As I was sitting in my Speech Communications class, the teacher asked “How many of you know how to kill a vampire?” Now it may be out of context but the professor was explaining a person’s “frame of reference” and wanted to show how many of us were knowledgeable about a certain topic. So as a random example, he asked about vampires. Personally, I am a fan of all of these different monsters and I knew the answer but what surprised me is that the whole class raised their hand with the exception of two people.

It came to my attention at this point that something as crazy as knowing how to kill a vampire is almost like common sense. This really shows us how closely monsters like vampires have been integrated into our culture. Every vampire movie that will come out or has come out in the past few years will not have to explain why a wooden stake in the heart would kill a vampire but will just include that since everyone knows that’s the only way to kill a vampire. Similarly, we know that in order to kill a werewolf, one needs to shoot him with a silver bullet.

It is clear that in today’s society we have a wide range of shows, cartoons, and movies that are based on monsters like vampires and they all seem to follow one particular model that was illustrated in the movie Dracula. This is the basic and “ideal” image that any regular person living in the United States has in their mind when they think of vampires. Noel Carroll uses vampires in his examples of fusion monsters and he too uses the Dracula model when he refers to them. According to his definition, a monster must be threatening and impure and surely this common Dracula model satisfies both conditions. The good thing though, is that if one of these threatening vampires try to suck our blood, we all know how to kill them.