What will kill a vampire

Gomez-Alonso found that nearly 25 percent of rabid men have a tendency to bite other people. That almost guarantees transmission, as the virus is carried in saliva. Rabies can even help explain the supposed aversion of vampires to garlic. Infected people display a hypersensitive response to any pronounced olfactory stimulation, which would naturally include the pungent smell of garlic. What rabies sufferer would not shrink from such a reflection?

At least one scholar has proposed that the genetic red blood cell deficiency porphyria, which once activated renders its sufferers pallid and hypersensitive to light, could also have inspired vampire legends. Holy ground. And the literary folks have really played this up in their stories of vampires. Knowing this, the key to killing a vampire using a wooden stake is to strike first.

Yes, that means playing offense against the offensive powerhouse, but in this game of life and death, you only need to score once. Okay, enough with the sports analogy, but the lesson remains the same: a vampire will let its guard down fairly easily.

You should attack quickly and without hesitation. A vampire can heal from most injuries, but a wooden stake through the heart is not one of them. Though they heal quickly, their skin and bones are just as fragile as any humans, so the key to killing them is to make it so they can't heal.

Which brings us to Again, the curse of silver begins before the first vampire became a vampire , when the goddess Artemis Greek mythology cursed the first vampire so that his skin burned when it touched silver. Using silver is a bit like a blend between sunlight and a wooden stake.

It doesn't work as well as either of those two options, but it has advantages of its own. First of all, unlike sunlight, silver is highly portable.

You can carry an item of solid silver make sure it's real, solid silver please with you easily. Secondly, it won't kill a vampire to stab it in the heart with silver as it would using a wooden stake , but it will slow down the healing process, which can be very helpful. In order to actually kill a vampire using silver, you'd probably need a lot of it. Silver is more helpful as a slowing or trapping agent. Vampires, despite their strength, cannot break a chain of silver, even if they tried.

If you could somehow manage to handcuff a vampire to a tree, say, using silver handcuffs, all you would have to do is wait until the sun rose the next day and you would have yourself a fried vampire. Of course, how you would actually manage to accomplish this task is another story. At first, fire seems like an easy fix to your vampire problems, but there is a problem.

Yes, it will burn vampires, just like it burns humans, but unlike sunlight and silver, it's only through natural means that a vampire will burn by fire. What I mean is, the reason sunlight and silver burn a vampire and cause its healing process to slow dramatically is because vampires are inherently cursed by these two elements.

While fire can burn just as well as sunlight or silver, it does nothing to slow the healing process of the vampire, because vampires are not cursed with a weakness to fire. If you're going to use fire to kill a vampire, you're going to need to have a big fire and have the vampire stuck in it for a long time.

Probably, say, an hour to be safe, though about a half hour will usually do the trick. This is because the vampire heals as it burns. The hotter the fire, the faster it burns, but you're still basically trying to beat the speed of the vampire's healing process. Should the vampire be mostly burnt but then escape the fire, it can still survive. This is another situation where tying a vampire down with silver to immobilize it would be very handy, if you could manage it.

If you're like me, you've probably never tried to literally tear anyone's head off, except perhaps in some sort of video game. And that doesn't count. Tearing a vampire's head off is not as easy as it might sound. What powers and special abilities does Jerry have? How can he be destroyed? Everyone knows how to kill a fictional vampire a stake through the heart but does that apply to "real" vampires as well? Because this is Vegas, Charlie contacts a local showman and apparent vampire expert who happens to have vampire slaying gear in his apartment who tells Charlie the "rules" about vampires.

It's good that Charlie checked: Some vampires are said to be able to turn into bats or wolves; others can't. Some are said not to cast a reflection, but others do. Holy water is said to repel or kill vampires, while others sip it with a twist of lime. Other traditional methods of killing vampires include decapitation and stuffing the severed head's mouth with garlic; a sacred blessed though not silver bullet; a stake through the chest not necessarily through the heart ; and so on.

This flexibility, incidentally, is one reason why the vampire genre has been so successful: writers twist old rules and invent new ones to keep the stories fresh.

As it turns out, Jerry's abilities are a mix: he doesn't cast a reflection, nor change into animals, but he can be killed by sunlight and staking at least sometimes.