Tucked into its massive slate of premiere dates and news was the announcement that Netflix has picked up an animated series based on the Castlevania series of video games. The show’s first four 30-minute episodes, dubbed “Season 1, Part 1” by Netflix, is scheduled to be available sometime this year. According to the official summary, the show will follow “the last surviving member of the disgraced Belmont clan, trying to save Eastern Europe from extinction at the hand of Vlad Dracula Tepe himself.”
The series has apparently been in the works for quite some time. Last year, we reported Frederator, the animation studio behind Adventure Time, had held the adaptation rights to Castlevania for 12 years and was finally getting a chance to put the cartoon in production. And way back in 2006, Warren Ellis, writer of comics like Transmetropolitan and Planetary, announced he was working on a cartoon adaptation of Castlevania 3: Dracula’s Curse that failed to materialize. Ellis is listed as a producer on the Netflix series, along with Adi Shankar (Dredd), who previously described this “super violent” Castlevania cartoon as “dark, satirical, and after a decade of propaganda it will flip the vampire sub-genre on its head.”