Move over Angel and Buffy! Another teen love story between hunter and vampire is here! “Falling in love is tricky for teens Juliette and Calliope,” Netlix’s synopsis reads: “One’s a vampire, the other’s a vampire hunter — and both are ready to make their first kill.”
First Kill sounds fantastic: “To her classmates, Juliette (Sarah Catherine Hook) seems like a socially awkward introvert, but she’s actually a vampire — and it’s getting harder to balance her supernatural urges with her high school responsibilities,” Lydia Wang writes. “Making matters more complicated, there’s dreamy new student Calliope (Imani Lewis), who’s hiding a similar secret: She was born to a family of monster hunters, and her parents think she’s finally ready to kill her first vampire.”
It is the BIGGEST throwback to Angel and Buffy in the first few seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, except there are lesbians… and Juliette isn’t older than Calliope.
“Naturally, these two are drawn to one another like fangs to a vein,” Lydia Wang continues. “They’re unable to keep their hands off of each other, whether they’re enjoying a rare moment of calm in each other’s arms, running away from their murder-hungry relatives or making out against a moonlit tree.”
The series is covert with contemporary Gothic conventions. The trailer reveals Juliette getting her period for the first time while coming to terms with being a vampiric outsider and Calliope, also an outsider for being a vampire slayer–like Buffy–deals with pressure from her family to resist love and focus on her slaying destiny.
One reason why we love a good vampire-slayer romance is that it’s the ultimate display of trust. They must put their lives on the line to even be in the same room as each other, let alone be intimate.
My only concern with First Kill is that the vampire-slayer romance is between two high schoolers. It’s not the storyline itself that worries me–we know teenagers can fall in love–but who will be watching with delight.
Teenagers and lesbians are at the top of Pornhub’s most searched categories. This show has both and appears to be fairly sexual. The real monsters will be watching from their living rooms, adding their own fetishistic fantasies to what they watch before them.
Nevertheless, First Kill looks like a quality show with great cinematography and an intriguing plot. Rather than focusing on the drama of coming out, the parents of these teenagers have bigger things to worry about… namely that their daughter has fallen in love with the very person born to kill them.
Netflix’s First Kill dropped on June 10.
