Vampire of the Sun
The idea that sunlight kills the undead is relatively new.
Imagine this scenario: JRR Tolkien is still alive and working on continuing his Middle Earth cycle, but when he finally publishes The Morgoth War in 2029, we are all a little perplexed by the presence of hit points, Led Zeppelin, and a Dothraki horde.
That’s pretty much what sunlight is to vampires.
Wait wait, hit snooze, back up
Sunlight is so strongly woven into the mythology of the literary vampire that it’s hard to imagine a vampire tale without a reference to it. 30 Days of Night capitalized on this mythology in novel ways, and even Stephenie Meyer’s wildly successful sparkleghouls had to be defined against a backdrop of vampires that were vulnerable to the sun.
But a cursory examination of the record shows that folkloric vampires, who the fiction grew out of, were blasé about sunlight. When it comes to the most intense light and heat that humankind have ever witnessed, the energy source that enables all life on our planet, they took a teenager’s “It’s fine, I guess” approach.
Even the very early literary, or fictional, vampires weren’t all that concerned with excess vitamin D: Varney, Lord Ruthven, and Carmilla all seem to more or less shrug at the ball of fire in the sky.
Even Dracula — DRACULA! — was fine with the sun. He was more powerful at night — because Bram Stoker understood the most basic rule of horror — but could and did run errands during the day.
So how did vampires become vulnerable to UV rays?
Credit for the innovation seems to belong to F.W. Murnau and team in the silent film Nosferatu, who realized that seeing their Count Orlock wretch in the sun would be more dramatic (and let’s be honest: cheaper) than immolating. And was it ever! Vampire fiction has been using the sun as Vamp-B-Gone ever since.
But scholar J. Gordon Melton points out a problem with this simple explanation. Nosferatu was banned shortly after release in 1922 and all known copies were destroyed, meaning very few people saw the film. But somehow, in Universal’s Return of the Vampire (1943), suddenly sunlight kills vampires. And the later Dracula movies by Hammer Films have some serious vampire-destroying scenes thanks to the sun. Today, with few exceptions, it’s taken for granted that sunlight will kill vampires.
It’s unclear whether just the right people saw Nosferatu and adopted the sun as a weapon against vampires, or if the seeds that were planted in Murnau’s brain were also sewn in others’ minds and came to fruition on their own. But this addition to the mythology is likely the most powerful post-Bram Stoker spin on vampires.
How powerful? When Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt wrote the official sequel Dracula: The Undead, they noted in the first chapter that sunlight can kill the vampire — something that was definitely not the case in the original book.
So even Dracula has adopted the mythology of his own fanfic.
I can’t think of another case similar to this, where official storytellers have taken on the innovations of their own spinoffs. JRR Tolkien does not incorporate the work of Gary Gygax into his sequels. Google does not change it’s branding to match Bing’s. “Friends” does not edit reruns to be more like “The Big Bang Theory”. DC doesn’t retcon Deathstroke to be a smartass Deadpool. Should I go on or are we good here?
I’ll go so far as to say no one has ever incorporated their influencees or parodies into their core art —
What do you think? Can a modern vampire story be written with no regard given to the sun, and still be considered a “vampire story”? Were vampires more interesting before they were limited to 3rd shift?
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Image credits: Shutterstock, Mad Magazine, Prana Films, Harper Collins, NPG Records, Tân Nuyen
