Maybe vampires hate the sun cause they would age much faster than humans. One day exposed to the sun would be equivalent to whole life for humans. In turn they would look like elderly by the end of the day.
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
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I mean obviously depends on the lore etc... whether sun leaves scars, or burns the whole body evenly regardless of where the point of contact is. If it can be done light enough.
Or god forbid... just causes the vampire to look glittery. Now I would go on to say that that's obviously a very modern tweak to the folklore... but actually sunlight itself as something to cause significant harm to vampires appears to have originated with Nosferatu in 1922.
sunlight itself as something to cause significant harm to vampires appears to have originated with Nosferatu in 1922
I think it's older than that. But you'd have to search for folklore about garlic, sliver and sun, instead of a book. And Stoker kind of merged together a few Slavic wights from different countries into his Dracula
Garlic would indeed be covered in one of the precursors, Pijavica (a slovic monster caused by leading a sinful life, warded away with garlic). The albanian Striga can be warded with a silver coin coated in blood. But sunlight, hard to find any old references to that, Some forms have vampires as purely human by day, or their powers get stronger at night. Stoker's vampires in fact did walk in the sun unharmed.
Is worth noting, that a lot of vampire lore seems more or less to have been written more or less as personifications of Plagues/Diseases. Of which silver and garlic both have anti-microbial effects for, and oddly many cultures considered them as tools for fighting diseases before even understanding germ theory (Hippocrates recommended silver for treating wounds and storing food in 400 BC), Garlic was used in primitive medicine going back at least 1000 years.
Sun, while obviously modern knowledge of UV light killing virus's exists. Doesn't seem like that was particularly noted in the past, most likely because very few people lacked exposure to the sun. It seems it wasn't till around the mid 1800s that sunlights effects on microbes was discovered and tested.
I'm pretty sure that before 1800s some things had to be dried on the sun because otherwise it goes bad. And it would be more in the form of folk wisdom. There I would search for connection "sun does good" -> "kills vampires"
I mean you are welcome to do some research as well, but so far, I've done a lot of searching, as I said I found results on Silver and Garlic, but I can't find anything that predates 1922 in which vampires seem to have any kind actual death. There's a few notes of vampires that are non powered normal people around sunlight, which I guess could count as a weakness. But that wouldn't make any actual tattoos like the shower thought we're discussing here.
Sorry, tonight I can only go as far as Wikipedia
If an upiór harassed a human at night, the remedy was to stop the upiór returning to its grave - at dawn it would disappear or change into black tar
There are two citations for that sentence but digging out the sources is too much for me tonight. Maybe there is the reasoning behind changing into tar and reference to some older sources
I think there might have been also some mention of power of the sun in some Mickiewicz work. But apparently not in "Upiór". There it complains to Venus
But true, that is not exactly the express-sunburn OP wrote about
Also in general the notion that good things happen during day and those active during the night are nefarious and untrustworthy.
sees a fully tatted vampire
"wow, look at that guy he's gotta just live in the sunlight. Too bad he won't be around much longer"
People do that.
in theory, they could be cool.
i imagined a tattoo artist at the beach, painting people with sun tan lotion to create ephemeral body art...
then you had to put that example.