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Review of "The Strain" S01E01

7/14/2014

26 Comments

 
The early buzz on The Strain was filled with dramatic adjectives. “Unique” got tossed around several times, though not by every reviewer. After watching the pilot episode, I can’t imagine how anyone could have applied the word unique to anything about The Strain, which is perhaps the most derivative vampire story to come to the small screen in years. In recent years, we’ve had vampire detectives (Angel and Moonlight), vampire lovers (True Blood), vampire teens (The Vampire Diaries), vampire aristocrats (The Originals), vampire slackers (Being Human), vampire capitalists (Dracula), and a bunch of Canadian vampires on the Syfy channel. The Strain, from producers Guillermo Del Toro, Chuck Hogan, and Carlton Cuse, wanted to reverse the trend toward human and relatable vampires and return them to their roots in horror.
To do so, The Strain steals shamelessly from earlier vampire fictions but wraps the borrowings up in Del Toro’s ambiance of originality. I was surprised that none of the critics who wrote before the show aired (at least that I could find) seemed to recognize that the pilot episode is modeled very closely on an incident from the novel Dracula. The arrival of a derelict plane at JFK airport, all souls aboard dead, a vampire preying upon the passengers, and an eastern European coffin filled with dirt carried in the hold—all of this is a near verbatim paraphrase of the Demeter incident from Dracula, in which the Count, traveling aboard ship in a box filled with his native Transylvanian soil, preys on the crew until the ghost ship glides into port at Whitby carrying only doom.

It turns out I wasn’t alone in recognizing the similarity. Del Toro told the Daily Beast in an article published this morning that he purposely modeled the scene in the show (and presumably in his novel on which the show is based) on Dracula:
The first image I came up with as a kid was the idea of a plane stopping in the middle of a runway. I was thinking of the Demeter, the ship in Dracula, which arrives in the port with all of the sailors dead and with the pilot tied to the wheel. That was what I liked: the idea that they find that ship, and like in Dracula there is a coffin on board, in the cargo. So that’s how the pilot begins.
I’m not sure Del Toro recognizes the plane image, but it very closely parallels the Twilight Zone episode “The Arrival,” in which a phantom plane arrives silent and empty on a runway. The difference, of course, is that in 1961 this didn’t involve a full-scale military assault on the plane of an international panic. Such are the times we live in.

But the elements of The Strain drawn from previous vampire fictions go much deeper. The show has received enormous praise for the supposedly unique or original idea of making the vampires into the carriers of a parasitic disease that mimics the traditional bloodsucking parasitism of the Eastern European vampire. I’m sure you immediately recognized this idea from Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, which was the first novel to introduce a scientific basis for vampirism. In that book, the strain was a bacterium easily destroyed by sunlight. In The Strain it seems to be some parasitic worm-things carrying a virus. The idea that vampires are a folklore reflection of a biological monstrosity, however, is still older—Lovecraft fancifully explained vampires as a rationalization of strange horrors from subterranean monsters in “The Shunned House.” The appearance of the vampires—with clouds of worm-like tentacles reaching out for blood—very closely resembles popular conceptions of Lovecraft’s tentacle-bestrewn monsters.

More famously, Nosferatu (in both F. W. Murnau’s 1922 version and Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake) casts the vampire Orlok as the metaphorical embodiment of the Black Death, bringing a plague to Wisbourg that doctors at first think is in fact the actual plague. The plague metaphor is strong in The Strain, and it is quite obvious that the pilot episode is modeled not just on the Demeter scene but on accounts of plague ships sailing into port with all aboard dead—plague ships Bram Stoker used as the model for the Demeter.

The borrowings don’t end there.

The sinister retainer in The Strain who organizes events to allow for the vampire’s passage from Europe to America mirrors Richard Straker from Steven King’s novel ’Salem’s Lot. Straker acted as consigliere for the vampire Kurt Barlow. The series’ Abraham Van Helsing character is so closely modeled on his Dracula original that they share a first name! This version is Abraham Setrakian, though he draws more on the film versions of Van Helsing than the novel version.

From what I have read of the novel version (which I have not myself read), the Master vampire is depicted as a comic book supervillain trying to take over the world with a plot roughly similar to one of Doctor Doom’s schemes.

Del Toro, however, seems to think his vampire story is more original than it is—though he recognizes to an extent how much he borrows. Strangely, though, he doesn’t seem to see these borrowings as specific but rather as “beats” of the genre—as if they existed independently of the horrors that originated them:
You need to do the same things differently. You cannot just come up with a vampire who is green and has an antenna. You need to do it through the introduction of familiar beats in the vampire genre, then take the audience to places that are unexpected. […]

The more you realize that we have a minutely figured out biology and mythology, the more you realize “I haven’t seen this” and “I haven’t seen that”—even if it comes through the tropes of familiar genres. You need a coffin in vampire mythology. But this is an elaborately carved, 9-foot-tall coffin. The lead vampire is 9 feet tall. He’s absolutely a monstrous creature.
In The Strain Del Toro seems to mistake making things bigger and louder for making them different. There is nothing wrong with reusing old material and making it fresh. Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot is in all its essentials a retelling of Dracula, but it works because it brings out new motifs and new meanings by placing the events of Dracula in a small-town American setting rather than among the English aristocracy. The Strain, however, seems more interested in the how of vampirism—the science fiction explanation for it—than with telling a human story, or even, like Lovecraft, a cosmic one. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness—which Del Toro toyed with adapting—similarly describes monstrous biology, but its goal wasn’t to explain how aliens work but to create a sense of the uncanny.

I get a sense here that The Strain isn’t so much an independent story as it is a piece of vampire fan fiction attempting to reclaim parasitic horror from zombies, those undead creatures whose modern forms derive from the same revenants that yielded vampires. Carlton Cuse made that fairly explicit in speaking to the Daily Beast:
You have these zombies, and they all do one zombie thing. But with The Strain there’s a range to what the vampires can do, depending on where they sit in the hierarchy. There are all these levels.
I know that bureaucracy is why I tune into vampire shows. I can’t wait until the thrilling episode when the CDC bureaucrats fight for jurisdictional control while the vampires have feudal negotiations over whose liege lord is in charge of operations. Game of Thrones it is not.

Horror works best when it is individualized. One monster attacking one person is terrifying—a breach in the order of the cosmos that the audience can identify with—but the more the monsters multiply and the more organized they are, the more abstract the horror becomes until there is very little difference between a horde of zombies overrunning the earth, a flock of vampires killing everyone, or just a marauding army.

The pilot of The Strain is often effective, frequently creepy, and mostly entertaining. But it is also an overripe fruit that threatens to burst at any point into an unwatchable mess as soon as the focus shifts from what works (the recycling of earlier elements, which long ago proved their value) to what doesn’t (sinister hierarchies, deranged billionaires, conspiracies). I think I’d have preferred a modern-dress Dracula where the Demeter was an airplane to this science fiction-horror hybrid that probably should have been a graphic novel.
26 Comments
Matt Mc
7/14/2014 08:50:15 am

Jason, have you read the book?

Reply
Jason Colavito link
7/14/2014 10:46:38 am

No, I have not. Is it as clichéd and hokey as the setup for the series?

Reply
Matt Mc
7/14/2014 11:01:25 am

I have read the first two book and while I have the third I have not read it.

I don't want to spoil the show at all but overall I enjoyed the two I read, there is some cliches that I found annoying really annoying mostly in relation to the main characters. Overall however if found the direction it goes in to be interesting and I hope that the show follows the books.

Without spoiling the story to much it goes much more in the direction of a movie like OUTBREAK and at times certain set pieces reminded me of Shadow over Innsmouth. It really heads in an apocalyptic direction.

I hope I am not ruining it for anyone. I do feel that so far the book is superior but that almost always is the case. I will stick with it for nothing else but Del Toro's hand in it, I really enjoy his imagery and approach to the fantastic.

Jason Colavito link
7/14/2014 11:50:02 am

I hope that the TV series goes more for the tense outbreak thriller route than the crazy conspiracy angle the pilot seemed to be implying.

Scott Hamilton
7/14/2014 08:54:18 am

There was a modern-dress Dracula with the Demeter as an airplane, from a story in a Vampirella/Dracula comic book special probably about fifteen years back. It was written by Alan Moore and had art by Gary Frank, and as I remember it the point was Dracula has become so familiar in our culture that no one noticed the oddness of the events coming to life today. However, I haven't read it since it was new, so I could be misremembering it.

Reply
JaredMithrandir link
7/14/2014 09:26:11 am

You can borrow and be Unique, it's all in how you do it. The idea of modernizing the Demeter sequence as an Airplane I'm kinda surprised no one thought of before.

Reply
Gregor
7/14/2014 09:35:12 am

"The Night Flier" by Stephen King, 1988

Reply
Only Me
7/14/2014 10:07:10 am

Jason, there was another vampire show, Forever Knight, that is worth a mention. If I remember correctly, in one episode's flashback sequence, it was revealed that vampires helped spread the Black Plague since they were immune to it themselves. Ironically, in a later episode, the AIDS virus proved lethal to them.

Reply
Gregor
7/14/2014 10:15:46 am

The same concept also appears in the "Vampire: The Masquerade" role-playing game / mythos. Essentially the idea is that vampires must, as a matter of survival, hide their existence from mortals. One major obstacle to this is the fact that while the vampires themselves are immune to human blood-borne diseases, their victims are not. As such, anomalous outbreaks of various "plagues" can draw unwanted attention to vampires as a whole.

Reply
Drew
7/15/2014 09:24:52 am

Also, Vampire: the Masquerade did the 'closer a vampire is in generation to the first vampire, the more stuff they can do' thing.

I'm surprised that anyone would look to Del Toro for something original. I'm saying this as a fan of his work, but Del Toro operates at his best when building on or updating source materials, be they Hellboy comics, mythology, kaiju, and so on. Heck, given Blade II, this is his second dip in the vampire well.

I've read the first book and enjoyed it up to a point - the beginning is a really good vampire tale full of atmosphere. Events that occur later in the book felt like tonal shift and turned me off - sort of like the ending of F. Paul Wilson's 'The Keep' if that makes any sense.

Have you read Charles Stross' new Laundry book? It's there in the Venn Diagram between Lovecraft Mythos and Vampires.

Gregor
7/15/2014 09:32:20 am

@Drew

Yes (sorry - I didn't watch the show so I didn't know the "generations" thing was also on the table). Matter of fact, they even licensed a video game a while back where, in one "scene", you are being transported to 'the big fight' and, if you pay attention, you see that the lowly taxi driver who picked you up is actually Dracula, one of the nearly-mythological "antediluvians".

Drew
7/15/2014 10:06:56 am

S'okay - I didn't spend all those years playing White Wolf games and not learn a little something about nitpicking. ;)

Jason Colavito link
7/14/2014 10:48:36 am

Thanks for that... I didn't know that.

Reply
JaredMithrandir link
7/14/2014 10:10:18 am

I was actually reminded of Paul Feval's Le Ville Vampire 1867 (Vampire City, translation by Brian Stableford for BlackCoatPress). With the Leehc like Tong things.

Reply
Pacal
7/14/2014 10:13:37 am

Actually Vampire's who are detectives predates Angel and Moonlight. There was a Canadian TV series called Forever Knight from 1992-1996 with a Vampire Detective working for the Toronto Police force. I note it predates Buffy also.

Regarding Vampirism caused by a infectious parasite in the 1945 film House of Dracula this is given has the reason for Dracula's vampirism by a Doctor who tr4ies to cure him.

Reply
JaredMithrandir link
7/14/2014 10:36:13 am

People forget that Stoker himself was going for somewhat of an STD metaphor.

However what's really interesting is the novel Blood of The Vampire published that same year as Dracula, in 1897. It very much treats Vampirism as an allegory for the very problematic Victorian concept of Female Hysteria.

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Jason Colavito link
7/14/2014 10:49:45 am

There is truly nothing new under the sun!

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Only Me
7/14/2014 11:30:09 am

In the vein (no pun intended) of vampirism being caused by parasites/infectious disease, I have the book One Foot in the Grave, by Wm. Mark Simmons.

He had the idea that vampirism was caused by the combination of two infectious viral strains, IIRC. The main character was turned into a half-vampire after a blood transfusion to save Dracula(!), resulting in him being infected with only half the virus.

Reply
Cathleen Anderson
7/14/2014 10:57:48 am

I did read all three books. It doesn't fall apart they way you are thinking it might.

I found the writing style rather annoying, because it does too much switching between viewpoints.

Reply
Clint Knapp
7/14/2014 04:58:36 pm

I actually just watched this before I checked the blog tonight. Glad I'm not the only one who was cringing through the obvious Dracula plot. Now I'm just waiting on the reluctant gangster transporter to turn Renfield. Unless they're saving that one for Sean Astin.

It seems watchable enough, and I've always given del Toro an easy pass. He's not the horror/sci-fi visionary he likes to think he is, but he's always done a passable job by me when it comes to keeping the monster genre alive and fun- if not particularly terrifying or original. Shame about the At the Mountains of Madness project, though. I've seen it done well in a comic adaptation published by Self Made Hero.

I do wonder, however, how long we have until some Nephilim "researchers" latch onto the giant vampire ur-villain. Clearly this is disclosure psy-ops at work!

Reply
spookyparadigm
7/15/2014 05:27:22 am

See if you can find the early script treatment del Toro and his brother gave ATMoM. I can't say I liked it much. There are some plot specific aspects that work and don't work (the shoggoths are much more like the T-1000 in their shapechanging abilities, an idea other authors have played with, but makes them too "small" IMO; there is a weird time-dilation element; and the big one is that in that version of the script, the Elder Things are resurrected from coffins rather than just freezing to death, and are hell-bent on resurrecting Cthulhu, or the shoggoths are, I can't entirely remember).

What bothered me much more, and I suspect Jason will have something to say about this given the topic of one of his books, is that a distinct Frankentstein element is added to the story. In the original story, the scientists are just scientists, doing exciting but expected work. They'll be there for six months, and then go back to their lives. In the script, our Hero William Dyer is forced to choose between his fiance, and Science with a capital S, in terms of going on the trip (also, IIRC, like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, there is already some suggestion of finding something truly extraordinary, possibly a fossil or somesuch, before they leave). He is pushed here, and during the expedition, by an obsessive Professor Lake, who is in full "searching after that which Man shouldn't know" mode. His counterpoint is a role written for Ron Perlman, an action type as one of the mechanics with the team, who derides the eggheads and all the trouble it got them into.

Yes, there is clearly something of this theme in the novella. But it isn't moralistic. The characters are not obsessive maniacs. And that was the scary thing for Lovecraft. Not that there will be assholes who will push the limits, but that eventually, even innocent everyday knowledge will eventually accumulate until the true, non-human reality of existence will be undeniable except through mad destruction of knowledge.

I have that comic adaptation. I thought it was ok, if a little meh, until they get to the city. The art-deco 1930s style city of the future, I can understand why he made that choice. But it totally took me out of the story from there. I really enjoy the HP Lovecraft Historical Society's radio drama version, and in the props that come with the CD, they have a photo of the ruins and Gedney, and they use Inka stonework for the architecture, something supported by the text. Lovecraft chose megalithic, if sophisticated, stone architecture for a reason, to make the city look old. Even if it doesn't make as much as sense as a glittering sci-fi city, it symbolically makes sense to scream that the place is old.

Reply
Mark E.
7/14/2014 05:15:34 pm

Steve St. Clair's admission of having fangs now has me concerned.

Reply
Matt Mc
7/15/2014 01:32:54 am

I would not worry he is pretty delusional.

Reply
Screaming Eagle
7/15/2014 11:13:33 am

Jason, you should read the books. I agree with most of what has been said above, especially that Del Toro does (admittedly) borrow from those before him, however the books did a fantastic job with character development. The relationship between ***spoiler alert!*** father, son & mother is touching.
To one of your comments, "hokey" is in the eye of the beholder. Most are watching this to be entertained, as a break from the rigors of real daily life. If there were 9' tall vampires traipsing around I would not be as worried about work, mortgage payments, teenage children dating and other adult responsibilities.
Keep up the good work, but let's get back to bashing goofy geologists and crackpot theorists!

Reply
JaredMithrandir link
7/16/2014 10:42:38 am

"Horror works best when it is individualized. One monster attacking one person is terrifying—a breach in the order of the cosmos that the audience can identify with—but the more the monsters multiply and the more organized they are, the more abstract the horror becomes until there is very little difference between a horde of zombies overrunning the earth, a flock of vampires killing everyone, or just a marauding army."

Thing is, I'm really NOT a fan of Horror. I like certain Horror stories because of the SciFi and Fantasy aspects they often contain, as well the Melodrama.

So I don't care if it is actually "Terrifying" to me or not. I've never been scared by any work of Fiction.

But I do like Super Villains, Magnificent Bastard Chessmasters whoa re always one step ahead. That's part of why The Dark Knight is the greatest Movie ever made, because of The Joker. And Part of why Pretty Little Liars is the best show on TV, because of -A. And why Code Geass and Death note are two of my favorite Animes, and why I love John Devil

Reply
Ralph E Vaughan link
7/20/2014 07:41:56 am

When a producer, writer or director claims "new and unique," I think of the first chapter of Ecclesiastes. So far, I have not been wrong.

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