Welcome to the World of the Vampire Kind

“More wolfsbane Van Helsing?”

“No Count, something more powerful.”

The scene is from Dracula and Van Helsing from 1931.  While I have always loved Bela Lugosi as Dracula, Hollywood did tend to make some major errors with the surrounding myths and even bigger errors with reality.

Let’s start with the myths.   The Greeks believed that the plant, called wolfsbane, monkshood, or aconite, came from the mouths of Cerberus the three headed hound.  From that basis, in traditional mythology it’s used to keep werewolves at bay much the same way that everyone accepts vampires are repelled by garlic.  Lots of people are repelled by garlic too.    So, 1931 Hollywood got the myths a little confused, but most moviegoers then had no idea and didn’t really care.  They were there to see Lugosi’s frightening yet incredibly seductive portrayal of the Count.

In reality, wolfsbane is more complicated.  Typically found in northern Europe, parts of Alaska, and India, it’s not a difficult plant to come by.   Great care should be taken however not to touch the plant itself.  Aconite is so poisonous that small doses of the toxin are lethal.  Even something as minor as touching torn leaves to bare skin can be a large enough dose absorbed through the skin to kill a person.   Symptoms begin to appear within minutes of the absorption and may cause tingling, numbness and paralysis.   Of course, it’s completely hysterical that Van Helsing is fingering what looks to be a dried root of the plant in an earlier scene of the movie.   In some forms of traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine, Aconite is used as a treatment for various conditions.   The key to their use is processing the plant to remove it’s toxins and administering the resulting plant in very small doses.

Glad you asked that!  Lots of people have seen enough Hollywood vampire movies to know what Hollywood thinks.  That, however, is not always in keeping with the mythology of the vampire.

I think there are very few people that have not seen a vampire movie in which the vampire is destroyed by a stake through the heart.  There are lots of other methods in the mythologies of various cultures around the world, but Hollywood really likes the stake.   Sometimes the ‘brides’ of the vampire are staked in their coffins, but more often than not, the main vampire in the movie gets staked through the heart in some dramatic fight scene.  If you’re a Buffy fan, they’re nearly always staked in the fight scene and not necessarily through the heart.

The question is, where did that idea come from?  Hollywood seized on the myth of the wooden stake for the dramatic and horrific effect, particularly in the much tamer 1920 through 1960′s era vampire movies.   Originally, the stake’s material was not such an issue.  The purpose of the stake was to keep the deceased in the coffin.   They were not actually staked until the box was in the grave itself.   The stake was supposed to be long enough to go through the box and into the earth, keeping the body attached to the grave.   Whether the stake itself was wooden or metal, such as iron, was alot more dependent on local beliefs and materials available rather than there being a single idea of how to keep a vampire in the grave.

Now that you know what the stake was supposed to do, the next question invariably is why the heart.   There’s a couple of different mythological reasons on that too.   Some believed that they actually had to have several stakes driven in at various points in the body so the vampire couldn’t just sit up and raise themselves off of a stake.  Some cultures believed that putting it through the chest did a better job of holding the body to the coffin rather than just putting it through soft tissues.    Other cultures believed that your soul resided in the area of your body associated with your heart.  If the soul couldn’t rise up to wander the earth, the body couldn’t either.

Kind of makes you grateful for mortuary science doesn’t it.