The Steamiest Vampire Romance Series Is Officially Back and Ready to Fight in New Season 2 Trailer [Exclusive]

Published Oct 22, 2026, 1:00 PM EDT

Ryan O'Rourke is a Senior News Writer at Collider with a specific interest in all things adult animation, video game adaptations, and the work of Mike Flanagan. He is also an experienced baseball writer with over six years of articles between multiple outlets, most notably FanSided's CubbiesCrib. Whether it's taking in a baseball game, a new season of Futurama or Castlevania: Nocturne, or playing the latest From Software title, he is always finding ways to show his fandom. When it comes to gaming and anything that takes inspiration from it, he is deeply opinionated on what's going on. Outside of entertainment, he's a graduate of Eureka College with a Bachelor's in Communication where he honed his craft as a writer. Between The IV Leader at Illinois Valley Community College and The Pegasus at Eureka, he spent the majority of his college career publishing articles on everything from politics to campus happenings and, of course, entertainment for the student body. Those principles he learned covering the 2020 election, Palestine, and so much more are brought here to Collider, where he has gleefully written on everything from the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes to Nathan Lane baby-birding sewer boys.

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Just over one week remains until Halloween, and things are feeling suitably spooky across film and television. Horror movies and terrifying thrillers, like DC's Clayface and the Austin Abrams-led Whalefall, are getting all the attention among theatrical releases, while streaming has recently welcomed Mike Flanagan's modern update of the Steven King classic Carrie and the Friday the 13th prequel series Crystal Lake. Even Passionflix, the home of steamy romance novel adaptations galore, is getting in on the action. The platform will soon welcome back its steamiest group of vampires just in time for the holiday with a new story of unexpected love.

Season 2 of The Black Dagger Brotherhood premieres in exactly one week on October 29, returning after a successful, sexy first run to adapt the second novel in J.R. Ward's paranormal romance series, Lover Eternal. At the center is Rhage, who is about the last vampire who should be falling in love. Portrayed by the returning Alexander Cubis of Tyler Perry's Ruthless fame, Rhage is among the strongest warriors in the titular brotherhood, but he has one glaring weakness: a curse that causes him to lose all control and become a nigh-unstoppable force that doesn't distinguish between friend and foe. After getting used to the constant danger and isolation, though, his whole existence is about to be challenged by Mary Luce, played by Law & Order: SVU alum Audrey Hare, who is brought under his protection and soon has him wondering if there is a better life awaiting him at the end of his fight after all.

Collider can exclusively share the full trailer for Season 2, which digs deeper into the brewing romance between Rhage and Mary Luce and what it means for the Black Dagger Brotherhood as a whole. The trailer opens not with romance, but action, showing the fight the vampires are caught in to keep their race alive as they prepare to bring in their newest recruit. Even amongst his fellow beings of the night, Rhage is viewed as particularly monstrous thanks to his curse, which has put him through hell physically and mentally. Mary sees him differently, though. Upon their chance first encounter while working as the translator for the Brotherhood's new trainee, there's an immediate connection, one that doesn't go unnoticed by his fellow vampires, sparking tension between them. Yet, they're determined to fight to be together, despite everything, from Mary's returning cancer to inhuman beings and Rhage's curse, trying to get in their way.

Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Iconic Romance Is Your Favorite? Harry & Sally · Love & Basketball · Heated Rivalry · Titanic

Four great love stories, and four completely different ideas of what love actually is. One is a friendship that took twelve years to admit itself. One is two people who refuse to stop competing. One happens entirely behind closed doors. And one lasts five days and never stops mattering. Eight questions decide which one is really yours.

🍂Harry & Sally(1989)

🏀Love & Basketball(2000)

🏒Heated Rivalry(HBO Max)

🚢Titanic(1997)

FIND YOUR ROMANCE →

01

How does your love story start? The first scene tells you what kind of story this is going to be.

AWe are friends for years before either of us says anything. BWe want the same thing and neither of us backs down. CNobody can know, including our closest friends. DOne look across a room and everything changes.

NEXT QUESTION →

02

What do the two of you keep arguing about? Every great romance has one fight it has over and over.

AWhether this is actually happening, and what to call it. BWhose career comes first this year. CWhether we will ever be honest about this in public. DNothing small. When we fight, it is about everything.

NEXT QUESTION →

03

How do you show somebody that you love them? Grand gestures are easy to write. This is the harder question.

AI remember every single thing they have told me. BI show up to the things that matter to them. CI keep their secrets like they are my own. DI would give up something enormous for them.

NEXT QUESTION →

04

What is actually standing in the way? There is always something. Which something tells you the genre.

ATiming. We keep finding each other at the wrong moment. BAmbition. We both want big lives and they do not match. CThe world. It is not safe to be open about this yet. DEverybody around us has decided this cannot happen.

NEXT QUESTION →

05

Which romantic moment gets you every single time? Be honest. There is one that works on you and you know which.

ASomebody running across a city to say it before midnight. BSomebody in the stands who stayed until the very end. CA look across a crowded room that nobody else catches. DSomebody promising to hold on, and meaning it.

NEXT QUESTION →

06

What would you actually risk for the right person? Every romance asks this. Most people find out far too late.

AA friendship I could never get back. BThe plan I have had for my life since I was a kid. CMy privacy. All of it would become public. DEverything. I would not think about it for long.

NEXT QUESTION →

07

Where are the two of you in ten years? Some love stories are about the meeting. Some are about the staying.

AStill talking. We have never run out of things to say. BBuilding something together, both of us still ambitious. CFinally open about it, after years of being careful. DApart, and I still think about it constantly.

NEXT QUESTION →

08

Which of these sounds most like something you would say? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your romance.

AI would rather talk to you than anybody else, forever. BI am not giving up either of us. We find a way to have both. CThis is mine, and I am not explaining it to anyone. DI would do the whole thing again, even knowing how it ends.

REVEAL MY ROMANCE →

Roll The Credits Your Romance Is…

Four love stories, four completely different ideas of what it means to be somebody's person. This is the one that matches how you actually fall, and what it would ask of you.

Harry & Sally

You do not fall for strangers. You fall for the person you have already been talking to for years, which is the slowest and by some distance the most durable way anybody has found to do this.

• When Harry Met Sally made the case that the best romance is an argument you enjoy, conducted over a decade, by two people refusing to admit what is happening.
• You want to be known rather than swept away. Somebody who remembers your worst story is doing better work than anybody arriving with flowers.
• The film is unusually honest about timing. These two are wrong for each other repeatedly until suddenly they are not, and neither of them engineered it.
• You would still be talking about everything at eighty. That is the entire promise.

Love & Basketball

You want a partner, not an audience. Somebody who wants their own life as badly as you want yours, and who would never ask you to be smaller to make the relationship easier.

• This is the rare romance where both people have a real career and the film takes both of them equally seriously.
• You would rather be pushed than protected. The right person for you is also a bit of a rival, and that never entirely goes away.
• It understands the actual problem in ambitious relationships. Not whether you love each other, but whose turn it is this year.
• You would still be competing at forty. That is how you would know it was working.

Heated Rivalry

The intensity was never the problem. The secrecy is. You are drawn to a love that lives entirely in private, and to the particular ache of wanting somebody you are not supposed to want.

• Heated Rivalry runs on the oldest engine in romance: two people on opposite sides, meeting in secret, getting far more attached than either of them planned.
• You keep your private life genuinely private, and something in you finds hidden things more real than public ones.
• The tension is not only between the two of them. It is between what they have and what it would cost either one to say it out loud.
• Years of this, and the whole story is really about whether either of them will finally stop hiding.

Titanic

You do not do this cautiously. When it happens for you it is immediate and total and it rearranges everything, and you would not accept a smaller version of it.

• Titanic gave us the biggest romance in film history and then made it last about five days, which is precisely the point of it.
• You measure love by intensity rather than duration. A few days of the real thing beats decades of something merely comfortable.
• The film is not only about the romance. It is about a woman who went on to live an enormous life afterwards because of it.
• You would still be telling this story at a hundred years old, and telling it exactly the same way.

↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ

'The Black Dagger Brotherhood' Season 2 Welcomes New Members to the Fold

There will be plenty of tender moments between Rhage and Mary as they find something more in each other, but The Black Dagger Brotherhood Season 2 will first and foremost be an emotional journey about "desire, sacrifice, and a love powerful enough to reach the man behind the monster." Hare will be joined by fellow newcomers Mariah Davis (SWAT Exiles), Bobby Hogan (Chicago P.D.), and Jon Haslam (Nashville) in entering the vampires' world this time around. Ballerina alum Robert Maaser, who took center stage in Season 1 as Wrath, will be among the returning supporting cast, alongside Olivia Applegate, Michael Roark, Andrew Biernat, Sia Zami, Joel Cederberg, Zack Ignoffo, Victory Van Tuyl, and more. The series will once again be directed by Passionflix regular Tosca Musk.

The Black Dagger Brotherhood Season 2 premieres on October 29 on Passionflix. Check out the full trailer in the player above.