Buffy makes it look so easy – she just has to touch a piece of wood to a vampire’s chest and the thing crumbles into dust. But if a vampire’s basic anatomy is unchanged from its mortal form, then its heart is protected by the sternum – a thick shield of bone. Could you drive a wooden stake through a human/vampiric sternum? I would think it would splinter. You would need a steel spike rather than the traditional wooden stake. Wouldn’t you?
Go in from the side or the back. All you need is a little angle, to get past the sternum. Or use ironwood. 
Properly, you’re supposed to use a sexton’s spade (I don’t know where that comes from, but it was written up in Famous Monsters a long time ago).
And if you read Dracula, take note of how big that “stake” is – it’s about a yard long!
As I recall from my Horatio Hornblower books, it’s best to insert your item between the ribs and shove upwards at an angle – much better than going in through that hard sternum.
Thing is, in a vampire movie nobody ever drives in the stake at an angle. It’s always point-on-the-center-of-the-sternum-and-drive-straight-down.
They addressed this in that Robert Rodriguez vampire movie with George Clooney. (I’m too lazy to look up the name) One of the characters remarks at how the vampires have changed and their bodies are “squishy”.
Horatio Hornblower fought vampires?!
Well, Buffy does have superhuman strength. Of course, the scoobies have no problem with it either. Didn’t one kill a vampire with a pencil once? I doubt that I could drive a pencil through someone’s abdomen without it breaking, much less ribcage.
And a sexton’s spade is used for digging graves. I can see the relevance.
That was Willow, and the pencil was propelled by magic. Think of it as a wooden bullet.
Dawn did it once, too, in the season 6 (?) Halloween episode. No magic involved. Kind of a dopey episode, over-all.
Properly speaking, one needs a stake and a mallet to properly dispose of a vampire. Of course, most movies skimp on the subsequent stuffing of the mouth with garlic, beheading, burning, and scattering of the ashes at a crossroad at midnight. Which is why we have so many sequels to vampire movies.
Most of the time in legend you drive the stake through when they’re in their coffins, too. Bit easier to do when they’re not all with the kung-fu skills.
Right. The actual idea is to nail them to the coffin. Not to destroy their hearts.
In one of the Fred Saberhagen novels, they seriously pissed one off by dropping a pencile down the barrel of a .38 and blasting away.
No, destroying the hearts can be important. Vampire lore varies from place to place, but since the whole point of a vampire is to collect blood from the living, stabbing it in an organ that’s full of the stuff is very satisfying. The idea is that when you stab it, if it bleeds at all, it’s been taking blood from people. Stabbing an ordinary corpse usually doesn’t produce fresh blood. It’s not always the heart, though; sometimes you decapitate them instead.
Whether it’s a sexton’s spade or a wooden stake varies from place to place too, but tradition is pretty clear on how to kill them. Wait for daylight, dig up the suspect corpse, commit some act of decisive butchery, rebury, wait. If the populace suffers no new ills, you’ve got all the vampires. If not, lather, rinse, repeat.
The stab-them-as-they’re-coming-right-at-you!!! makes for good drama but is not found in folklore.
Something else I should note—according to a lot of folklore I’ve seen, it’s important to drive the stake through in a single blow. If you fail to do that, all your incomplete work will have done is rouse the vampire.
There’s actually an old legend about a would-be vampire killer who, after such an incident, was thanked by the vampire for his “gift” of a stake—saying “I’ll use it as a club to keep away the dogs.”
Seems like in Dracula they struck several blows on the stake. When they killed teh Count, the American (Quincy?) cut his head off with a bowie knife while someone else staked him.
I thought Quincy stabbed Dracula through the heart with the Bowie knife?
Again I screw up because I don’t have a copy of the book in question… 
Then there was the episode of Angel when the copy lady shoved a two-by-four through Angel’s chest and into the heart of the vampire behind him. My guess from that point forward was that they had a kind of a weakness to wood, the Thanksgiving episode of Buffy notwithstanding, when Spike was tied down and got hit in the chest five or six times… “Hey! Watch the heart!”
Quoting from Paul Barber’s Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality, p. 71: “…staking is just one of many methods to dispose of vampires and revenants, and it is sometimes a mere preliminary to their cremation, since the staking does not always work…” Various places require the stake to be made of ash or hawthorn, but other woods are used. From page 73: “…staking the revenant seems most typical among the southern Slavs; the Greeks preferred cremation, the Russians disposal in a desolate area or body of water, and the Germans and western Slavs favored the sort of decapitation…” So it kind of depends on where your vampire is from.
I also recommend the article “The Killing of a Vampire” by Veselin Cajkanovic in The Vampire: A Casebook, a reasonably priced little volume edited by the late Alan Dundes.
PS: Re: hearts, Barber’s index has: “heart: burned, 74; cut out, 21, 25, 63, 73; pierced with needle, 53; pierced with sickle, 50; two hearts of vampire, 31, 191.”
And a couple of cures from Romanian folk tradition (from another article in the Dundes Casebook, this one by Jan Louis Perkowski):
Shoot it.
(or)
Exhume the body and shoot it.
(or)
Bury a bottle of wine near the grave and then retireve it and drink its contents with your relatives six weeks later.
Practical people, those Romanians.