The Strain: Three Things We Liked About Del Toro’s Vampire Tale, And Two We Didn’t

Del Toro's latest was a mixed bag.

By David Wharton | Updated

This article is more than 2 years old

WormsGood: A New Breed of Vampire
With The Strain serving as a head-on collision between two different types of vampire story — the scientific and the supernatural — the scientific side of things is definitely the more intriguing at this point. The idea of vampirism being carried by parasites is a nice twist on the classic idea of a bite turning you, and our instinctive revulsion at the thought of parasitic infection should provide plenty of opportunity for squirm-inducing moments in the weeks to come. The whole prehensile tongue thing is also a huge departure from the comparatively tame vampire tradition of a love bite and a pair of dainty puncture marks. And as the show continues, we should get to see just how horrifying the evolution from human to vampire is in the Strain-verse. Lestat these guys are not.

It’s also nice to see somebody trying to make vampires genuinely frightening again. The romanticized vampire has been done to death in recent years, courtesy of things like True Blood and Twilight, so it’s long past time for the bloodsuckers to be presented as something that no one in their right mind would want to encounter, much less aspire to be. The last thing I can recall that did a good job of presenting vampires as unsympathetic alpha predators was 30 Days of Night, so I’m looking forward to watching del Toro’s vision unfold in the weeks to come.


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