Vampire hunters are necessarily brave. Their prey is powerful. Their prey is supernatural. And their prey sees them as prey, hence the need to be well prepared, mentally, spiritually, and practically. In 2022, a vampireslayer kit from the nineteenth century auctioned for over $15,000, its contents including holy water and brass crucifixes.

In the eighteenth century, Dom Antoine Augustin Calmet recorded the use of decapitation, impaling, burning, and staking to make dead the undead. Nearly two centuries later, Montague Summers explained, “The only way to obtain deliverance from their molestations is by disinterring the dead body, by cutting off the head, by driving a stake through the breast, by transfixing the heart, or by burning the corpse to ashes.” In Stoker's Dracula, Van Helsing also keeps garlic close at hand.

The means of destroying a vampire are many, of course. In F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (Prana-Film, 1922), Ellen Hutter (Greta Schröder) keeps Graf Orlok (Max Schreck) in her bed all night until the cock crows at dawn. She captures a dark entity long enough to expose him to the light, thus creating an unforgettable image, his disintegration. The process is not unlike the image capture intrinsic to filmmaking. In 1928, the book Amateur Movie Making instructed readers that the filmmaker “must capture spirit and emotion and imprison them upon his celluloid ribbon, and for this purpose, nothing is more efficient than the lamp.” Artificial light or real, supernatural vampire or reel, professional vampire hunter or hobbyist, fiat lux are words to the wise. Light dispels the dark, even as it produces new images, new shades, new shadows.

Amateur filmmaking, the production of “home movies,” became a somewhat popular pursuit in the mid- to late twenties, particularly for the wealthy, being spurred by cameras and projectors that used smaller gauges than 35mm.