The image of the vampire being repelled by a cross has been perpetuated in popular culture ever since Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Stoker’s wizened vampire hunter, Dr. Van Helsing, explains how his crucifix wards away the count, “There are things that so afflict him that he has no power … as for sacred things, as this symbol, my crucifix … to them he is nothing, but in their presence he take his place far off and silent with respect.” Van Helsing’s pragmatic use of crucifixes and holy wafers may have added extra scandal for Stoker’s Victorian audiences. The English protagonist, Jonathan Harker, comments that he was raised to see crucifixes as idolatrous. Van Helsing’s advice was echoed by the occult writer Montague Summers. In The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928), he states that crosses and indeed all holy objects are powerful weapons against the vampire.

Early Christian literature is replete with stories of Christians casting out demons and overcoming supernatural evil. In Europe, this tradition seems to have grafted itself onto older, Pagan cosmologies. To fight vampires, pagan symbols, such as wild roses or hawthorn, are often used in concert with crosses and holy water. The major Christian churches have never taken a position on the reality of vampires or the effective means of thwarting them. Instead, popular remedies against the undead seem to have arisen with or without the consent of local priests.

An account by the French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort published in 1717 describes a visit to the Greek island of Mycone where the villagers are having problems with a broucolack—a vampire. De Tournefort describes how a spiral of panic formed over crimes that were allegedly being committed by an exhumed corpse. As the situation grew worse, the villagers seemed willing to listen to anyone who claimed to know how to destroy a vampire. First, the 10-day-old corpse was dragged into the church where a mass was said for it. De Tournefort writes:

When the mass was over, the body was taken up, and preparations were made for pulling out its heart. The butcher of the town, an old clumsy fellow, began with opening the belly instead of the breast. He groped a long while among the entrails, without finding what he looked for, till at last somebody said he should cut up the diaphragm; and then the heart was pulled out to the admiration of the spectators. In the meantime, the carcass stunk so abominably, that they were obliged to burn frankincense; but the smoke mixing with the fumes of the corpse, increased the stink, and began to hurt the poor people’s brains.

Two weeks after this ritual, some villagers argued that the heart should have been removed before mass was said and not after. The corpse was apparently exhumed and reburied three or four times a day, whenever a villager had a new idea of what ought to be done. At one point, several swords were stuck into the grave in order to keep the corpse from emerging. However, an Albanian traveler pointed out that the swords would prevent the devil from leaving the corpse because their hilts resembled the shape of a cross. He recommended using Muslim scimitars instead.  De Tournefort concludes his account, “After this instance, is it possible to deny, that the modern Greeks are no great Grecians, and that nothing but ignorance and superstition prevails among them?”

Today, popular culture has turned vampires from demonic figures into complex characters that serve as alienated heroes and anti-heroes. As such, the traditional dread of the cross now seems anachronistic. In the hit TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy’s nemesis, “The Master,” ponders his irrational fear of crosses, “This symbol—these two planks of wood—it confounds me. Suffuses me with mortal dread.” Since Stoker, generations of writers have worked to retheorize the vampire’s fear of the cross for a world that is increasingly secular as well as religiously plural.

By far, the most interesting solution appeared in the movie Dracula 2000 (2000), in which it is revealed that Dracula is none other than Judas Iscariot. He hates all Christian symbols, as well as the metal silver, because they remind him of his betrayal. Another approach is that the vampire’s fear of the cross is psychosomatic. In Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), the protagonist, Robert Neville, notices that only some vampires fear crosses. He eventually concludes that these vampires were Christian in life. They fear crosses because they believe that they ought to. Neville explains, “As far as a cross goes—well, neither a Jew nor a Hindu nor a Mohammedan nor an atheist, for that matter, would fear the cross.” This interpretation appears again in Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967). Here, a woman presents a cross to an undead Jew who merely laughs and states, “You’ve got the wrong vampire.”

However, the most common solution is to simply dismiss the vampire’s aversion to crosses and religious objects as superstition. In Blade (1998), the brooding vampire slayer explains, “Vampire Anatomy 101: Crosses and holy water don’t do dick so forget what you’ve seen in the movies. You use a stake, silver, or sunlight.” The vampires of Anne Rice and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro are thoroughly unaffected by crosses. In Twilight—a series that breaks all the traditional rules for vampires—Edward Cullen’s vampiric “father,” Carlisle, actually keeps a large wooden cross in his study. Carlisle’s biological father was a priest, and the cross is kept to honor his memory.

Some scholars of religion have suggested that the vampire’s increasing immunity to religious objects indicates the decline of Christian hegemony and the rise of secularism. The fact that sunlight, silver, and garlic continue to be effective while crosses and holy water are not may even point to the resurgence of a sort of nature religion. This is especially prominent in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which the slayer is aided not by a priest but by a Wiccan. However, the cross in Carlisle’s office indicates another side to the ever-changing vampire and its relationship to the cross: It is possible that even as slayers are becoming more secular, vampires are becoming more Christian.

Joe Laycock is a doctoral candidate studying religion and society at Boston University and the author of Vampires Today.