When writing anything about vampires, the first thing that comes to mind is “Twilight this ain’t!”—maybe because the writer is hungry or preoccupied with a mean thing somebody said in the comments last week. But the fact of the matter is, maybe their vampire story does share certain superficial elements with the Twilight saga and maybe, just maybe, that’s okay.
In the case of David and Aimee Thurlo’s Lee Nez series, that superficial resemblance is a tie to Native American culture (Jacob’s a Quileute, remember) in the form of all-Navajo, all-vampire cop protagonist Lee Nez. (Blade this ain’t!) In the books, Nez teams up with a tough-but-sexy female FBI agent to battle with shapeshifters and an undead Nazi hell-bent on world domination, all of which sounds like it would make for a pretty cool movie.
Now the first Lee Nez book, Second Sunrise, is going to become that movie, starring Hell on Wheels’ Eddie Spears, Balthazar Getty, and Sage Galesi. Director Joanelle Romero, herself a Native American activist and founder of Red Nation Media, tells Variety she thinks Second Sunrise could be a breakthrough film for Native American media, an opportunity she credits to—wait for it—Twilight.