TV Highlight of the Fortnight: Strain Drain

There are several terrifying sequences early in FX’s adaptation of Guillermo del Toro’s Strain novels. A Marilyn Manson-esque rock star struck down with the vampire virus from which the series takes its name tries to rip a groupie’s throat open. A loving-dad-turned-undead-monster lurks in a shed, to which his wife lures unsuspecting passers-by. Actor Corey Stoll runs a hand through a visibly glued-on hair-piece, a feathery abomination that requires the viewer to take a sanity check whenever it (the feathery abomination, not the viewer) has screen-time. 

Risible toupees aside, the series is a masterclass in splatter-punk horror. It pushes against a modern trend in the genre towards less is more. In The Strain, more is ALWAYS more – it is a riot of exploding body parts, fountaining ichor and characters solemnly intoning such lines as ‘Well, if the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, we’re going to the morgue’. Such excess risks silliness. But The Strain’s mythology is artfully woven, kitsch elements sublimated into a genuinely chilling premise – what if vampirism were a rampaging infection, much like Ebola or Avian flu? What use garlic, crucifixes or silver-tipped crossbow bolts in the face of unthinking microorganisms?
Since debuting in the United States last month – it belatedly arrives in Ireland on ‘Watch’ September 17 – The Strainhas waged a one-show campaign against the defenestration of vampires in the culture. The series, executive produced by del Toro and overseen by Lostshow-runner Carlton Cuse, works hard to restore a sense of menace to a pop-trope that, thanks to Anne Rice, R-Patz etc etc, feels thoroughly defanged. 
Here, the vampires are not dashing in the least – it is difficult to imagine suburban schoolgirls crushing on monstrosities that feed via barbed mouth-tentacles and which, in transforming from human to undead, dispense with hair, skin pigmentation and – mind where you step – genitalia. 
“I wanted you to see right away they are brutal parasites,” Del Toro told one interviewer. “They drain and kill you and discard you, like the burger wrapper you throw away. They are not here to develop romantic feelings or talk about how lonely they are.”
Vampires are a long-running obsession for the Mexican film-maker, beloved among cineastes for his surreal Spanish-language movie Pan’s Labyrinth and adored by fanboys for his ribald adaptations of the Hellboy and Blade comics – the latter, not uncoincidentally, focused on a vampire hunter combating a cabal of depraved blood drinkers. 
“I did a bunch of notes when I was a kid about vampiric biology.” he said recently. “I was very much into the research into vampirism in all the countries … all the species of vampires through the ages, and through the different geographies. I found really interesting stuff about, for example, that the Strigoi of Eastern Europe have a stinger under the tongue, Mexican vampires were hairless, you name it. The [Southeast Asian] Penanggalan is a floating head with intestines underneath it that leaves the body behind. So reading the formidable mythology about the vampire, I made a lot of notes about how it would come about biologically as a kid. 
“And I also made notes about social, religious connotations, what it meant to me. How in Eastern Europe, for example, the myth is that the vampire returns to the centre of the family first, and then it destroys that family, and then it goes on expanding destruction through the world.
The Strain opens with a passenger plane from Berlin losing power after landing at JFK Airport (the silent jet lingering at the edges of the runway is one of the most chilling images in the entire series).  With no communication from the pilot, it falls to infectious disease specialist Ephraim Goodweather (Corey Stoll, of the ludicrous wig) and sidekick Mia Maestro (Carmen from the Twilight movies) to don biosuits and investigate. All but four passengers are dead,their skin a ghastly shade of waxwork white. The survivors are a pilot, a hard-charging corporate lawyer and the aforementioned doting dad and goth rocker.
They live, but only for the moment. Over the next several days, the survivors hear a ghastly buzzing in their ears; their hair starts to fall out; they develop an overwhelming urge to drink blood. The ‘strain’ has them, literally by the ghoulies, and very bad things are about to happen.
In downtown Manhattan, meanwhile, a decrepit billionaire with iffy kidneys is planning his immortality. He has hooked up with a slithery vampire who, in a previous life, got his jollies by serving as a concentration camp commander. Together they are working to bring a ‘Master’ Strigoi to New York (‘twas he who caused that ruckus on the plane) and, all going well, transform the city into charnel house of undead.
So far, so schlocky. And yet The Strain should not be mistaken for lo-rent genre dross: rest assured this is not the new Sharknado. The genius of the show – as with the novels co-written by del Toro with Chuck Hogan –is that it conveys a horrifying supernatural yarn in the fashion of a buttoned-down police procedural. To the extent it is possible in a series about flying vampires with HR Giger’s Alien-esque extendable mandibles, the tone is cool and scientific. 
Thus, as Stoll and his team discover the surviving passengers are undergoing horrific transformations, their response is to hit the laboratory rather than reach for silver blades and wooden stakes. There are several disgusting interludes in which vampire bodies are variously drilled and sawed, the better to assess the menace sweeping Manhattan. This, you suspect, is how a vampire invasion might proceed in the real world: quietly, inevitably, with flummoxed PhD types doing their best to hold the tide at bay. 
Is it scary? In places, very. A scene in which a little girl vampire feeds on her father will stay with you, as will the one, already outlined, in which the unpleasant neighbor is shoved into the garden shed where resides the hubby-turned-vamp. Of course, there’s lots (and lots) of gratuitous silliness as well – The Strain signals its camp elements early with the introduction of a sword-cane toting octogenarian who battled the vampires in Eastern Europe 50 years earlier.
If you like your television sensible, sober, a shade pretentious, The Strain may not be for you. It is gleefully lurid, unapologetically schlocky. On the other hand, should you appreciate a ludicrous tale, spun adroitly (and, Stoll’s wig aside, with cracking production values) there is plenty to sink your teeth into. Here at HP we’ll certainly be glued all the way through season one’s 13 episodes. 

The Strain debuts on Watch
September 17