Guillermo del Toro's 4-Part Vampire Series Fixed The Damage Done By Twilight

Published Sep 28, 2026, 10:30 AM EDT

Tom is a Senior Staff Writer at Screen Rant, with expertise covering everything from hilarious sitcoms to jaw-dropping sci-fi epics.

Initially he was an Updates writer, though before long he found his way to the TV and movies team. He now spends his days keeping Screen Rant readers informed about the TV shows of yesteryear, whether it's recommending hidden gems that may have been missed by genre fans or deep diving into ways your favorite shows have (or haven't) stood the test of time.

Tom is based in the UK and when he's not writing about TV shows, he's watching them. He's also an avid horror fiction writer, gamer, and has a Dungeons and Dragons habit that he tries (and fails) to keep in check.

For fans of vampire horror, Twilight was the worst thing that could have happened to pop culture. The Twilight boom of the late 2000s completely changed what vampires meant to mainstream audiences, and not for the better. The 2008 movie and its sequels replaced blood-drinking terrors with sparkling permateens, and the impact on vampire-based entertainment was as immediate as it was heartbreaking. Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) and his family may technically have had teeth, but the franchise’s vampires had lost all their bite, as did the scores of imitators that followed.

Thankfully, vampire horror has been healing. Movies like 2023’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter and 2024’s Abigail and Nosferatu proved that audiences could once again embrace vampires as monsters rather than supernatural romantic leads. However, undoing the Twilight effect took years, and one of the most important projects that helped steer the genre back toward its horrific roots was FX’s The Strain.

Co-created by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, The Strain ran for four seasons between 2014 and 2017. The plot sees epidemiologist Ephraim Goodweather (Corey Stoll) struggling to keep his family safe as a mysterious biological outbreak transforms New Yorkers into grotesque vampiric creatures called Strigoi. For horror fans who always hated glitter-coated vampires, The Strain is essential viewing, especially since Del Toro’s series was pivotal in reversing the pop-culture PR crisis caused by the Cullens.

The Strain Made Vampires Scary Again

Unlike Twilight’s vision of sparkling immortals, there is absolutely nothing romantic about becoming a vampire in The Strain. Vampirism in the strain is a biological infection, with victims gradually losing their humanity as parasitic worms transform their anatomy. The resulting Strigoi are pale, decaying predators that feed using horrifying extendable throat tentacles rather than elegant fangs. There’s even a graphic scene that exists just to confirm that reproductive organs disappear along with ears, noses, and hair as the human body is repurposed entirely for feeding and spreading the infection.

The show’s central antagonist, the Master (voiced by Robin Atkin Downes), proves more than any character just how far The Strain sits from Twilight. Rather than an impossibly attractive immortal, he is a towering, ancient, noseless abomination commanding other vampires through a psychic hive mind. Even the intelligent Strigoi who aren't under his direct control are unmistakably monstrous quality, both in their appearance and personalities.

Vampirism isn't a fantasy offering eternal youth and supernatural romance in The Strain. It is a disease that mutilates the body and turns loved ones into predators at the whims of a red-eyed centuries-old tyrant. As a creative concept, every aspect of the vampires in The Strain is fully committed to horror with a distinct streak of Guillermo del Toro’s uniquely imaginative aesthetic style thrown in.

True, The Strain wasn't solely responsible for reversing the damage Twilight did to vampire fiction, but it was an important and significant step in the right direction. Years before The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Abigail, and Nosferatu put monstrous bloodsuckers back on cinema screens, The Strain spent four seasons reminding audiences that vampires could still be genuinely disgusting and terrifying.

Zombie TV Show Fans Should Also Check Out The Strain

It isn't only horror fans tired of Twilight-style vampires who should check out The Strain. Despite being focused on vampires, the FX series functions like a zombie apocalypse show when it comes to its tone and atmosphere. Its Strigoi infection spreads rapidly through bites and parasitic worms, turning ordinary people into hostile creatures and transforming a localized medical mystery into the collapse of New York City. Rather than focusing on a single vampire siring new followers one-by-one, normal people are turned in their thousands by the time The Strain concludes.

The similarities become especially clear whenever the Strigoi attack in numbers. While a select few vampires in the strain retain intelligence if their sire deems them worthy, the majority are mindless creatures who swarm their prey like zombies, driven only by the need to feed. Individual vampires like The Master’s lieutenant, the immortal SS officer Thomas Eichorst (Richard Sammel), can be frightening, but the greatest terror in The Strain comes when scores of mindeless thralls attack en masse.

It gives The Strain a lot more in common with zombie TV shows like The Walking Dead than it does with many traditional vampire series. Both begin with society being overwhelmed by an infection that authorities cannot contain, before shifting toward survival as civilization starts to collapse. Characters have to fortify locations, scavenge resources, navigate devastated streets while avoiding hungry hordes, and accept that infected friends and relatives may no longer be people they can save.

Despite being a vampire series, and a good one at that, The Strain still narratively functions incredibly well as a zombie outbreak story. Its mythology, ancient villains, and blood-drinking monsters make it a vampire series, while its infection mechanics and apocalyptic hordes make it feel remarkably like a zombie series too. Anyone who likes watching civilization crumble beneath an advancing army of the undead should find plenty to enjoy with The Strain, even if they don’t hold a grudge against Twilight.