There’s a few vampire stories that make vampires allergic to the sun and UV light, but not allergic to regular light bulbs that you’d find in street lights or people’s houses or office complexes (see Blade or The Strain).
But don’t “ordinary” light bulbs produce UV light as well? I guess what I’m asking is if there’s a technical way to distinguish UV lights from regular light bulbs for vampire fighting purposes, such as: “UV lights produce X frequencies but ‘ordinary’ light bulbs produce Y frequencies” or maybe “UV lights produce X intensity but ‘ordinary’ light bulbs produce Y intensity.”
I guess I’m not formulating this question correctly, but I’m not sure how to.
For what it’s worth, in the original modern vampire story (Bram Stoker’s Dracula) the vampire wasn’t ill-affected by sunlight, his powers were merely diminished during the day.
The burning-up-in-sunlight meme actually comes from the 1921 movie Nosferatu, as the producers wanted to make their vampire different enough so they wouldn’t get sued by the Stoker estate. (It didn’t work.)
In the video game Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, in which vampires do burn up in sunlight, a mad scientist experiments on your character (who is a vampire) by exposing you to full-spectrum light, equivalent to sunlight. The light has no ill effect, which makes the scientist wonder if there’s some “magical” or undiscovered scientific principle that makes sunlight hazardous.
An “ordinary” bulb back when most of those stories were written refers to an incandescent bulb, which produces some, but very little UV light.
Modern light bulbs are mostly either CFL or LED.
CFL produces a lot of UV, but there’s a coating added to the inside of the bulb that is supposed to block most of the UV so that it never leaves the bulb. I say supposed to, because sometimes the coating is either insufficient or has manufacturing defects that allow UV light to leak from the bulb. This is more of a problem with the el-cheapo bottom-dollar Chinese import bulbs than it is with better quality bulbs. A sensitive vampire probably wouldn’t get fried to a crisp as the UV levels even from these defective bulbs is still relatively low, but your Joe Average bloodsucker might get a case of vampire sunburn or something like that. Depends on how sensitive a typical vampire is to UV, I suppose.
LEDs produce very monochromatic light. In fact “white” LEDs don’t produce anything even close to white light. What they do is produce a mix of a very limited frequencies of light that is chosen to look white to our eyes. LED lights produce almost no UV at all.
A UV bulb designed to kill vampires will definitely put out significantly larger amounts of UV. Vampire slayers can easily find these types of bulbs, though the manufacturers tend to refer to them as germicidal UV lights. I’m sure their marketing departments will quickly add the label “anti-vampirical” once the vampire population increases and becomes much more of a menace.
Whereas in the seminal 1993 Super Nintendo videogame Shadowrun, vampires weren’t burnt or injured by bright (strobe) lights, but disoriented and temporarily blinded. (Presumably like ordinary people would be.) But it was an important mechanism to enable you to stake them to death, in keeping with pop-culture vampire-hunting protocols.Yes, I put it in a spoiler block. It’s only been 22 years. Some of you may not have played the game, and trust me, it’s worth playing unspoiled.
Nah, they’ll have rights by that time and we’ll all outwardly feign bemusement that vampires were once seen as beasts to be hunted. In fact, we’ll all be obliged to let 'em bite us at lunchtime. World’s goin ta hell…
Ok, so if I understand this correctly, germicidal UV lights put out much more UV light than incandescent bulbs*. And fluorescent lights put out only UV light, and if I could figure out a way to magically scrape off the phosphorus coating without damaging the bulb, I’d be set for vampire hunting purposes (but there’s probably no practical way to do that). And LED lights are going to be completely useless for vampires.
*There’s a joke in there somewhere about government regulations, but since I agree with the regulations in question, I’m not going to make it.
That’s exactly what the germicidal light is, an uncoated fluorescent tube. Blacklights have a coating that emits long-wave UV instead of the short-wave UV produced inside the tube.
Remember that there is Long Wave and Short Wave UV.
Long Wave UV is what people call “Black Light.” It will pass through window glass to a small extent.
Short Wave UV is almost entirely blocked by Window Glass. To make an efficient Short Wave UV source requires using Quartz or exotic glasses.
That’s the guy in Chinatown?
V:TM/V:TR deconstruct vampire myths, and some of the traditional ones are false, or only apply to specific bloodlines (most reflect just fine in mirrors, for example).
If the sunlight-destrpys-vampires thing came only from Nosferatu it wouldn’t have gone anywhere. As you noted, the movie brought down the wrath of Stoker’s widow, who wasn’t getting paid any royalties for the use of her husband;s material. She prosecuted the distributors and sought to destroy all copies of the film. She didn’t succeed, but she did effectively bury it for a long time.
For years afterwards, vampire continued to be killed by having stakes pounded into their hearts (even metal ones) and by bein g burned, or dissolved in acid. In Carl Dreyer’s movie Vampyr they staked the vampire (with a metal pole) in broad daylight. It wasn’t the daylight that got her.
What revived the notion of sunlight killing vampires, and made it part of “standard” pop culture vampire lore, was when screenwriter Curt Siodmak, newly arrived from Germany (and undoubtedly familiar with Murnau’s film, started writing scripts and screen stories for Universal. (He’s the guy responsible for a lot of “wolfman” lore, too). For Son of Dracula he has "Count Alucard (Lon Chaney, Jr.) being dissolved by sunlight at the end. He also used the meme in House of Frankenstein, where John Carradine, playing Dracula, gets destroyed by sunlight.
As I’ve said before, I suspect that WWII was part of the reason for the reintroduction of this meme. You had a shooting war going on, with loved ones inperil from real physical harm. The last thing you needed was to show a gory death by staking. Death by sunlight was about as benign a death as you could get.
At the end of the 1950s, Hammer films in England made their own version of Dracula (called Horror of Dracula here in the States), and opted to have the Count die by exposure to sunlight. After another studio latched onto the idea, it became pretty common coin in monster films, and soon other vampires besides Dracula were dying from sunlight.
As for the vampires-succumb-to-UV, it’s all part of the Great Game whereby everybody invents their own mythology for vampires. It also allows them to show vampires illuminated by ordinary light, rather than have the movie mostly in the dark. Ordinary lights put out a little UV, but not much. Partly it’s because incandescent lights don’t put out a lot of UV. But mercury discharge lamps do – and fluorescent lights are mercury discharge tubes with a glowing phosphor inside. But in this case the glass ebnvelope of the tube blocks the short-wave UV, while allowing long-wave UV (which is good for making blacklite posters glow, but not very harmful to skin). If you want a source that puts out a lot of short UV, you get a special lamp with a quartz or fused silica envelope, which transmits further into the UV than ordinary glass does.
The idea of UV sources for zapping vampires has been used quite a bit of late. Vampires fall to them in Christopher Moore’s vampire novels Bite Me! and You Suck!. Arguably the special bomb that kills off a castleful of vampires in the movie Van Helsing is also a UV source.
I don’t know about stories, but in the movies it seems to be the direct rays of the sun that are deadly, with the vampires dissolving when the sun’s disc pops up over the horizon.
Vampires apparently aren’t bothered by Twilight.
Well, not [I[REAL* Twilight. I’m sure the suggestion that they sparkle really pisses them off.
I don’t know, it depends on how pragmatic they are. The popular conception that they’re just beautiful but misunderstood emos probably makes it a lot easier for them to snag prey.
You’re correct about a standard tungsten incandescent bulb – it glows with close-to-blackbody output, with more of it in the infrared than in the visible. (You could theoretically run it at higher voltage and get more output in the visible, but it would cost a lot more and very seriously shorten the filament lifetime. And the bulb would get REALLY hot.)
I don’t know how that particular Osram lamp might differ, but I do know that you can get a spectrum like that if you don’t compensate for the non-uniform response of a silicon detector in your spectrometer. We knows from personal experience, we does. Not correcting gives you a peak at a wavelength in the near IR and a dropoff to zero in the output farther in the IR because the detector response drops off to zero.
An incandescent bulb gives off 100% heat. Nearly all of that heat is in the form of light, and a fraction of that light (usually less than half) is visible. So what you could say is that it gives off more useless heat than useful light.
