A spoiler-heavy look at Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s vampire apocalypse, its unsettling biology, and the curious business of saving New York when everyone seems determined to make matters worse.
A Plane Full of Dead People
There is something particularly unsettling about an aeroplane that has landed safely but refuses to behave like one. No passengers getting up before the seatbelt sign goes off, no scramble for overhead lockers, no mobile phones switching back on. Just an aircraft sitting on the tarmac at JFK, completely silent, with almost everyone aboard apparently dead.
That is how The Strain begins, and I still think it is one of the better openings to a television horror series. It has the procedural mystery of a medical emergency, the atmosphere of an old-fashioned supernatural story and just enough science-fiction weirdness to suggest that whatever has arrived in New York is going to be difficult to explain. Four passengers have survived. There is a mysterious coffin in the cargo hold, biological evidence that makes little sense, and something very small and unpleasant moving where it should not.
The first few episodes work because nobody really knows what sort of programme they are in. Scientists think they are dealing with a pathogen. Officials want a manageable explanation. A very old man knows considerably more than anybody is willing to believe. Meanwhile, something resembling a vampire outbreak is quietly preparing to become an extinction event.
I have watched enough vampire films and television to have developed a fairly high tolerance for variations on the theme. Give them fangs, an aversion to sunlight and perhaps a century of romantic regrets. The Strain, however, came up with one of the more interesting and genuinely unusual vampire variants I have encountered. Its creatures are not romantic and certainly do not dress well for eternity. They are parasites wearing the deteriorating remains of human bodies, and I found that considerably more interesting.
Vampires That Should Come With a Public Health Warning
The central idea is wonderfully revolting. Infection begins with parasitic worms, spreads through a host and produces a transformation that strips away recognisable anatomy. Hair disappears, facial features flatten, organs alter, and the mouth becomes a delivery system for an extraordinary retractable feeding appendage.
That stinger is probably the show’s most memorable invention. Instead of two elegant puncture wounds, these vampires launch a long, fleshy proboscis from their throats. It feeds and can transmit the infection. It looks as though someone has combined a leech, an insect and the worst possible anatomical surprise. There is nothing seductive about it, unless your idea of romance involves an emergency appointment with an infectious-disease specialist.
The parasitic worms are more than a convenient visual gimmick. They explain the spread, the physical deterioration and the gradual loss of human agency. The strigoi become part of a biological network under the control of an ancient intelligence known as the Master. Even their behaviour is disturbing beyond the feeding: newly turned creatures are drawn towards those they loved when human. A family home becomes the place the infection is most likely to visit next, and the impulse to recognise and welcome someone familiar becomes dangerous.
Guillermo del Toro’s Particular Brand of Horrible
The Strain began as a collaboration between Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. They published three novels between 2009 and 2011 before adapting their world for FX, where the television series premiered in July 2014. Carlton Cuse served as showrunner, while del Toro directed the pilot and helped establish the visual rules of the creatures and the programme itself.
That involvement is obvious. Del Toro has always seemed interested in what monsters physically are, not simply where they hide before the next jump scare. His creatures have anatomy, texture and peculiar evolutionary logic, even when the supernatural is involved. You can imagine him drawing the inner workings of a vampire with the same enthusiasm another director might reserve for a car chase.
The production combines substantial practical makeup and creature work with digital effects for movements such as the worms and feeding stingers. Some shots have aged better than others. The computer-generated appendages sometimes look a little too polished, but the designs remain convincingly unpleasant. Cold blues and sickly golds make much of New York feel infected before the creatures have even appeared. Against that palette, red blood and raw flesh are difficult to ignore.
I appreciate a genre series with a physical and visual identity beyond making everything dark and hoping the audience can follow. These monsters have distinctive shapes, stages of transformation and rules. They are not simply pale actors with contact lenses, and the production has taken some care to make them seem to belong to their particular world.
The CDC Meets the Apocalypse
Corey Stoll plays Dr Ephraim ‘Eph’ Goodweather, the CDC epidemiologist assigned to investigate the aircraft. He is intelligent, determined and convincing as someone who would initially approach a supernatural disaster through evidence and containment procedures. He is also difficult to like for long stretches, which makes him an interesting if occasionally exhausting lead.
Eph is dealing with alcoholism, a failed marriage and a troubled relationship with his son. These problems give him something to lose, but also give the writers opportunities to send him into questionable decisions. He can be perceptive when studying the infection and remarkably obtuse when dealing with other people. That may be believable, although there were times when I wanted the show to remember that he was meant to be a trained scientist.
Mía Maestro’s Nora Martinez provides a necessary counterweight. She is capable, compassionate and often seems better equipped to consider what their work means for the people affected. Her eventual death in the second season, after becoming infected and choosing electrocution rather than transformation, is especially bleak. It also removes one of the stabilising characters just when the survivors could use somebody with sound judgement.
The early autopsies, testing and clinical investigation remain among my favourite elements. Watching Eph and Nora try to document anatomical impossibilities gives the horror a convincing foundation. Once the apocalypse develops, however, the scientific aspect recedes in favour of resistance operations, politics and family drama. Some of those developments work; others make me miss the days when the biggest problem was identifying a worm in a specimen jar.
The Old Man Who Was Right All Along
David Bradley’s Abraham Setrakian is one of the show’s strongest characters. Elderly, irritable, secretive and generally disinclined to waste time on people who will not listen, he knows considerably more about the outbreak than anyone else. A Holocaust survivor and former concentration-camp prisoner, Setrakian has pursued the Master for decades, carrying old texts, hard-earned knowledge and a marvellously impractical-looking sword cane into a crisis defined by laboratories and bureaucracies.
Bradley makes his exhaustion convincing. There is a weary authority about a man who has spent most of his life pursuing the same unfinished business, and who now has to explain himself to people discovering it for the first time. He can be stubborn to the point of recklessness, but he rarely seems arbitrary.
His encounters with Thomas Eichhorst are among the best scenes in the entire run. Richard Sammel plays Eichhorst as a chilling combination of Nazi cruelty, administrative efficiency and supernatural entitlement. His politeness is frequently more revolting than his appearance, not least because the character did not require vampirism to become a monster. Immortality simply gave him more time to practise.
Their final confrontation works because the history between them has been built over several seasons. Setrakian poisons his own blood to bring Eichhorst down, sacrificing himself in the process. It is a fittingly ugly victory for somebody who has made the vendetta inseparable from his life.
Sometimes You Need a Rat-Catcher
If the outbreak has a practical hero, it is Vasiliy Fet. Kevin Durand plays him as a municipal exterminator whose knowledge of rats, sewers and the hidden infrastructure of New York becomes extremely useful when vampires begin occupying the spaces under the city. He understands his particular expertise and does not waste much time pretending to understand everybody else’s.
Fet is resourceful, physically capable and funny without constantly announcing that he is the comic relief. In a crumbling city, the person who knows where the underground tunnels lead may be rather more useful than the person chairing the latest emergency meeting.
Ruta Gedmintas’s Dutch Velders brings a different kind of expertise. A hacker who initially helps disrupt the city’s communications without understanding the full consequences, she becomes a crucial member of the resistance. Together, she and Fet lend the group a more practical dimension. I was less convinced by the romantic complications involving Dutch, Fet and Eph. The show occasionally behaves as though an unfolding vampire apocalypse needs a relationship triangle to keep the audience interested, even with perfectly serviceable monsters knocking at the door.
Miguel Gomez’s Gus Elizalde and Joaquín Cosío’s Angel de Plata give the resistance another flavour. Gus begins as a streetwise survivor pulled into events almost by accident, while Angel is a retired wrestler who once played a masked hero on screen. An ageing performer discovering that the monsters he pretended to fight are now real is exactly the sort of peculiar idea this show could use more often.
The Silver Angel and the Horror of Old Television
The black-and-white Silver Angel sequence is one of my favourite diversions. Styled after vintage Mexican lucha-libre horror, it recalls a time when masked wrestlers confronted vampires, mummies and assorted monsters without anybody feeling obliged to explain why. Those films often worked with limited resources, but their imagination was hardly limited.
I have an affection for that earnest strain of old genre filmmaking. The costumes might look inexpensive and the acting a little theatrical, but a masked wrestler taking on a supernatural threat is the kind of proposition that can still carry a film. By introducing Angel as somebody whose real life is a long way from his screen persona, The Strain makes something more interesting out of nostalgia than another quick cultural reference.
Angel is older and physically damaged by his wrestling career, working in a restaurant and living with the memory of a career that has passed. There is a lovely melancholy to a fictional hero discovering he can still be of use when the monsters are no longer fictional.
Quinlan, the Master and a Very Unpleasant Family Tree
The Master is the ancient intelligence behind the infection, capable of occupying different bodies and arranging human society around the needs of the strigoi. He is less interested in ruling humanity as equals than in managing it as livestock. His human collaborators are often as disturbing as the creatures themselves.
Eldritch Palmer, played by Jonathan Hyde, is one such collaborator: a wealthy, physically frail man who is so terrified of mortality that he helps dismantle the world in exchange for a promise of survival. The observation that money cannot buy everything is hardly new, but Palmer is an effective illustration of someone determined to test it, even at everyone else’s expense.
Then there is Quinlan, played by Rupert Penry-Jones, a half-human, half-strigoi being born rather than turned. His relationship with the Master is personal as well as adversarial, and he has an eerie, sculpted appearance that sets him apart from the anonymous infected. I enjoyed his measured presence and single-minded purpose. He is neither a conventional vampire hunter nor a fully obedient creature, and his loyalties are organised around something more durable than whichever group happens to be giving orders.
The Master himself is more uneven. He can be menacing when working through proxies such as Eichhorst, but not every bodily incarnation is equally convincing. For a creature that has supposedly spent centuries planning the end of civilisation, he sometimes employs strategies rather vulnerable to a man with a lamp and a piece of silver.
The Family Problem That Nearly Ruined Everything
And then there is Zach Goodweather. The fracture between Eph, Kelly and their son is central to the story, particularly once Kelly becomes a strigoi. Natalie Brown makes the transformed Kelly deeply unsettling, recognisable as a mother but no longer governed by the instincts of one. The Master’s manipulation of that connection is a good extension of the show’s idea that affection itself can become a route for infection.
The problem is that Zach becomes increasingly difficult to believe as a character rather than a mechanism for forcing the plot forward. Teenagers can be irrational; so can adults, as almost everybody else on this show demonstrates. But there is a difference between allowing a frightened child to make mistakes and repeatedly requiring him to make precisely the decision that will cause the largest possible catastrophe.
The third-season finale pushes this to its limit. When Eph kills the transformed Kelly, Zach responds by setting off a nuclear weapon, helping bring about the conditions for the Master’s victory. I understand the intended tragic connection between family grief and global disaster. I’m not convinced the writing earns it. The frustration belongs with the choices made for the character, not the young actors asked to perform them.
New York After the End of the World
By the fourth season The Strain has largely abandoned medical mystery for the mechanics of occupation. Under the Master’s regime, human collaborators, controlled populations and blood farms have turned infection into a system of government. The survivors are no longer merely avoiding creatures in basements. They are living inside a political order built to feed them to those creatures.
This is an intriguing development. Eichhorst’s history lends the material an unmistakable association with totalitarianism, while Palmer’s collaboration shows how certain people convince themselves that helping a monstrous regime is better than losing their privileges. Vampirism is now a model of exploitation rather than simply a means of feeding.
I would have liked more time spent on the messy transition between the initial outbreak and that fully functioning dystopia. A city’s collapse consists of countless small failures: trains stopping, hospitals filling, supply deliveries disappearing and people learning that the neighbours may be more dangerous than the streets. The show sometimes rushes past those everyday disasters to get to its next large set piece. Still, there is something impressively ambitious about a story that begins with one silent aircraft and ends with humanity threatened with organised captivity.
The Last Stand and the Price of Winning
The series finale brings the surviving resistance underground with a nuclear device and a plan to destroy the Master beneath the city. Quinlan confronts him and dies in the attempt, while the Master moves into Eph’s body. Zach ultimately detonates the weapon, killing himself, Eph and the creature that has dominated their lives.
The ending has a grim symmetry. Zach helped cause the nuclear disaster that enabled the Master’s regime, and another nuclear explosion becomes the means of destroying him. A family bond repeatedly exploited by the villain finally becomes his weakness. The surviving Fet, Dutch and Gus can begin to contemplate life after the strigoi, although rebuilding a civilisation after this particular series of catastrophes will require rather more than optimism and a few working tools.
I remain divided about the emotional resolution. Zach’s sacrifice gives his story a closing shape, but a last-minute heroic decision cannot entirely erase seasons of infuriating behaviour. I could see what the finale wanted me to feel without quite arriving there. It is a suitably bleak conclusion to a bleak series, even if its emotional bookkeeping is a little generous.
What the Novels Did Differently
The television adaptation follows the broad outline of del Toro and Hogan’s trilogy — The Strain, The Fall and The Night Eternal — but changes characters, events and the emphasis of its mythology. The books ultimately pursue a more explicitly biblical explanation for the origins of the strigoi, while the show spends more of its energy on the immediate collision between supernatural folklore and modern epidemiology.
The ending differs significantly too. The final confrontation takes place elsewhere in the novels, and Eph rather than Zach has the decisive part in detonating the weapon. Nora’s trajectory is also different. These changes matter because they redistribute the emotional weight of the story, with television placing much more emphasis on the damaged Goodweather family.
I can see the appeal of both approaches. I generally prefer the series when it keeps the scientific and supernatural interpretations in uneasy conversation. Once every mystery has been explained, a monster can start to feel less mysterious, however elaborate its family history.
A Soundtrack for a Diseased City
Ramin Djawadi’s music fits the atmosphere without demanding constant attention. There are tense rhythms, electronic textures and the sort of brooding dramatic passages appropriate to a city gradually becoming uninhabitable. The score works alongside the show’s chilly cinematography and queasy effects rather than trying to turn every encounter into operatic grandeur.
What stays with me even more is the contrast between the clinical equipment of the CDC and Setrakian’s accumulation of old books, specimens and weapons. It is the difference between a society confident that everything can be measured and one ageing survivor who knows the instruments have not caught up with the danger. The ultraviolet lamps, silver blades and strange creature anatomy all give the series a satisfying material culture of its own.
Remember When Vampires Were Supposed to Be Attractive?
The Strain arrived in a television landscape still heavily influenced by sympathetic and often seductive vampires. Twilight, True Blood and The Vampire Diaries had all approached that tradition differently, but together they had made the attractive immortal an ordinary part of popular culture. Del Toro and Hogan went in the other direction: diseased bodies, parasitic worms, loss of identity and a gruesome feeding mechanism nobody would confuse with a kiss.
The series also emerged at a moment when genre television had enough room to develop unusually elaborate worlds. Across 46 episodes it mixed epidemiology, conspiracy, monster horror, occupation and outright apocalypse. A film might have given us a simpler story with a more controlled pace; television made the peculiar detours possible, even when not every one of them succeeded.
Watching it after the COVID-19 pandemic adds an uncomfortable note to the early episodes. Official hesitation, misinformation, business interests and the public’s reluctance to accept restrictions now feel familiar. The series was not predicting a particular crisis, of course. It simply understood that an outbreak becomes much more dangerous when the systems meant to manage it are hampered by ordinary human behaviour.
Forty-Six Episodes Later
I do not think The Strain is consistently great television. Its pacing wanders, some relationships overstay their welcome, and the elaborate endgame loses a little of the disturbing simplicity that made its first season effective. There were moments when I wanted fewer arguments among the survivors and a great deal more attention paid to the creatures themselves.
But it remains an easy recommendation for anyone tired of conventional vampire stories. The biological premise is genuinely inventive, its creature design memorable and Bradley, Sammel and Durand give it plenty of personality. Even its stranger digressions, such as the Silver Angel sequence, suggest a programme made by people who genuinely enjoy older horror traditions and want to do something peculiar with them.
For me, the lasting image is not the Master delivering another speech. It is a recognisable human face suddenly opening to reveal that dreadful stinger, the familiar rearranged into something entirely different. That is the sort of monster imagery I appreciate: unpleasant, imaginative and just absurd enough to work. Immortality may be attractive in theory, but this version involves some serious compromises, including the loss of your nose and the urge to eat your relatives.
Further reading: FX’s official series page and an interview with del Toro, Hogan and Cuse about the adaptation’s creative choices.
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