Contagious thirst

In 2006, the Guillermo Del Toro invited Fox to make a bloody series about the vampirism epidemic, but he received the following answer: “Yes, we want to launch something with the vampires, but could you make this comedy?” The director was offended and wrote about infectious bloodsuckers three books in collaboration with Chuck Hogan (it was his novel by Ben Affleck who shot the “city of thieves”). After the release of the first volume, the TV producers admitted their mistake and vied with vying to get the Del Toro-Hogan project, but they decided to finish the trilogy first before starting work on the show.

The struggle for The Strain was won by the FX cable channel. Here, Del Toro received absolute freedom of action and spent more than six months to begin with, from scratch, creating various monsters for the series (they say, only $ 500,000 were spent on them). Gillermo later attracted one of the authors of Lost Carlton Kewz, who became a showrander, and assigned himself the role of a director, producer and screenwriter.

The Strack starts at the airport of New York, where the plane from Berlin arrived. All passengers are dead, but it only seems so at first. The first-a-virusologist Efraim Gooduer rises the first on board (friends and colleagues call him just “EF”) and sees that unknown biological traces are flaunting throughout the cabin, and there is an ancient Slavic cabinet in the cargo ward, which is very similar to a coffin for a creature of a different order.

A year ago, Guillermo Del Toro removed the Pacific Rubezh, B- Movie in the skin of a summer blockbuster for IMAX 3D about the battles of indecently large robots with kaizu, creatures from a neighboring dimension. “Strait” is also a blockbuster with a filling from B- Movie , but with an inevitable adjustment to the scale of the television screen. The director collects under one roof of heroes no less important than gigantic robots: in the premiere of the Nazis, vampires, street bandits, and even one old Jew with a blade hidden in the cane.

To command the archetypes parade so that no one gets bored is a difficult matter, and Del Toro does not really cope, although he leads the history of vampires on TV to the new shores. It is symbolic that “The Strain” appeared almost simultaneously with the final season “True Blood” , the main haven of romantic illusions about bloodsuckers on television. Vampire del Toro is a completely different breed - they do not even have genitals. “We want to turn over the vampire genre, because today it is filled with melodrama,” explains Carlon Kewz. Yes, ruthless parasites came to the beautiful Erica to Northman - from small worms that strive to climb under the skin, to the supreme demon in the hood, which sucks all juices from the victim and tramples her head on the concrete floor with pleasure - simply because it can.

Guillermo Del Toro has long been following the development of TV shows - he admits the love of “ The Sopranos” , “ Game of Thrones” , “ Justified” , “ Boardwalk Empire” and does not hide that the leading roles in the “Pacific Forest” specially selected actors who were glorified on TV. Then he brought in the same frame Charlie Hannam (Sons of Anarchy ) , Idrisa Elbu ( “ The Wire” , “ Luther” ) and Charlie Day ( “ Always Sunny in Philadelphia” ). Now the director’s goodness is beneficial for “The Strain” : the vampire passengers who have revived in the morgue eat a pathologist in the style of the zombie from “The Walking Dead” , and the little risen girl from the plane returns home to her father right in the footsteps of the French hit “ Les Revenans” -and not accidentally speaks French.

Dr. EF will fight the vampirism virus in the company of Abraham Sedrakran, a colorful pensioner who, during the Second World War, got into a concentration camp and found out that there was much more evil than the Nazis in the world. “You are not a hero or a savior. You are just a number. I took away your name and gave you this number, ”the old acquaintance with a snake reminds him, but Abraham grabs the blade, not for the heart.

The confrontation only started, and the creators have already announced that the shelf life of the “strain” was from three to five seasons. “We enter the new phase of television, when the viewer is especially fond of series, where there is a beginning, middle and end,” says Carlon Kewz. - If we analyze the success of “ True Detective” and “ Fargo” this season, as well as the incredible technique that I received the ending of “ Breaking Bad” , then it is easy to notice that the audience is now longing for stories that lead to a full -fledged finale. It is this story that we want to tell in our show. ”

Whether the “strain” corresponds to these high ideals, it will not be clear soon, but even now the series has obvious problems that can bury the bright multi -season future where the creators will aim. On the one hand, they are in no hurry-in a 70-minute premiere, del Toro puts the plot guns in places and does not actually shoot from any. On the other hand, the authors force acquaintance with the main character with rather far -fetched monologues. So, over the two episodes of the EF managed to visit the family therapist and at a meeting of anonymous alcoholics - and in both cases he erupted by a monologue that he was for a person, listing his qualities, good and not very, literally through a comma. But in the “New Phase of Television”, which Carlon Kewz repeats about, it is customary that the viewer recognizes the characters independently, without an author’s dictatorship, looking primarily at how the hero behaves, and not at what he thinks of himself.

So far, the “strain” is most convincing in the society of monsters, not people. A little infected girl sits in a dark cooled bath and waits for a curly dad to give a towel. He's something bursting about the soundtrack of the “king-lva”, but the girl hears only a rumbling thirst inside herself. Soon she will subside - and dad too.