to be at least a few in the IRS, right?
You’d think so, but then you kick yourself when you realize you put all your money in Amagamated Spats and Buggy Whips Ltd.
Or like Monty Burns, who had his savings in “Confederated Slave Holdings”.
Well, at least that stock has been holding steady since 1865.
Probably some Lawyers as well.
I’d like to see a story where Vampires exposed to sunlight just get a really bad sunburn.
“It…doesn’t hurt you?”
“Doesn’t hurt? Doesn’t hurt? Look at me, I’m a walking blister with fangs! They’ll be calling me ‘lobster boy’ for weeks! ow! I hope I have some Aloe gel back at the crypt…”
Or maybe a play on the old “holy symbols hurt vampires, but only if the wielder has true faith” schtick…like having a Vampire in the Soviet Union being warded off by an athiest comisar holding a little plastic red star. Something like that.
That reminds me of the Buffy episode “Lie to Me”
They were excited about meeting vamps until Spike burst through the door with the intent of ripping their heads off.
**Angel: I’ve seen enough. I’ve seen this type before. I mean, they’re
children making up bedtime stories of friendly vampires to comfort
themselves in the dark.
Willow: Is that so bad? I mean, the dark can get pretty dark. Sometimes
you need a story.
Angel: These people don’t know anything about vampires. What they are,
how they live, how they dress…
A young man dressed exactly like Angel comes down the stairs behind him
and looks him up and down before continuing on. Angel clears his throat.
They start up the stairs to get out of the club.
**
Cracks me up everytime.
Well, I’m about the farthest thing from Goth, but living forever sounds pretty effin’ cool to me. 'sides, I already prey on living things: I’d just need to order my steaks extra-rare. And I already sleep through most of the day as it is…
I generally don’t like the whole “cool vampire” thing either, but I’d definetly have to think twice if the opportunity ever came up.
Well, a lot of people explain the sunlight thing by saying that it’s ultraviolet light that harms vamps. This allows vampire hunters in modern times to carry around portable tanning lamps as weapons. However, the behaviors of X-rays and UV are as different as the behaviors of infrared light and radio waves. Since vampires are “dead”, it’s unlikely that ionizing radiation would have any harmful effect on them. You could always test that theory by blasting a vampire with gamma rays – but then you might get The Vampiric Hulk. 
Aren’t Gamma rays the kind that give people radation posioning?
“Count smash you one, two, THREE times! A-ha-ha!”
I have read speculation that the vogue for vampire novels in the late nineteenth century was a reaction to the prevalence of “consumption”, ie, tuberculosis, which was seen as a very “arty” disease at the time…
I read about book about TB called The White Plague published in 1952 that still thought of TB as an “arty” disease. The authors spent pages and pages speculating on the possibility that the tubercle baccilli produce some sort of toxin which has the side-effect of stimulating the intellect.
“Kewel” vampires just don’t do it for me. They seem designed to appeal mainly to self-pitying teenagers who are wont to write bad poetry of the “I walk alone” school.
Ah, but the romantic 19th century vampire could at least go out in the sun! So they were still less mopey than vampires eventually became. 
I’ve never noticed any consumptive themes in Dracula (although some critics think there are allusions to syphilis!), but the young victim in J. Sheridan le Fanu’s seminal vampire novella Carmilla behaves pretty much like a tuberculosis patient. Or rather, she behaves the way tuberculosis patients in Victorian literature often behaved. She knows that there’s something wrong with her, but she’s become so languid that she’s not really troubled by it…she just sits around dreaming.
I have heard some critics speculate that the rise in popularity of vampire books/films in the late 20th century was inspired by the AIDS crisis.
I never thought of Dracula in the novel as being frugal, and I thought he was rich precisely because once a year he would go out and mark all the treasure troves in his area. Add to that the idea of compound interest, and over a few hundred years you would wind up pretty well off.
The other question I always wanted answered is how come we all aren’t vampires already?
Assuming that everyone a vampire bites winds up a vampire himself, and that vampires feed as often as they seem to do in the books and movies, simple geometric progression would imply that we should all have been bitten by now.
I recently re-read Dracula, and the only way I can figure is that you don’t end up a vampire unless you die from being bit by a vampire. If he/she just bites you once, you recover.
Which leaves a plot hole in the novel. The three sisters who want to bite Jonathan Harker in the early part of the novel are bought off from biting him before Dracula is done with him by being given a bag in which is a child that Dracula stole. Later in the same part of the novel, the mother shows up at the castle door screaming, “Monster, give me my child!” (Dracula sics the wolves on her for some reason, rather than sucking her blood, so he must not be too hard up for victims.) So the three vampires must have sucked the child dry and killed him. But the child never re-appears in the novel as a vampire child, and van Helsing nevers locates the child to stake him out and destroy him.
So there must be at least one vampire still wandering around Transylvania at the end of the novel. Probably a lot more, if Dracula has been flitting thru windows for five hundred years or more.
The idea that vampires must spend all the daylight hours in their coffins is not consistent in the novel, either. During the early part, with Jonathan Harker, Dracula has to dash off to his coffin the minute the rooster crows, but later in the novel, he is active during the daylight.
Gotta love the novel anyway. That scene where the vampire sisters are getting ready to “kiss” Jonathan Harker is about as close to porn as mainstream Victorian fiction would allow itself.
Regards,
Shodan
To convert somebody into a vampire requires repeated small drainings, usually 3.
However, excommunicants, witches, warlocks, and certain very evil men are also said to change into vampires, spontaneously, after death.
In RL, various accounts of Stalin’s secret burial include high-ranking Party members driving a stake through his heart first. I believe them.