SFX 250 PREVIEW! How The Strain Is "Completely Subverting The Vampire Genre"

Not the kind of vampires you'd want to have a love affair with...

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Guillermo de Toro’s new TV offering is not just, to paraphrase a Cards Against Humanity card, another goddamn vampire show. Based on del Toro’s novels of the same name, The Strain promises us a whole new look at bloodsuckers.

Executive producer Carlton Cuse (Lost) is pretty clear on what drew his interest to the project. “I felt like doing another vampire show was completely uninteresting. But the idea here that was embedded in the book was about completely subverting the vampire genre. It was thinking of vampires not as brooding, romantic creatures but horribly opportunistic, parasitic creatures.”

The Strain’s unique take on vampires dispenses with the now-ubiquitous idea of Dracula’s kin as being upstanding and gentlemanly. Instead, vampirism has been caused by the outbreak of virus worms. They burrow into humans through the eyes or skin, infecting their genes and turning their hosts into vampires.

But many of the vampires’ unique characteristics had to be invented by the television team especially for the show.

“You have to come up with everything from the creature’s gestation, to how to they move and what is their biology?

"We worked hard on trying to figure out how to pace the stuff and show the ways in which society starts to get upended as the spread widens."

Read more about The Strain in the new issue of SFX, on sale Wednesday 25 June. The Strain infects FX in the US from Saturday 13 July.