Silver Bullets: How To Hunt a Werewolf
What Would You Pack to Hunt a Wolf Man?
It’s that time of year when the veil between our world and the supernatural grows thin, allowing all kinds of spooks and preternatural creatures to wreak havoc on our peaceful lives—if you believe in that sort of thing. Here’s the scenario: Your neighbor confides in you that there’s a vicious werewolf prowling the block, and it’s up to you, the expert hunter that you are, to tag it under the light of a full moon. You know just what you have to do—make some silver bullets post haste.
But hold up, because this common horror movie trope, while possible, ain’t as easy to accomplish as it sounds, or as the movies make it look. With The Wolf Man (2025), a new adaptation of the Universal Studios classic monster movie from director Leigh Whannell (The Invisible Man), set to drop in the coming weeks, now is as good a time as any to brush up on werewolf self-defense knowledge.
A Werewolf’s Kryptonite: Silver Bullets
Like Rudy says in The Monster Squad, there’s only one way to kill a werewolf, which is actually something of a modern monster, at least the version most Americans know so well.
You know the rules, we all do—a person transforms into a demon wolf under the light of the full moon. It can be anybody, a survivor who is bitten becomes a werewolf themselves, for instance. Everybody knows the only way to kill a werewolf is with a silver bullet.
This legend dates back exactly to 1941 when Universal Pictures released The Wolf Man starring Lon Chaney, Jr. Myths and legends about human beings transforming into wolves or other animals are as old as time—every culture and era has a variant, and each of those has its own rules, so to speak. But the rules we mostly accept for werewolves were invented by Curt Siodmak when he wrote the script for The Wolf Man, cobbled together from various legends and his imagination.
The full moon thing? Made up. Shapeshifters and werewolves of Old World legends were usually considered to be possessed by an animal spirit and transformations were brought on by spells or by the spirit itself when it became strong enough. No moon needed. But it was a good detail for the movies.
Heck, the silver bullet bit, although it’s mentioned briefly in the dialog of The Wolf Man, never even comes into play—both werewolves in that movie are bludgeoned to death with a silver-headed cane. (Sorry for the spoilers, but the movie is over 80 years old.) But, a new iteration of this classic is coming.
The Wolf Man (2025) from director Leigh Whannell (The Invisible Man) is set to drop in January, so now’s as good a time as any to brush up on your werewolf defense knowledge, just so you can sleep a little more soundly through the spooky season.
Why Silver For Monsters?
Silver has always been considered somewhat magical by human beings from various cultures. Once upon a time, it was more rare than gold and platinum. It also has antimicrobial properties, so in the days before germ theory, silver tinctures and salves could help somewhat miraculously heal wounds and abate illnesses when all else failed. Plus, it shined up real pretty—so much so that the earliest mirrors were made using silver.
Of course, before scientific explanations could be offered, these properties were considered mystical, magical, and even religious. So, if silver could ward off illness and help heal wounds, as well as create shockingly reflective surfaces that were considered by some to be mystical in their own right, it stands to reason that it could do some good against the unholy forces of darkness that prowl the night. And so, legends were born and silver became a material associated with positivity and protection against evil.
While ancient vampire legends include the use of silver against bloodsuckers in various forms—a detail that sometimes makes it into the movies but usually doesn’t—ancient shapeshifter and werewolf legends really don’t. In fact, those creatures are typically vulnerable to the same causes of death that animals of their size would be. So if we’re going by the OG legends, just load for bear—or dangerous game—and you’re set.
But that wasn’t cool enough for Hollywood in the 1940s, so here we are.
Making Silver Bullets Ain’t So Easy
They make it look so easy in the movies—just grab some old silver dinner spoons, melt them down, pour the molten silver into some bullet molds, and then load up your cartridges. Well, actually, most movies show the melting part but gloss over the actual cartridge creation. In one of my favorite werewolf movies, the aptly titled Silver Bullet (1985), we see exactly this.
Uncle Red (Gary Busey) brings two silver medallions to a local gunsmith and asks him to turn them into a silver bullet as a gift for his nephew, who just discovered The Lone Ranger. This is a cover of course, and the gunsmith takes the tasks seriously, hinting that he knows they really have a werewolf problem.
Then, we see the gunsmith melt the silver and pour it into a mold for lead .44 Magnum bullets. We even get a shot of the gunsmith actually seating the bullet on a case with a single-stage press, something you don’t see much in movies. The problem is, most of that wouldn’t be possible with regular equipment he’d have on hand.
First, let’s look at density. Silver sits at 10.49 g/cm³ and lead comes in at 11.34 g/cm³ — pretty close, but different enough to matter. Silver is lighter than lead for the same mass. No getting around that. A lead bullet will weigh about 10% more than a bullet made of pure silver of the same size.
Natural silver is hard but also brittle, which is why sterling silver—which is what most jewelry is made from—is only about 92% silver. The rest is usually copper and other metals, like nickel, added to make the silver even harder and less likely to crack. That also makes it a little harder to work with.
The first big roadblock is silver’s high melting point of 1,763 degrees. Lead melts at a comparatively low 621.5 degrees, which you can achieve with a campfire. To melt silver, a lead furnace won’t cut it; you need a special silver foundry. Or an arc furnace.
So, no, Tonto was not making The Lone Ranger’s silver bullets while they chewed the fat around the fire at night.
If you can manage to puddle the silver, you have to make sure it’s hot enough to get it into a ladle and into a mold without hardening. Also, the silver might destroy a mold made for lead, so, like, there’s that. The guys from TKOR used molds of packed sand made with factory bullets, and that seemed to produce a well-shaped bullet after some polishing. So, if you were wondering if people have put serious thought into this matter over the years—yes, yes they have.
If you can manage to do any of that and get decent bullets, you then have to deal with the fact that silver shrinks as it cools. So even if you got the molds to work perfectly, the finished bullet would be smaller than expected.
Say you get everything you need together to seat a silver bullet on a case—you first have to figure out what kind of powder charge to use, because thanks to the lighter silver bullet, everything is thrown out of whack.
A full charge of modern smokeless powder could send the lightweight bullet screaming downrange, or it could turn a brittle silver bullet into a small cloud of silver shards at the muzzle. And remember, the silver is hard, so it’s not going to take the rifling on the way down the barrel very well, if at all. So don’t expect much accuracy.
If you need more proof that silver bullets are really tough to work with, Mythbusters made silver bullets in Episode 79, though the video clip is nowhere to be found. After much work, they did get the silver bullets to function and tested them on some ballistics gel. Due to their light weight, they didn’t do so hot, especially compared to lead, but they did fire.
Back in the day, the staff of Gun World Magazine tried its hand at making The Lone Ranger’s silver bullets. They had a tough time, but they did make them and test them. They were pretty slow using black powder loads—around 800 fps—and they were wildly inaccurate. But thanks to the hard silver, they reportedly did punch neat holes through steel targets, when they hit them.
What’s A Werewolf Hunter to Do?
If you’re facing down a werewolf situation in your neighborhood, you could hope that the vintage rules apply like in An American Werewolf in London and you can just use your best rifle—unfortunately, you won’t know until it’s too late.
So, if you find yourself having to make silver bullets in a rush on your own, you’d honestly be better off trying to make a slug and load it into a 12-gauge shotgun shell. It also might be possible to drip molten silver into a tub of water, like an old-school shot tower, to create some relatively round silver shot that can then be loaded into a hot 3.5-inch shotshell. But then you’d, of course, have to get within shotgun range—of a werewolf. But it’s better than pistol range!
It’s either that or make round balls or shot and go with a smoothbore muzzleloader, though you might want more than one shot at a charging lycanthrope.
If you don’t have an expert with the right tools at your disposal to create a true silver bullet and load it into a cartridge, these are your options. Of course, if you have enough time to gather materials, do some testing, and know how to make an arc furnace work like the dudes from TKOR in the video above, anything is possible. They made some 9mm rounds that totally functioned. They didn’t have much ass behind them and couldn’t cycle a Glock, but they worked—at about three feet from the target.
But, let’s think outside the box. After all, your life depends on it. It’s never specified exactly how much silver is needed to kill a werewolf. I say, get an S&W Model 500 revolver or lever gun and some factory ammo with deep hollowpoint bullets. You still have to melt some silver, but then you just need to get a dab of it to fill that hollowpoint cavity in the factory bullet and let it cool. Boom: silver-filled hollowpoints. You can probably fit as much silver as it would take to make a .22LR bullet in that cavity.
Or you could just dip the tips of some rifle bullets in melted silver, but since you really won’t have a chance to test and make sure it’s enough silver before being torn to shreds by a supernatural horror, maybe the hollowpoint idea is safest.
Stay safe out there, and Happy Halloween!