How do you kill a vampire in ‘Renfield?’

Warning: The following article contains spoilers for Renfield. 

Renfield has risen from the dead. After nearly a century in the ground — the film is a sequel to the 1931 movie of the same name, by the way —  Dracula (Nicolas Cage) and his servant Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) have taken to the streets of New Orleans to once more delight in the delectable blood of innocent victims. 

Well, Dracula is doing the delighting. Renfield is trying to break free from his master’s servitude. Thanks in large part to a 12-step self-help group of fellow codependents trying to get out from under the thumb of their respective a**holes, Renfield has realized he no longer wants to do Dracula’s bidding. He wants to live his own life. He wants to make his own mark. He doesn’t want to partake in evil murders anymore. He wants to be a hero.

Which means he has to kill Dracula. But killing Dracula is not as easy as it sounds, if it sounds easy at all. Renfield not only has to battle his inner demons, but he has to slice, dice, and mutilate Dracula if he has any hope of killing him for good. And even still, is that enough?

How do you kill a vampire in Renfield lore?

The specifics of killing a vampire are left intentionally vague in Renfield. After Renfield and Rebecca (Awkwafina) —  actually, just Rebecca — trap Dracula in a holy protection circle (made out of cocaine, no less), they spot a collection of medieval weapons on the wall and exchange a pair of devious glances. 

To the voiceover of Renfield revealing that vampiric lore has never actually settled on one specific method of killing a vampire, he and Rebecca decide to cover their bases by slicing, dicing, mutilating, ripping, tearing, shredding, sawing, and otherwise dismembering Dracula to itty bitty pieces. Also, there’s holy water involved. Then, to top it off, they grind Dracula’s dismembered parts into tiny little pieces and encase those pieces in cement ice cube blocks. And then — yes there’s more — they toss those blocks down the sewer. 

Does this do the trick? We don’t know. While tossing Dracula’s cement blocks down the sewer, a voiceover of Renfield says something along the lines of “it will take a long, long time for Dracula to recover from this.” One is left to assume, then, that Dracula is not dead. 

At the beginning of the film, Dracula also encounters direct sunlight and goes up in flames, but before we can find out whether this would cook him to crisps and kill him, Renfield tosses a window drape over his body and extinguish the flames. As such, Dracula survives, albeit as nothing more than walking charcoal. 

Universal Pictures and Renfield’s executive producers have hinted at a possible shared universe, but the chances of a sequel is slim. Unfortunately, we may never know for sure how to Dracula, or any vampire, but should our sequel-prayers be answered, so too might our burning questions.