Based on the 2002 graphic novel of the same name…
My theory is, if you had Superman’s powers-fueled-by-daylight gimmick, you’d lead everyone to believe you’re a creature of the night who shuns sunshine…
Shout out to the time Dracula tried to bite Superman:
It would have been too silly to see Dracula’s fangs bust right off when he bit Kal-el in the neck, huh?
Whoa, say that three times as fast as you can.
So would the easiest way to kill a vampire be to sneak into his bedroom and replace his sleeping coffin with a tanning bed?
As I recall, Blade was fond of his UV-emitting devices for fighting vampires. So there’s another item pointing to UV hypersensitivity.
Ann Rice lends herself more toward the magical/supernatural. SPOILER: The longer someone is a vampire, the less sunlight affects them, personally. Truly ancient vampires come in from the noonday sun with a nice bronze tan. However, since what you do to a vampire also affects the vamps they’ve turned, you can nuke a whole shitload of them simply by exposing the oldest ancestor you can find, possibly without doing much harm to the one you exposed. Older minions will shrivel up and need some feedings to get back to normal, but freshly minted ones–poof.
Shouldn’t that make Superman vulnerable at night? Batman could kick his ass without kryptonite.
Battery-powered, like a Kryptonian Energizer Bunny.
One of the funniest scenes featuring a sunlight-powered being is the Ted V. Mikels’ 1968 opus The Astro-Zombies. The titular Astro-Zombies are apparently powered by sunlight. When one is attacked at night, it takes a flashlight and holds it to the solar panel, enabling it to escape.
There’s quite a bit of efficiency lost to the conversion of battery power to light energy, and then from photons back into electrical power by the photocell. It would clearly be much more efficient for Mad Scientist John Carradine to have simply used batteries to power his Astro-Zombies in the first place. He could always have put in a solar panel as a spare.
It means you can power an Astro-Zoimbie with two “D” calls and have power to spare!
The aforementioned 30 Days of Night also features UV lamps as a powerful anti-vamp weapon. First discovered when some vampires attack a guy in a marijuana grow op.
Here’s what gets me: Werewolves are closly aligned with the moon. Moonlight empowers them. Silver, a metal closely associated with the moon, harms them.
Vampires are closely (but inversely) aligned with the sun. Sunlight harms them. But why would silver harm a vampire? The only argument I see is that silver is “pure” in a vague way that’s effective against many kinds of occult abomination. The thing is, there is a metal associated with the sun the way silver is associated with the moon: gold. So why doesn’t gold affect vampires? And would gold harm a vampire, or empower one?
Gold can hurt a vampire…so long as it has been fashioned into a Holy Symbol wielded by a very strong believer in same.
No, the Sun counterpart wouldn’t be gold. It would be trees. Both by using sunlight to grow and making new life as opposed to just being undead. That’s why wooden stakes work, mate. They just bloody work!
Does it? I can’t think of any movies or books off the top of my head where silver was a weakness for vampires. Googling “does silver hurt vampires,” the only sites that say, “yes” seem to be a bit unclear on the idea that vampires are fictional.
Yeah, can you get a suntan or sunburn from moonlight?
Moonlight doesn’t have much UV in it.
My Grandmother told stories of her Grandfather staking a vampire back in the Old country. The Vampire there was a creature of the night as it was a animated corpse- a revenant- who could only pass during the dark, and who slept during the day. They also weren’t sexy, with breath like rotting meat- which makes sense. Nor could they fly, turn into bats, etc. Just a person, buried not in consecrated ground, which came back, usually for revenge. But yes, drank blood.
Blade, True Blood, and Hellsing are examples of media where silver has an effect on vampires, but it’s true that there’s plenty of counterexamples like Buffy or the White Wolf tabletop games. Geralt carries a silver sword in The Witcher, but that’s an example of silver as a generic monster-killing metal rather than specifically anti-vampire.
As I pointed out in my article, lots of stories now feature ultraviolet light used as a weapon against vampires. Christopher Moore has one of his characters make a vest studded with UV LEDs in two of the novels in his Vampire Trilogy. “UV Bullets” feature among the arsenal; of werewolves in the Underworld series. And the “light bomb” used by Friar Carl in Van Helsing is clearly inspired by a magnesium flare, which puts out a pretty fair amount of longwave ultraviolet.
The interesting thing is that popular culture – which usually doesn’t care whit about spectroscopy – managed to self-aggregate a little theory about vampire vulnerability to UV light all on its own.
While we’re at it, how about that garlic- how specific do we need to get, botanically? Is it just Allium sativum, or do any related species work as well?
Are they going to just laugh and point out that, despite the similar smell, it’s currently considered to be in a different subgenus when threatened with ramsons? Do leeks have any effect?
Not very well, unless you’re dealing with a Welsh vampire.
And in Ultraviolet (which I’ll never shut up about) the good guys use carbon-tipped bullets. Updated wooden stakes, see?
There was some type of vampire somewhere that was made stranger by moonlight. It was referenced in a Kim Newman book.
We are ALL made stranger by moonlight.