Netflix's Castlevania Review: 4 Ups And 1 Down

Ups...

4. Freaking Vampires!

If one doesn't know two things about the video game, one can still enjoy the animated series and that is because... vampires! And not just any vampires - Vlad Tepes and his son themselves.

The vampires in the series are elegant, asexual, even impotent - which is exactly how they were presented until the end of the XX and the beginning of the XXI century. In his essay The Fantastic Vampire, Studies in the Children of the Night, James Craig Holte writes that vampires created terror by "manipulating gender expectations."

Here the vampires are their basic selves - they are the cold, ruthless beings that exhibited terror through the ages. They use magic and fear, not sexuality, in order to reach their goals.