Has anybody here read a real book about vampires...

"...or are we just remembering what a movie said?"

I have always found it ironic that a character enjoins the other characters to try and think of "legitimate" vampire folklore, and not fall prey to misconceptions promoted by movies, and then the movie immediately proceeds to perpetuate arguably the biggest of all movie-related misconceptions: the idea that vampires are destroyed by sunlight.

That idea is an invention of the 1922 German silent film "Nosferatu," an unlicensed adaptation of Dracula, which changed Dracula to Count Orlok, and the location of most of the action from England to Germany. They also altered the ending. Instead of having the villain killed with Bowie knife through the heart, and his head cut off with a kukri knife, they had the villain destroyed by the rays of the rising sun. The makers of that film were German expressionists, heavily concerned with symbolism, and for them, the idea of a nightmarish creature of the dark, banished by the strong light of day was a powerful trope – a symbol of man’s dark superstitious fantasies, juxtaposed with, and dispelled by the harsh, bright light of day, which was itself a symbol for reason.

There was nothing in vampire folklore, or previous vampire literature to indicate vampires couldn't survive exposure to sunlight. Dracula, Carmilla, and Varney were literary vampires who were all able to move about with complete freedom during the day. In some of the folk tales vampires are powerless to move in the day, but otherwise, you could bake them in the hot sun, and it wouldn’t harm them in the slightest – once night fell, they’d be as dangerous as ever. The idea that sunlight kills vampires is straight out of the movies.

But boy did it ever catch. Now all vampire movies show vampires as being burned to a crisp by the sun. When Francis Ford Coppola made a somewhat faithful adaptation of Dracula, they had to specifically have narration that Dracula could walk around during the day in order to make audiences understand.

So I just find it amusing that Harvey Keitel's character tells the other characters to try and disregard movie myths about vampires, while the movie goes on to keep up the biggest of all movie myths about vampires.