Holy ground. And the literary folks have really played this up in their stories of vampires. After neighbors complained that Paole was leaving his grave to throttle them at night, villagers dug him up and put a stake through his heart. Oh, and if you happen to be short of wood, you could also just stab a vampire with whatever else is sharp and handy. There are constant historical anecdotes where people behead and burn suspected vampires.
Subsequent outbreaks—including one in and that likely killed ID6—ravaged the city again over the two centuries that followed. But no. This narrative continued into the second episode when Dracula told Agatha he is so afraid of the cross because he inherited it from all of the peasants he consumed, revealing everyone is afraid of the cross.
However, Agatha quickly dismissed this theory, warning him that he was lying to himself about the truth. While the reason for the fear is not explicitly given in the novel, the crosses are part of a whole list of religious artefacts which ward off the evil vampire.
Viewers familiar with the religious practice of exorcism will also know that the crucifix is used to expel demons in this process as well. The light of the day will burn him to death. The stories also tell us that there's a downside to this predatory choice. You become a creature of the night, unable to stand in the light of day.
Some mistakenly think that this is because the cross is a holy symbol, imbued with religious power. But this is wrong.
The symbol, like the thing itself, is powerless. And that's the point. That is why vampires can't tolerate it. Most vampires don't believe in the cross, but that hardly matters.
It's the idea of the thing that gives them fits. The cross confronts vampires with their opposite — with the rejection of power and its single-minded pursuit. It suggests that no one is to be treated as prey — not even an enemy. The idea of the cross, in other words, suggests that vampires have it wrong, that they have it backwards, in fact, and that those others they regard as prey are actually, somehow, winning.
This notion is incomprehensible for vampires. The one thing they're certain of, the thing that drives them and tells them who they are and how the world works and that they've got it all figured out is that the key to immortality is in choosing to be the predator rather than the prey.
The idea that this might be wrong is so befuddling, so contradictory to everything they have chosen to be that it forces them to recoil. They can't get past it.
It has become fashionable in modern vampire stories to portray these monsters as unaffected or somehow immune to the cross. Don't you believe it. This confusion arose due to the ridiculous, contradictorily cruciform objects being bandied about these days as "crosses. They are often weak against crosses and holy water, and possibly the Bible.
Slacktivist maintains that the cross represents self-sacrifice and self-denial, which is anathema to the predatory, selfish worldview of the vampire. By this standard any social predator can be a "vampire", rather like the antichrist from 2nd Peter.
Like many pop conceptions, Marvel Comics vampires are weak to genuine symbols of religious faith. Nightcrawler, a staunch Catholic despite his demonic heritage, can use the cross to physically repel a vampire, even a makeshift one made out of two stakes; Kitty Pryde tries the same trick and fails, because she is Jewish, but later comes prepared with the Star of David to the same effect.
Joss Whedon's vampires suffer intense heat when touching specific holy objects the cross, the Bible, etc. This is basically an extension of the core plot device that Magical Items help equalize the human-demon scales, and that the more ancient and musty an object, the more powerful it is so a cross merely acts like a branding iron, not a burning flame.
No specific religious theme is implied, as Whedon is a vocal atheist and the Buffy mythos is generally an occult free-for-all.
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