I feel it is key to remind the thread of the tongue-in-cheek horror/comedy that is The Monster Squad. In that protagonists are actual movie monster fans who come across knowledge that actual monsters (Universal’s monster cast in this case) are real and take measures (some more, some less effective) against them.
In terms of generalities though, a lot of black comedy or horror-comedy movies tend to be at least a bit aware of the tropes and the protagonists have some partial knowledge of what is going on. The ones that try to play it fully straight are the ones that seem to have the blind spots.
In Mira Grant’s “Newsflesh” series, characters explicitly cite George Romero movies as a valuable source of survival info for dealing with their zombie apocalypse.
In Children of the Night, by Mercedes Lackey, a vampire character discusses several pieces of popular culture vampire lore that he knows from personal experience are misunderstandings or outright myth. They’re also dealing with a couple of types of vampire-like beings that are not familiar to people who only know the Dracula-style vampire.
And of course, in Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King, at least two characters are acquainted with the popular culture vampire lore and this is helpful to the good guys.
Again, read the annotated version. This helped me a lot. Both Wolf (The Annotated Frankenstein and The Essential Frankenstein) and Klinger (The New Annotated Frankenstein) have versions out there. I’ve read both Wolf and Klinger, and they made what had previously been a tedious slog into an interesting experience.
Aside: The in-universe reason why the Lone Ranger used silver bullets was because his cabin sat on the entrance to a secret silver mine. But it took me a while to figure out the narrative reason: Silver bullets are expensive. If you’re using bullets that are that expensive, then you’re naturally going to be very reluctant to waste them. It’s a way to make violence only a last resort for the Lone Ranger.
In 30 Days of Night, a bunch of vampires descend upon Barrow, Alaska, cut the town off from outside communications, and spend the next 30 days killing everyone. The sheriff is in with a small group of survivors early on trying to figure out what to do and he says something like, “Okay, those are vampires. I don’t want to hear anything like ‘oh, vampires aren’t real’ because those are vampires. Are we all in agreement that we’re dealing with vampires?” Not a great movie, but it had its moments.
I believe silver bullets for werewolves comes from Guy Endore’s “The Werewolf of Paris” where someone makes a bullet out of a silver cross to shoot a werewolf.
There is a movie called Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon where the main character wants to be the “best” slasher ever.
Shaun of the Dead has the character constantly admonishing each other, “Don’t say the z-word!” They know about zombie movie, but don’t want to admit that they’re trapped in one.
In the comic book Preacher, Cassidy was attacked by a vampire as a young man in rural Ireland, and has no idea what’s happened to him. He’s never heard of vampires, until a decade or so later, when he’s at a pub and someone leaves a copy of Dracula on the table.
In HItman, by the same author, the titular assassin is hired to kill a scientist who invented a gas that turns corpses into zombies. One of his team gets bitten on the hand, and begs his friends to cut it off “before he turns.” When they finally confront the scientist, he mocks the newly one-handed guy for watching too many movies - the zombies aren’t created by an infection, and a bite from one isn’t any more dangerous than any other kind of bite.
One of the big differences between vampires/werewolves and zombies, is that “knowledge that these things exist” is usually part of the trope, even before mass media made them household words. In Dracula, Van Helsing already knows about vampires before the Count comes to England, and of course, the villagers all know about the Count. Similar in most werewolf stories. “People have been telling stories about these creatures for centuries,” is already part of the lore, so adding in Bram Stoker as one of the people telling stories doesn’t really break anything.
Romero-style zombies are different. They’re an apocalyptic threat, that overwhelms civilization when they crop up. They can’t have happened before, because that would mean we live in a world with a radically different history. You can’t really have folk tales about that time the dead consumed the city of Paris, because that’s the sort of thing that would show up in regular history, not something you learn from the wandering fortune teller. It’s hard to justify a character in a zombie movie knowing about George Romero zombie movies, without justifying how George Romero knows about zombies.
At least in the case of the “Newsflesh” series, Romero movies were viewed as fiction (as in our universe) until some very bad luck with engineered viruses hybridizing led to a real (in their world) zombie apocalypse. Once people realized what they were up against, they tried strategies from Romero movies, which proved to work in their real world.
The Return of the Living Dead handled this well. George Romero made witnessed a military experiment gone wrong and made a movie about it, but changed the details just enough so that he wasn’t disappeared. So even though the characters saw his movies they aren’t much help against “real” zombies.
They were also poking fun at zombie movies in general for not using the z-word.
One of the reasons that zombies are never referred to as zombies is because Marvel owned a trademark on the word “zombie”. How could Marvel trademark a common word from Haitian folklore? Well, to be honest, a lot of folks wondered about that over the years. A lot of folks who understand copyright and trademark law a lot better than I do have stated that it’s unlikely that the trademark could have held up in court.
If you were making a zombie TV show or movie, you had a choice. You could call them zombies and face a potential legal battle, which would cost your production company a lot of money (even if you are likely to win), or you could pay Marvel a licensing fee which is also going to cost your production company some money. Or you could just call them walkers or infected or ghouls or whatever and not worry about it, which makes the folks funding your TV show or movie a lot happier.
Marvel’s trademark expired in the 1990s so if you want to call your creature a zombie you are no longer in any danger of being sued by Marvel. Many zombie shows and movies still avoid the term, either for reasons already stated in the thread or just out of tradition.
Under the Comics Code Authority, comic books in late twentieth century United States operated under many restrictions, mostly aimed at preventing horror elements from being used. This code became more lenient in 1971 but still prevented the use of certain terms such as “zombie”, because they lacked the literary background of creatures such as vampires and werewolves, although not the use of zombies or zombie-like creatures. In order to circumvent this, Marvel Comics used the term “zuvembie” in place of “zombie” in their comics.
In 1989 the Code was changed again, permitting the word “zombie”, and Marvel retired the term “zuvembie”.[3][4] In 1997, John Byrne used the word again briefly in Wonder Woman Annual#6, published by DC Comics. In 2007 Deadpool, a character known for breaking the fourth wall, uses the term alongside Zombie in Cable & Deadpool#48. These uses suggest that, since its first appearance in Weird Tales, “zuvembie” has become a term acknowledged by both major comic book companies, DC Comics and Marvel Comics, and that it is now seen as an esoteric reference to comic book cultural history.
There was a panic in France in the 1760’s over a huge number of deaths being attributed to the Beast of Gévaudan, which has been speculated over the years to have been a werewolf, some other supernatural monster, or a serial killer. (Modern thinking is that this was likely to have been multiple unrelated killings by wolves, which were a serious problem at the time.) After many failed attempts by others to hunt down the “unkillable” beast, Jean Chastel claimed he killed it with a silver bullet in 1767. The argument that silver bullets were for killing witches, not werewolves, is somewhat moot. Becoming a werewolf generally was considered to be an act of witchcraft in which you made a bargain with the devil to gain such a power, not a curse transmitted by bite. Witches and werewolves were cut from the same cloth, and witch-hunts and werewolf-hunts were pretty similar. (I listen to the excellent MonsterTalk podcast too much. It’s a skeptical examination of monsters in folklore and popular culture.)
How many people know that in the original Stoker novel it was garlic blossoms that repelled vampires? Or that Van Helsing used consecrated communion wafers more than he used crucifixes? Or that at times Dracula, and more especially his brides, behaved more like solidified ghosts or astral projections than walking corpses? (Although they all did have physical bodies interred). Also, for some reason people seem to think that a vampire’s heart has to staked with wood, when it seems like the original intent was just destroying the heart.
Finally, in Brian Lumley’s Necroscope series, it turns out that traditional legends of vampires are based on accounts of a quasi-supernatural entity he names Wamphyri, who have a degree of overlap with the legends but a lot of differences too (being horribly more formidable for one thing).
Staking may have also been a means of nailing the corpse in place so it could not rise from the grave.
The “Digging New England Vampires” episode of the Archaeological Fantasies podcast features archaeologists discussing an American “vampire” burial site. The site was noted as unusual when archaeologists noted one of the bodies had its head removed and the leg bones had been arranged in a cross on the body’s chest.
When families were dying one by one of such things as tuberculosis, they would dig up the earlier victims to see if one of them was a vampire causing the later deaths.
Hmm… Looks like Chastel never claimed that himself… “The allegations of Chastel purportedly using a gun loaded with silver bullets are derived from a distorted detail[4] based primarily on Henri Pourrat’s Histoire fidèle de la bête en Gévaudan (1946).” (Five years after Siodmak’s The Wolf Man screenplay.)
Ella Odstedt’s 2004 Norrländsk folktradition. Uppsala. s. 147 supposedly has a report of a Swedish belief from 1936 that silver bullets can kill were-bears. That would be a few years before The Wolf Man, so folklore may have preceded Hollywood.
Being neither a believer in witches or werewolves myself, I am not surprised that no witches turned into werewolves when presented with silver. Werewolves don’t exist, but people would confess to it under torture. Werewolf trials were sort of a subset of witch trials. The Wikipedia article on it has a lot of references and links that can be chased down.
