Whoa, mind blown!
(I am definitely going to be thinking about that for a while.)
Why shouldn’t some art be depressing? Why should an artist rule out certain emotions?
And what’s depressing about American Gothic?
Who wants to look at a couple of rustic sad sacks?
One 1959 episode of the TV show The Rifleman featured three actors who played werewolves and one who played Dracula
Michael Landon, Chuck Connors, and Steven Ritch, with John Carradine as an extra added bonus
Sounds like a fun plot. The rifleman killed three werewolves with silver bullets, but his downfall was not realizing that you need to use a wooden stake for a vampire?
Not so interesting. The actors had all played werewolves in different movies or TV shows, and Carradine has played Count Dracula practically infinite times on stage, and at least three times in the movies (not to mention characters with names like “Alucard”, which is Dracula spelled backwards, and other vampires). But there were apparently no werewolves or vampires in the TV episode. Woulda been interesting.
Your statement reminds me of a short story that appeared inn an old issue of Famous Monster of Filmland where a werewolf in the Old West figures he’s safe from anyone killing him. Until he hears someone say “Hi-yo Silver, away!”
Does the stake actually have to be made of wood, or was that just what came to hand in the original Dracula novel? I’d have thought that destroying the heart was the pivotal thing.
Interesting question, with multiple answers, mainly because everyone is making up the rules as they go along.
1.) Unlike a lot of vampire “fakelore” that Bram Stoker made up from whole cloth, this one is pretty traditional, goin g back to real folklore. People drove wooden stakes into vampires in the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire (1845-1847), the earliest fictional use of it I know. Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) was done in by a stake, too.
2.) You can find collections of folklore that mention the stake, as in Gerard’s The Land Beyond the Forest, which Stoker used. But such accounts also mention other methods, including driving a metal stake through the heart (or head). The Master himself had an old column about these old ways to kill vampires of different ethnicities. So the wooden stake wasn’t unique.
- ) In Carl Dreyer’s film Vampyr (1932), they kill the titular vampire with a metal rod driven through her heart.
4.) But the wooden stake got more air time in pop culture, so it’s what everyone knows
5.) Larry niven asked if you could kill a vampire with a stake made of plastic wood in one of his stories. IIRC, they never did settle it.
6.) In the novel I Am Legend Richard Matheson’s protagonist at first kills the vampires by using wooden stakes, but eventually learns that they aren’t necessary, and he can simply cut big enough slits in their arms and make sure the cuts stay open.
7.) The Marvel character Blade used wooden knives to kill vampires, so clearly he thought you had to use wood. I don’t know if that carried through to the movies – I never watched those.
In Stoker’s novel, Dracula himself is killed with a Bowie knife.
Look, if you want to take your chances with some hoity-toity carbon-fiber stake, be my guest. Oh, and feel free to try Roundy’s garlic salt and a yin-yang symbol instead of a cross.
It was good knowin’ ya…
Willow Rosenberg killed a vampire with a telekinetic pencil (“Choices”).
Yeah, but in the stage play and the 1931 movie he gets the wooden stake through the heart.
Imagine what it would be like to be a monster that could be killed in every fashion ever depicted in fiction? The bubble boy would have nothing on you.
So, a human being?
Human beings don’t have a problem with sunlight or garlic or crosses or…
Tell that to people who get sunstroke, or are allergic to alliums, or who were involved with the Crusades, or…
And iirc, poor Lucy was staked as well.
On May 15, 1932, Charlie Chaplin attended a sumo match in Japan and thereby escaped an assassination attempt by rouge navy cadets who did succeed in killing his host, the prime minister. The plotters had hoped to pull off a two-for, drawing the US to declare war to avenge Chaplin (!) One of the plot’s masterminds is remembered from this clip during the Tokyo Trials.
Were they caught red-handed?
It was a makeup attempt.