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Using a silver bullet in monster mythology


Little do most people know that the silver bullet is supposed to be just as effective on vampires and other evil creatures created by evil supernatural forces. In other ancient legends, a werewolf can also be killed by wooden weapons, such as the usual wooden arrow to the chest.

TRIVIA:

At the gunshop the proprietor tells uncle Red that newly-minted silver bullet should be accurate. That is not true, not after I watched an episode of "Myth Busters". The testers fired silver bullets out of a lever action rifle. The accuracy was poor. The problem is, silver is harder than lead. It doesn't grip the barrel rifling adequately. To fire silver bullets accurately, a firearm's barrel would need different rifling, deeper lands and grooves. However, at very close range, a silver bullet would have enough accuracy to hit what it was aimed at, estimating 25 feet or so, which in the werewolf movies, is within the range usually when encountering a werewolf.

Also, in the movie Marty kills the werewolf with the silver bullet through its remaining good eye. The .44 magnum bullet should have exited the werewolf's head, making a gory mess in the process. This is not shown.

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Hollywood, films in general, are their own way of telling and re-telling stories; it's only natural that they would have their own set of mythos when they need new ideas for stories to tell. Just my opinion.

Boingo

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Little do most people know that the silver bullet is supposed to be just as effective on vampires and other evil creatures created by evil supernatural forces. In other ancient legends, a werewolf can also be killed by wooden weapons, such as the usual wooden arrow to the chest.

TRIVIA:

At the gunshop the proprietor tells uncle Red that newly-minted silver bullet should be accurate. That is not true, not after I watched an episode of "Myth Busters". The testers fired silver bullets out of a lever action rifle. The accuracy was poor. The problem is, silver is harder than lead. It doesn't grip the barrel rifling adequately. To fire silver bullets accurately, a firearm's barrel would need different rifling, deeper lands and grooves. However, at very close range, a silver bullet would have enough accuracy to hit what it was aimed at, estimating 25 feet or so, which in the werewolf movies, is within the range usually when encountering a werewolf.

Also, in the movie Marty kills the werewolf with the silver bullet through its remaining good eye. The .44 magnum bullet should have exited the werewolf's head, making a gory mess in the process. This is not shown.
Agree with you here. Silver does not make good bullets, unless you are either the Lone Ranger or are going after werewolves.

This is also true as well, although it might have been a bit involved to create the special effects. Or maybe they did not want to gross people out.

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This was explained more in the book - the gunshop owner adjusted the powder load and casing to better handle the silver, and specifically asked for a report on whether or not it was as effective as he thought it would be.

I'be never seen MythBusters, but Google informs me that they made a bullet with silver instead of lead, following the standard measurements and load for lead. That definitely wouldn't work.

The book also mentions that the lower powder load necessary for the silver bullet to be accurate created a subdued noise, like a cap gun popping, instead of a real gun firing. I think it's safe to assume that in order for the silver bullet to be accurate, it had to be much less powerful than a normal 45.

Sorry for the late reply, but just found this streaming and hadn't seen it since I was a kid, so I had to jump into IMDB.

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Long time responding but I have a problem with this explanation. They make steel bullets for the same guns as lead bullets and they fire just as accurately. Steel is much harder than either silver or lead.

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Pretty sure you're thinking of steel casing, not steel bullets. That would be steel casing instead of brass.

I've never heard of a steel bullet.

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At the gunshop the proprietor tells uncle Red that newly-minted silver bullet should be accurate. That is not true, not after I watched an episode of "Myth Busters". The testers fired silver bullets out of a lever action rifle. The accuracy was poor. The problem is, silver is harder than lead. It doesn't grip the barrel rifling adequately. To fire silver bullets accurately, a firearm's barrel would need different rifling, deeper lands and grooves.

They don't know what they're talking about. Here's a list showing the hardness of the elements:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardnesses_of_the_elements_(data_page)

Copper is harder than silver, and most bullets are copper-jacketed, including extremely accurate bullets used in target shooting competitions, long-range varmint hunting, and military or police sniping. Also, bronze is harder than silver, and bronze solids are commonly used in dangerous game applications. Furthermore, mild steel is significantly harder than silver, and steel-jacketed bullets are common too, particularly in Combloc military surplus ammunition.

There's nothing intrinsic to silver which would make a bullet made from it inaccurate. If the bullet is made right and a good load is worked up for it, it can be as accurate as a bullet made from anything else.

Unjacketed lead bullets aren't used much anymore. They are primarily used in .22 rimfire cartridges, cheap plinking loads for revolvers (e.g., .38 or .44 Special), and in "retro" loads for "Old West" type guns, such as .45 Colt single-action revolvers or .45-70 Government rifles. With regard to mainstream factory ammunition, unjacketed lead bullets don't exist for automatic pistol cartridges like 9mm Luger or .45 ACP, or for high-velocity rifle cartridges like .223 Winchester, .308 Winchester, .30-06 Springfield, and so on. That's because an unjacketed lead bullet causes major lead fouling (known as "leading") in the bore once it exceeds a certain velocity (which is about 1,000 FPS for pure lead or around 2,000 FPS for harder lead alloys).

The .44 magnum bullet should have exited the werewolf's head, making a gory mess in the process.

Says who? A real problem with using silver to make a bullet (as opposed to the nonexistent accuracy problem) is that it's less dense than lead. That means, to match the weight of a lead bullet, a silver bullet of the same caliber would have to be longer, i.e., it would have to have a greater volume. If you make the silver bullet long enough to match the weight of a lead bullet, it may be too long to chamber in the gun, or it may have to be seated deeper in the case which reduces powder capacity and therefore reduces potential velocity.

We saw the bullet that he made and it wasn't an extra long bullet, which makes sense, because he was using an off-the-shelf bullet mold and those are designed with lead in mind. So that means the bullet was "light-for-caliber", which means it had low sectional density. Lower sectional density = less penetration, all else being equal.

On top of that, we don't know how "hot" the gunsmith loaded the cartridge, nor do we know how a fictional werewolf's head is constructed, i.e., we don't know how much bone was in the path of the bullet nor how thick it was.

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The OP is full of shit. Silver can weaken a vampire, e.g. silver chains, but not kill it. Vampires can ONLY be killed by sunlight or by having a WOOD stake driven through the heart, then beheading and stuffing the mouth with garlic—which is too complicated for the folks who make movies. Werewolves can regenerate from ANY injury, including “death” and limb loss—unless they are shot in the heart with a silver bullet or other silver weapon BY THE ONE WHO LOVES HIM. Geez, this isn’t rocket science, people.

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I hope you are joking cuz otherwise the OP is at least as correct as you are. Silver as a weapon against werewolves was invented wholesale for The Wolf Man (1941).
Vampires as you describe them are roughly derived from the novel Dracula (1897)... Bram Stoker took a lot of ideas from central and eastern Europe, pertaining to different vampire traditions, put it all together and invented anything else he liked. Beheading may have come up somewhere, staking the body (probably not with wood) into the the earth--fastening it down--(coffins were not universally used) was not uncommon as a solution. However removing and burning the heart is described. Vampires were not even necessarily drinking blood (sounds like it ought to be the definition, doesn't it?) but were invoked to explain spread of disease. It is for this reason that vampires are most often said to prey on family members--it simply fits with the spread of infection to the nearest and dearest. Traditional vampire stories are wildly varied and overlap somewhat with witches... who again overlap with werewolves. Werewolves in European folklore, traditionally, were a subset of witches--specifically they were people who used magic or contact with the Devil to learn how to become wolves at will. Such beings had no special invulnerability to ordinary weapons and stories of werewolves, shot or stabbed with ordinary weapons are the norm. Medieval stories of werewolves seem typified by Peter Stumpp--look him up on Wikipedia.
The first version I know of a silver bullet used against a witch (I recall something--possibly 19th century Rumanian--about shooting a silver bullet into a vampire's coffin), comes out of the WPA interviews with backwoods folk in Virginia and may come from older Scotish, Irish or German immigrants... So you might guess it would be useful for werewolves.
Basically, folklore provides a lot of contradictory rules so for vampires and werewolves the rules are whatever you want them to be for your fiction.

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Some vampire extermination lore requires you stake the heart, decapitate the head, stuff the mouth with holy wafers, and then bury the head next to a river that is close to a church!

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Maybe the werewolfs skull is much thicker than the human skull? Thats why the bullet doesnt go all the way through? Maybe all its bones in general are denser and stronger? It would explain how he could break a baseball bat easily and have the means to support all the muscle he gained when he transforms.

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