When it comes to literary masterpieces, Bram Stoker‘s Dracula will forever be in the running. The most notable vampire story, Dracula has produced countless derivative takes on the tale, including a Zenescope Entertainment comic book series titled Helsing. Well, the graphic novels soon caught the eye of Neil LaBute, who distilled the basic concept into a five-season series that first aired on SYFY back in 2016. If you haven’t given Van Helsing a shot, it’s a vampire thriller that is different from Dracula in nearly every way, but remains a fascinating fantasy world worthy of exploration. Now that the whole series is on Netflix, there’s no better time.
‘Van Helsing’ Takes the Dracula Legend and Tosses It Into a Post-Apocalyptic Landscape
Only a few months after its contemporary, Wynonna Earp, was doing something similar on the network, Van Helsing aired on SYFY with a pulse-pounding pilot that felt like The Walking Dead meets the world of vampires. Despite its title, Van Helsing has little to do with the traditional Dracula story, instead largely focusing on a woman named Vanessa Stewart (Kelly Overton), who was attacked by a vampire and left in a coma for three years, only awaking after the world has been ravaged by the undead. Vanessa soon discovers that she is actually a Van Helsing, having come from a long lineage of vampire hunters, tracing back to Abraham Van Helsing (Michael Eklund) himself. But what you think you know about the Dracula legend is flipped on its head come the fourth season, when it’s revealed that the Dark One is not what any of us thought. Miraculously, it’s through Vanessa’s blood that vampires can be redeemed, becoming human once more.
After an event dubbed The Rising, the supervolcano below Yellowstone National Park erupted, blackening out the sky in the Western part of North America and prompting a legion of vampires to come out from hiding. The undead largely took over places like Seattle, where our heroes begin their journey, only to expand throughout the continent. Joining up with a group of survivors, including the ex-Marine Axel Miller (Jonathan Scarfe), scientist “Doc” Carol (Rukiya Bernard), their young companion Mohammad (Trezzo Mahoro), the deaf Sam (Christopher Heyerdahl), and the former vampire “Flesh” (Vincent Gale), Vanessa begins the series by hunting for her missing daughter. Of course, as the show progresses, the world expands to include vampiric serial killers, groups of surviving clans, shady government organizations, and the attempted reformation of the post-Rising United States, not to mention the introduction of Vanessa’s long-lost sister, Scarlett Harker (Missy Peregrym).
What was always compelling about Van Helsing was that, unlike the Zenescope comic it’s based on, Vanessa is not automatically a badass vampire warrior. Over the course of the first few seasons, we see her learn and grow and go from a vampire novice to a pro. “I did not want to play a character that came out of the gate just as this monster killing machine that was impenetrable,” Kelly Overton told Collider in a 2016 interview. “I really wanted to make her a real person with strengths and weaknesses. The vulnerability was really important to me and, in fact, was one of the biggest challenges for me, in playing Vanessa.”
After Five Seasons, ‘Van Helsing’ Ended On Its Own Terms
As Van Helsing continued, the show morphed from a survivalist vampire thriller into something a bit more fantastical. Elements such as prophetic visions and utterances, mystical books, and even time travel made their way into the SYFY drama, which aimed to connect the series even further to the original Dracula source material — but only to a point. Van Helsing never claims to be a direct adaptation of Bram Stoker’s story, nor does it attempt to honor the long legacy of the monstrous Count in the same way that, say, Hugh Jackman‘s Van Helsing (which attempted its own TV spin-off back in the day) did. Instead, the SYFY series carved its own legacy over the course of five seasons on the network, growing more cinematic the more the television landscape changed.
Midway through Van Helsing‘s fourth season, the series makes an odd change that it never quite recovers from. Introducing newcomers Jack (Nicole Muñoz) and Violet (Keeya King), it effectively writes its leading lady off the show. While Overton took an absence from Van Helsing due to her own off-screen journey through motherhood, the series reflected that change in its ushering of Jack and Violet into the forefront of the program, drastically shifting the feel of the story in its eleventh hour. It’s not until the last five episodes of the fifth and final season that Overton returns, just in time for Van Helsing to come to a close. While there’s little denial that the first three seasons of Van Helsing are its best, the fifth season concludes the centuries-long battle between the Van Helsing clan and Dracula (played by Battlestar Galactica‘s Tricia Helfer), giving a true finality to the series.
While Wynonna Earp would go on to get a TV movie reunion, Van Helsing ends with the open-ended possibility of more, but no actual need to pursue the story further. For some, that may be a bit of a disappointment, but in an age where far too many shows are canceled on cliffhangers and without any proper conclusion, this is (thankfully) not one of them. If you’re looking for a new and engaging take on the traditional vampire story that tosses most of the tradition altogether, SYFY’s Van Helsing may be the vampire show on Netflix for you.
Van Helsing is available for streaming on Netflix.
