If the words “lesbian Twilight” get your heart beating as fast as ours’, good news: Netflix just ordered a teen lesbian vampire series that might just quench our thirst for spooky, queer-adjacent content.
The streaming platform announced Thursday that it was picking up the series First Kill, based on a short story by the young adult author V.E. Schwab that was published in the recent collection Vampires Never Get Old: Tales With Fresh Bite. Schwab will serve as creator, writer, and executive producer.
First Kill follows the story of teenage vampire named Juliette, who is looking to take her place in a powerful vampire family when she makes her first kill. But the victim she sets her eyes on, a new girl in town named Calliope, turns out to be from a family of vampire slayers. Though little else is known about the show so far, it sounds like a sapphic version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer for a younger generation.
Emma Roberts will serve as executive producer alongside her best friend, Karah Priess, under their media company Belletrist Productions. It’s not Roberts’ first foray into queer-friendly horror, either; she was the lead actress in the canceled Ryan Murphy horror-comedy series Scream Queens that ran from 2015-2016. (Recently, Murphy teased that he was planning to bring the show back in some capacity.)
First Kill will no doubt fall within the long lineage of lesbian vampire movies and shows before it, from the coded sapphic storyline line in the 1936 film Dracula’s Daughter to the queer cult classic of 2009’s Jennifer’s Body. It’s also part of a wave of more recent horror and fantasy media pushing the boundaries of queer representation, like Netflix shows The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Ratched, as well as the upcoming remake of witch flick The Craft, which features a transgender lead. Whatever is in the air this October… well, we’re here for it.
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