NIGHT CRITTERS

I figure that, when it comes to vampires, we're just not getting the whole story.

Do you ever wonder why vampires don't move with the times? They seem to go a lot on the capes and the cloaks and the frilly shirts, don't they? There's a certain look that the vampires have that, for everyone else, really went out by about 1810.

The answer, when you get down to it, is pretty obvious.

You see, there are two preferred ways of killing your Children of the Night types. The first is a stake through the heart. Interestingly, a stake through the heart kills just about everyone, vampire or not, and that is, in fact, pretty much the case of any large, sharp object pushed through the heart. If you don't have a stake to hand, however, you can always resort to decapitation - removing the head from a vampire's body will also, by and large, end its reign of terror. And, once again, I'm thinking that beheading pretty well does it for the non-vampires too. Okay, so we can throw in sunlight and holy water, but that's pretty much the end of the list, and those tended to be things to make them run away rather than actually bring up the "End - a Hammer Horror Production" caption.

Now you'll see that these methods, by and large, have the same effect on non-vampires as they do on the Nightbreed. But no one ever mentions, say, any methods to kill vampires that came about after 1750. Nuclear attack. Napalm. Too much salt in the diet.

By keeping the out-of-date look the vampires have fooled us into thinking they're immune to all that new stuff but I reckon it's just an error of omission. We're not getting the whole story.

"I hear Count Dracula died."

"Yeah - old age. His fangs fell out, he forgot who he was, half the time he didn't know who I was - it was terrible. We put him in a home eventually. He passed on in his sleep. Poor dear."