This is a new one to me - apparently there are stories of “hard men”, soldiers who can’t be killed by ordinary bullets, and who are only vulnerable to silver bullets. Folk songs about Bulgarian rebel leader Delyo describe him as invulnerable to normal weapons, driving the Ottomans to cast a silver bullet in order to murder him circa 1720.
A book from 1886, History of the Scottish Expedition to Norway in 1612, mentions that Captain George Sinclair was shot by Berdon Segelstad with a bullet melted from a silver button because the Norwegians thought Sinclair was an agent of Satan, and they wanted to make sure they killed him. Then they killed his wife and child, too.
Both of those stories predate the Brothers Grimm tale of a witch killed by a silver button fired from a gun. (The Grimms’ fairy tales were published from 1812 through 1857, but were based on earlier folklore.)
My supposition: Some people may have believed that silver is generally efficacious against beings that are otherwise supernaturally difficult to kill.
In several of the paranormal romances with werewolves, silver bullets are no worse than regular ones.
In one, they acknowledge that silver doesn’t make the bullet worse, but one of the main characters has a silver bullet with the name of his nemesis on it.
We missed them the first time around in this thread, but the vampires in Terry Pratchett’s Carpe Jugulam are ridiculously genre-savvy. So much so that it comes around and bites them on the ass at the end of the story.
“Remember – that which does not kill us can only make us stronger.”
“And that which does kill us leaves us dead !”
I think making everyone know “the rules” just makes it harder to come up with a good story. Take Shaun of the Dead, they knew what zombies were so the outbreak was completely put down basically over night. Of course that wasn’t the point of the movie so it works, but a true horror story is much harder to write when everyone knows the solution.
In the Dresden Files books, there are (at least) three different kinds of vampires, the Black Court, the Red Court, and the White Court. Of the three, the Black Court are by far the weakest, not inherently, but because, ever since Dracula was published, everyone and their werewolf now knows their weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and they’ve been mostly hunted down.
(the White Court, however, who feed on human emotional energy rather than blood, are doing just fine)
As I say there, it’s not as if you portray the trope once and it’s established. Especially in this case – UFA made Nosferatu without getting permission or paying royalties, and Florence Stoker – ram’s widow – was pissed. She took them to court and demanded that all copies be destroyed. They damned well almost all were, too. We’re lucky enough survived. But the point is that the film didn’t get seen enough, especially in the US, for the notion to take hold. In movies and print, vampires died mainly by having stakes driven into their hearts, or being burned. H.P. Lovecraft, in his one “straight” vampire story, destroyed the vampire with acid.
What happened, though, was that two movies in one year portrayed a vampire dissolving in sunlight – Son of Dracula and Return of the Vampire, both in 1943. Universal studios kept up the idea in House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula.
Even so, the idea didn’t quite take hold. But when Hammer films had Dracula dissolve under the influence of sunlight in Horror of Dracula (1958), that pretty much cemented the idea in the popular mind.
And of course, part of the reason the movies did it, and also part of the reason it took hold in the public consciousness, is that it made for a really neat special effect.
Well, yeah. But, as I argue on my webpage, I suspect part of it was to avoid needless bloodshed. For the first Dracula movie in 1931 Dracula’s staking takes place off-camera (even though the play they based it on had a spectacular on-stage special effect where you see them driving the stake in, and the body turns to dust a la Buffy). It was thought that showing the staking would be too severe for American audiences (they even removed any reference to the staking of Lucy as a vampire, although they do mention it in the Spanish-language version). In Daughter of Dracula they re-create that final scene, but, again, you don’t get to see the staking.
But having a vampire bloodlessly dissolve under sunlight is even better – you get to see the demise without any of that awful screaming and blood. I suspect, too, that the the two films showing it were released during WWII was an important factor. Who needs to be reminded of blood and impalement when your relatives might be fighting overseas under the same threat. A nice clean dissolve removes all those thoughts. (Although I have to admit that Bela Lugosi’s melting into Jello at the end of The Vampire Returns is goopier than Lon Chaney Jr’s in Son of Dracula or John Carradine’s in the two “House” movies.
I did a series of comics many years ago about “The Real Zombie Apocalypse”, which was basically us wiping out the Zombies as soon as they showed up, since we’ve all seen the movies. Eventually, we developed things like the ZKG, which first responders would attach to patients, so if the patient suddenly died, the ZKG would shoot spikes into their brain, to prevent zombification.
An equivalent might be a murder mystery in which no one had any idea of the concept of murder (“What a weird accident! Fred must have accidentally put arsenic in his coffee”).
Yeah, that’s probably a better analogy: not being unaware of murder, but being unaware of the common elements and tropes of murder mystery fiction: fingerprints, DNA samples, detectives looking for clues, etc.