I thought it was more that if you killed them in OTHER ways, they would come back to life. The stake through the heart is to make sure a vampire is good and actually dead, and not just hibernating.

This reminds me of a book I read can’t rememebr what, where a bunch of kids were prospecting for gold, they knew aqua regia, (royal water), composed of two parts of hydrochloric acid, and one part of nitric acid would dissolve the gold…so they ran the test and the ore dissolved…what they failed to comprehend is aqua regia dissolves pretty much everything. It is the fact that gold ONLY dissolves in it that is the point and they had intact only struck copper.