ok, all you vampire lovers, i was watching “DRACULA 2000” last night (in the mood for something with absolutely no thinking required), and something occurred to me. vampires can’t enter churches, and they are buried at crossroads in unconsecrated ground, right? so why can they walk around freely in cemetaries? cemetaries are holy ground, blessed by the church and consecrated to god, for the most part. so how come vampires can walk around in them without screaming in agony and having their feet burn off? and every religious funeral i’ve ever been to concludes with the minister “blessing” the ground, so technically the vampires shouldn’t be able to rise from the graves, because they’d have to claw their way up through “blessed” dirt. that should cause lots of pain, and even death. i mean we’ve all seen movies where the minister blesses a bathtub full of water, and the vampire gets thrown into it and his skin boils off as if the water were acid. so, how come blessed dirt doesn’t do the same thing? any ideas? i’ve read lots of vampire novels, and seen lots of movies, and i’ve never seen anyone deal with this, except in the few instances where the creator of the vampire has decided that for whatever reason, none of the holy symbols work (like in interview with the vampire, preacher, fright night, etc). any thoughts?
Well, that’s why they do it now… back in the day, they might not have done it and only after they got the ground rules down figured out they needed to bless the ground. Then again, if they had figured that out it kind of begs the question of why they didn’t cremate the bodies…
Maybe the blessing only lasts for a little while? Or maybe they’re forbidden from entering God’s house, but they can stand in his yard?
Maybe digging up from underneath breaks the blessing, and that’s why the parent vampire doesn’t dig his children out?
Um, graveyards are more easily desecrated by bored high school heavy metal fans?
The thing that I always thought was weird was the fact that those tombstones are often covered with crosses (in fact, often the are crosses). It seems to me that a graveyard is the last place that a vampire would want to wake up.
The truth to it all, of course, is that the “Vampire” we know today is more the product of pop culture – novels and plays and movies – than it is authentic legend. A lot of the elements that we think central to the vampire – burning up under sunlight, being invisible in a mirror, being driven off by garlic and wolfbane – aren’t in the legends at all, and are traceable back to the movie “Nosferatu” and to Bram Stoker’s book. The Vampire as eloquent, cultured gentleman comes to us through Dracula, and thence through Varley the Vampire and to Polidori’s book, and arguably Byron’s own effort. Before that, the vampire was a disgusting inarticulate soul-sucking or blood-sucking corpse.
So seek ye not consistency nor guidance from the movies. They do whatever seems workable or convenient. Look at how Once Bitten screwed with even the Hollywood version of the Vampire.
That’s a very interesting point, and one I had not considered previously. My first WAG is that the “consecrated ground” is a Catholic thing, and perhaps the vamps are hanging out in Protestant/Jewish/other graveyards.
My second WAG:
In Victorian times, when most of modern America’s vampire legends were being developed, graveyards were not considered particularly holy places. It was an acknowledgment of your piety and the respect of the community for a person to be buried under the church floor, or closer to the altar, but I can’t imagine what would happen if a newly-made-vampire was buried in such a place. Perhaps it would simultaneously rise and combust.
My third WAG:
Depending on which authors’ vampire universe you are reading/watching vamps can go into churches (unlike a home), they just don’t because there is so many things (crucifixes, holy water) that is dangerous to them. The vamps in the Buffyverse seem to freely enter churches and convents. Perhaps the movies you were watching just needed a plot device where the humans could gather without harm.
As to your final question. It occasionally seems that a modern author will disavow the “Christian symbols hurt vampires” because (perhaps) they are unwilling to give that type of authority/validation to a single religion. I have often wondered why the holy symbols of Islam/Judaism/Buddhism do not work against vampires. I suppose it’s because any hero, no matter how dim-witted, can put their fingers or two sticks into the shape of a cross.
As far as other religious symbols working on vampires, people have tackled that – with different results. In the 1970’s Marvel comiv Tomb of Dracula Dracula could be held off by any religious symbol, and is held off by a Star of David. In Richard Matheson’s book I Am Legend (the basis for the movies The Last Man on Earth and The Omega Man) the hero holds off a Jewish vampire with a Torah.
In Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers a vampire breaks into a room and the woman holds up a crucifix, only to be told that “Oy, have you got the wrong vampire!” by her attacker.
Several films seem to hold that no symbol works if you don’t believe in it.
Again, Stoker seems to be at the root of the crucifix-as-vampire-repellent, but I’ll have to check my sources.
But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is AAAAAHHHHH THE SUN!!!
FOOM
– Vampire theatre
I highly recommend Paul Barber’s Vampires, Burial, and Death : Folklore and Reality to anyone interested in the origins of vampiric folklore or pre-modern funeral practices and conceptions of death. It was from this book that I learned why people in the past didn’t just cremate any corpses suspected of being undead – or all corpses, just to be safe. It’s because cremation ain’t easy. It requires a lot of fuel, and a very hot flame. Even then, human bodies don’t burn easily or evenly due to their high fluid content and size.