Netflix’s upcoming vampire drama series continues to take form. Elizabeth Mitchell (Lost), Aubin Wise (Atlanta), Jason Robert Moore (The Punisher), Gracie Dzienny, Will Swenson, Phillip Mullings Jr., Dominic Goodman, and Dylan McNamara joined the full cast of First Kill, giving face to the Fairmont and Burns families. Sarah Catherine Hook and Imani Lewis were previously announced as the leading cast members, Juliette Fairmont and Calliope Burns. MK xyz, Jonas Dylan Allen, and Roberto Mendez join First Kill as additional cast members in the series, all in their debut series roles. Overall, the series is bolstered with young actors and a diverse cast—a stark difference from typical shows in the vampire canon.
The series, based on short story by New York Times best-selling author Victoria “V. E.” Schwab of the same name, follows teenage vampire Juliette as she’s pressured to take on her first kill as a member of her powerful vampire family. Her target, new girl in town Calliope, turns out to be a fearless vampire hunter from a long line of successful slayers. As the pair get to know each other, they begin to fall for one another. That’s right, Schwab’s not just sticking with that age-old Vampiric Homoerotic Subtext trope. No, First Kill is explicitly queer. Now, we don’t want any comparisons to Twilight here, this is strictly a dream premise: it’s the diverse lesbian version of Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
The series recently entered production with Felicia D. Henderson, known for her work on The Punisher, Empire, Gossip Girl, and Soul Food, serving as writer, showrunner, and executive producer. Emma Roberts and Karah Preiss serve as executive producers, along with the creator, executive producer and writer Schwab.
No release date has been assigned for First Kill.
24 Comments
The premise is Buffy but gay AND they cast Elizabeth Mitchell as the requisite Teen Show Hot Mom?
She’s already played a much better lesbian in a much better show:
How exactly do you know it’s better?
It’s not a Netflix show aimed squarely at the 14-19-year-old white-girl-unsure-about-her-sexuality demographic.
heh. I’ve heard good things-and I think the Teens are gay in this new one, not the requisite Hot Mom- but we’ve been on Elizabeth Mitchell for 20 years now.
romeo and juliet but sapphic and vampires? yes and please hurry thank you.
I don’t know if I want them to kill themselves at the end.
i hope netflix* is learning to stop burying the gays* all tv & film
There’s something amusing about the intersection of “bury your gays” and vampires. Feels like a loophole.
Looking at the headshots because the different families looked like they could be related to each other. It’s something I’ve realized I appreciate more and more as that sense of visual resemblence does add to familial scenes.
Netflix has announced that the crazy millionaire psycho that tortures Daniel in Karate Kid III (Terry Silver) will return in season 4 of Cobra Kai.
Wait…there are straight vampires? I always assumed pretty much every one since Dracula was bi?Also this looks like yet another ‘Pretty, Rich people, vampire soap opera” show so …hard pass I guess.
There are in fact at a lot of heterosexual girls out there who prefer their awkward teen vampire fantasies to draw the line at homoeroticism, stopping short of outright queerness. It’s hardly surprising we had a surge of relatively straight vampire media. That’s a lot of money to leave on the table otherwise. Twilight struck me as the most recent high water mark.I’d say there’s an ebb and flow even within the vampires-as-allegory culture. It’s only natural that certain allegories will get some time in the sun (oops) only to be replaced by others periodically. Sometimes the vampire/queer link comes back with a vengeance, but sometimes other stuff breaks through: vampires as allegory for any flavor of human elite you can think of, vampires as parasites to set up a larger allegory between society and nature (works especially well when the vampires are capitalists/industrialists,) vampires as allegory for the neurodivergent (though usually not in any good way, yet,) and even vampires as a parodical allegory for people who fancy themselves proper outcasts from society, but totally aren’t.
Yeah, I’ve always thought Steven King was on the right track when he pointed out that vampires represent the idea of sex for , well , fun…rather than the bland sex = joyless procreation.Especially in the eras that stuff like Camilla and Dracula came out… and the fact that both were written by Irish writers in a mostly Catholic country may have factored into it, bearing in mind that they may be seductive but are also corrupting ( so a fierce dose of guilt included.)Also apologies for being a bit of a dick in my first post, stuff like that show is fine , albeit not for me ( I prefer stuff like the UK version of Being Human for my TV vampires)
I didn’t think your post was dickish at all. I deliberately chose to respond to a wisecrack with seriousness, because I thought there was something interesting there to talk about.And you’re right about the vampire/sex thing. I just kinda forgot about it, but it belongs on the list.It’s actually rather interesting that the “sexy vampire” stuff geared towards hetero teen girls never seems to emphasize the allure of risk-free sex. If the twin dangers of pregnancy and disease get discarded (which isn’t true for all variants,) then some other danger – usually the danger of getting snacked on in the heat of the moment – is quick to take its place. There’s certainly something to unpack there. Maybe you just have to dig down deeper into the bowels of vampire smut to find the risk-free fantasy.
I’ll bet sexy vampire fiction geared towards male teens is all about that disease-free fuckfest angle, though. Actually, I wonder if we might end up discovering a divide between male and female authors of sexy vampire bullshit when it comes to those angles.
If this is successful, I hope Schwab gets to do a Shades of Magic TV series. That could be great if done right.
I enjoyed the short story, and look forward to the show.
“That’s right, Schwab’s not just sticking with that age-old Vampiric Homoerotic Subtext trope. No, First Kill is explicitly queer”That… doesn’t seem all that novel to me. From a film standpoint, Daughters of Darkness, The Velvet Vampire, and The Vampire Lovers all came out in the early 70s and all featured explicit queer content. Then there was The Hunger in the 80s.
There were three films in The Vampire Lovers series alone, although I’m not sure Twins of Evil had as much queer content.On of the sequels, either Lust for a Vampire or Twins of Evil has the same theme song as that old Justice League cartoon. I couldn’t believe my ears when it started up.
There was gay vampire action a-plenty in True Blood too.
Tara was also important as a non-rich, non-white, working class background, fully gay vampire who cut against the “wealthy white nobleman” pattern of Eric and Bill.
Those are good but they’re obscure 70’s horror/exploitation flicks. I love ‘em, but they’re not relevant in a discussion of how the vampire genre has evolved in popular consciousness. The trope’s most widely seen form would be Dracula->Interview With a Vampire ->Buffy->True Blood. That’s how the broadest group would know it. If this show gets even a significant fraction of Buffy’s notoriety, then yes, it will have moved the needle on queer vampires.
On the literary side, “Carmilla” predates “Dracula” by two decades and the listing-after in that is female listing after female, rather than the probably-bi Count. In film, a follow up to Bela Lugosi’s Dracula with his daughter led to moral concerns about “hovering” before a kiss and a prolonged scene where she’s eye-f***ing an art model went through several revisions to put more and more clothes on. The censors had kittens about it.
Given that “save your daughters” was in the marketing, and pretty clear allusions to gay cruising for sex are involved, it’s one of those cases of subtext where it’s not as obvious as Xena, but it looks and quacks like a duck and straight explanations fail…
it isn’t full of the usual “Ryan’s Gays” for once. Not a Rannells, Bomer nor Quinto to be seen!
Juliette!!!! Awesome!!!