How to kill a Werewolf

How to kill a Werewolf

How do you kill a werewolf? Wait, I know this one, you need silver right? Or maybe you need fire. Or to cut off its head. How do you kill a vampire? Do you need a stake? Will sun do it? Will holy water? Does silver affect them? How do you kill a zombie? Destroy the brain, right? But does that mean nothing else works?

This is actually something that writers struggle with. You have the fictional monster, and you need to get rid of them. So how do you do it? Typical way is to go looking through the traditional methods. But guess what, even ‘tradition’ is probably a lot newer than you think.

There are a good half a dozen ways to become a werewolf in traditional folklore and none of them have anything to do with getting bitten by a werewolf, a full moon, or silver. These range from drinking rain water out of a wolf’s pawprint to using a magic belt to transform. Ways to stop a werewolf vary too. Some include calling their name or throwing clothes at them.

So where did the full moon, bite, and silver come from? Universal Monster movies, for the most part. Then they get reinforced by more movies and books. Is this bad? Not in the slightest.

Unless it doesn’t work for your story.

In which case, throw out whatever doesn’t work for you and put in something else instead. Sure, you can’t throw out everything. If you call your character a werewolf, they have to be able to actually shift into something that somewhat resembles a wolf. This may be an indistinguishable from normal wolves wolf or some kind of wolf man hybrid. This may be completely voluntary, completely involuntary, or a combination of the two. But if you decide that silver doesn’t actually affect them, then it doesn’t. If you decide that werewolves are immortal unless killed with very specific ways, (i.e. silver, magic, fire, etc.) then that’s how it works in your story. If your werewolves are actually pretty normal with a little more reliance on the moon cycle and perhaps a preference for rare meat, then that works.

Traditional vampires were frequently stopped by their obsession for counting. People would scatter seeds on the ground before going to sleep, and the vampire would have to stop and count all the seeds before they could move on to attack the person. While there has always been a bit of folklore wisdom that evil has to flee when morning comes, the biggest reason we consider vampires vulnerable to the sun is because of Nosferatu. In Dracula, the count could walk around during the day. Oh, and some said that when a werewolf died, he became a vampire.

So use what works for you. Sure, your vampires have to be parasites of a type, though there are enough psychic vampires that the idea that a vampire might not need blood can easily work. But you get to decide on the other parts.

If something is heavily ingrained in the lore and you decide not to go that route, you may need an explanation. If your werewolf is immune to silver, why? Maybe because it has to be pure or blessed silver and most silver is alloyed. Or maybe because werewolves were never vulnerable to silver, but spread that rumor anyway so that they are actually immune to a ‘werewolf test’. Or maybe there are different types of werewolves in your world, say, natural and magic, and the silver only works on one kind.

Or say you want your vampire to be able to walk in the daylight. Well, maybe it’s an age thing. Maybe old vampires are strong enough to walk around as long as it is at least partly cloudy. Or maybe it’s young vampires who are closer to humans who can handle a little more sun.

I did a fair bit of evaluation when creating races for my books. In fact, I have a series of pages on my website to show what being a Were or shifter means in this work. I invite you to check them out.

How do you kill a Werewolf?