Herschel Walker Fact Check: Can Werewolves Kill Vampires?

Herschel Walker, in his campaign for the Georgia Senate runoff, decided at a rally in McDonough, Georgia, on Wednesday to address an age-old question: Can werewolves kill vampires? It’s probably not relevant to his governing aspirations, but I’m here for it. We all want to know! Let’s hear the argument.

Walker described watching a “stupid movie late at night hoping it’s gonna get better, it don’t get better, but you keep watching it anyway” called “Fright Night, Freak Night, or some type-a night.” It was about vampires, he recalled, and both 1985’s Fright Night and its 2011 remake are indeed about vampires, so let’s assume it was that.

“I don’t know if you know, but vampires are some cool people, are they not?” he said. Uh, I guess it depends on the vampire? I don’t feel comfortable making such broad generalizations. “But I’m going to tell you something I found out: A werewolf could kill a vampire, did you know that? I didn’t know that, so I didn’t want to be a vampire anymore, I wanted to be a werewolf.” If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.

It is very strange that Walker seemed to glean this information from Fright Night, as neither version argues that a werewolf can kill a vampire. The 1985 original, however, does depict a vampire named Evil Ed briefly taking the form of a wolf (more a wolf wolf than a werewolf), only to be murdered by movie vampire hunter Peter Vincent (played by Roddy McDowall) in the way that one tends to murder vampires: via stake through heart.

Just based on the general rules of werewolves and vampires, I would think that werewolves could only kill vampires in the traditional fashion portrayed in this scene. In that respect, though, the werewolf wouldn’t be using its wolf powers to do so, but rather the human capacity to successfully wield a stake. It’s not the wolf that would be killing the vampire in that scenario, but the were.

I’m trying to think of other movies that successfully argue that werewolves can kill vampires. The Monster Squad? Nah, Frankenstein’s monster kills Dracula in that. Twilight? I don’t know, I only saw the first one and I don’t remember it, but from what I hear from my Jezebel colleagues, Jacob did not kill Edward by the end of that franchise—he married a baby.

Underworld (2003) does depict a war between vampires and werewolves, and werewolves seem to have the ability to just bite fatal chunks out of vampires, but actually I haven’t seen that one either, so I’m not sure what the exact science behind their ability to do so entails. Still, they seem capable. So Walker is technically right, according to another movie that he was not describing.

During Walker’s rally-turned-horror-con, he went on to inaccurately describe another Fright Night scene in which Vincent confronts another vampire and finds that typical vampire kryptonite like a cross is ineffective because, “You have to have faith for this to work on me.” Walker’s point was: “And that’s the way it is in our life: It don’t work unless you got faith. It’s time for us to have faith.” The voters of Georgia now must ask themselves: Do you have faith in a candidate who can’t even describe what happens in Fright Night correctly?