Directors Sam & Adam Deats and EP/co-showrunner Kevin Kolde talk about their all-new series, the latest installment in the ‘Castlevania’ universe, a coming-of-age story of reckoning with trauma while destroying monsters and vampires alike… with lots of blood; now streaming on Netflix.
It’s been six years since British comic book writer Warren Ellis and the team at Frederator Studios brought the adult animated vampire series Castlevania to Netflix. The Annie Award-nominated series – which followed monster hunter Trevor Belmont, Speaker Magician Sypha Belnades, and half-vampire Adrian "Alucard" Țepeș on their journey to defeat vampire lord Dracula and his recruited army – wrapped its fourth and final season in May of 2021.
But with ample material from 27 years of videogame content, beginning with the franchise's first release in 1986, fans knew it wouldn’t be long until another Castlevania series made its way to the streaming platform. Enter Castlevania: Nocturne, which premiered yesterday, September 28 on Netflix.
Helmed by returning Castlevania directors Sam & Adam Deats and executive produced by Kevin Kolde, Clive Bradley, and Adi Shankar, Nocturne comes from Powerhouse Animation Studios and Project 51 Productions, delivering a coming-of-age story about reckoning with trauma while bashing in the faces of monsters and vampires alike.
This next installment of the Castlevania universe, written and created by Bradley, takes place in France in 1792, at the height of the French Revolution. In a remote part of western France, the counter-revolutionary aristocracy has forged an alliance with a terrifying Vampire Messiah, who promises to “eat the sun” and unleash an army of vampires and night creatures to crush the revolution and enslave humanity. Annette (Thuso Mbedu), a sorceress from the Caribbean, seeks out Richter Belmont (Edward Bluemel), the last descendant of the long-fabled family of vampire hunters, to lead the resistance.
A teenage Richter, along with Annette and young revolutionary Maria (Pixie Davies), begins a long and bloody battle that will bring him face-to-face with an evil every bit as terrifying as the threats Trevor, Sypha, and Alucard faced generations prior.
Get into vampire mode – here’s the trailer:
AWN talked with the Deats brothers and co-showrunner Kolde about the choice to make children Castlevania’s new saviors, challenges that came with Nocturne’s immense scope, and the long history of Castlevania video game storylines that will, for the first time, be brought together. The creatives also reminisce about Castlevania Seasons 2 and 3 and lessons learned in having eyes bigger than their stomachs.
Editor’s Note: We were asked to wait to post this interview until today as the creators shared some spoilers… be warned!
Victoria Davis: How long had you guys known you wanted to continue telling stories in the Castlevania world? Before it became official with Netflix, had Nocturne been planned before you wrapped the last season of Castlevania?
Kevin Kolde: We started talking about this late into the original series. The plan was always to end Castlevania after four seasons. But we were already talking about what we might do next.
VD: I know Nocturne hails from the Konami video game, but how much of the narrative in this new series is pulled from the game, and how much is totally original content?
Sam Deats: Once folks actually see the full breadth of the series, they're going to start noticing that there's a great deal of the story elements present, though sometimes a little bit different from what they might remember from the games. But the key points are there, even if it takes a while for some parts of the story to become clear.
VD: And, I’m guessing, you’re making sure to take viewers on a journey so they can’t guess what’s about to happen next, even if they played the game?
SD: Right.
VD: We’ve talked before about the absolutely barbaric gore this show illustrates – of which I’m a big fan. But how did you want to take it further? Or, rather, what new territories did you explore with this in Nocturne that proved an interesting challenge?
SD: We actually had a lot more help on production this time around, so it felt a bit easier than the previous seasons. But there's a lot of very tricky hand-to-hand fighting and stuff like that going on. The last few episodes, particularly Episode 8, are full of action choreography, and that's harder than the really big flashy stuff.
VD: But you do still have a lot of that flashy stuff in Nocturne. There actually seems to be quite a bit more sorcery and magic in Nocturne than was what was shown in Castlevania. What were some of the story and design pillars you wanted to hit with these fight sequences to make them grounded and fit in the same world with all the other hand-to-hand combat?
Adam Deats: A lot of it is in the writing. Richter is from the Belmont lineage that’s connected with the magician Sypha Belnades, so the Belmonts being able to use magic now just makes sense. We’re also covering the French Revolution and interjecting some of the Haitian Revolution, because that's historically what happened. That gave a totally new space to play in terms of Haitian magic and mythology and whatnot.
VD: With so much room to play, were there some magic executions that ended up being better on paper than in concept or wild ideas that couldn’t make it to final concept?
AD: I almost never said no. Even when I don’t know how something is going to work, I always try to have us take a shot at it.
SD: When we're conceptualizing what to do with magic, during action sequences and stuff, it is usually balancing the story-based abilities of the user along with coming up with new, interesting, and fun things to do with that set of abilities and the circumstances without breaking things. We try to stay away from making characters too powerful because of things that might come up later.
I'm very particular about trying to give characters cool moments, but making sure it works within the context of their age, their experience, and the arcs they still have to go through. This isn't a Shonen Jump series where folks are blowing up planets or anything like that. This is much more grounded, but still pretty flashy and otherworldly.
VD: I don't think that's talked about often, how characters’ magic or fighting abilities, especially in a show like Castlevania, are things you must keep track of when it comes to how they are progressing, fading, or being suppressed depending on how the story is going and what's coming up next. I imagine that's a whole other side of the storyboarding process that not a lot of people know about.
KK: It’s a huge consideration and it’s always on our minds. We don’t want our characters to become Superman. You have to watch that Power Creep, or else you’ll end up with characters that can’t be defeated, or who can’t lose.
VD: You have to keep the audience at least a little worried about these characters.
KK: Exactly. Otherwise, there are no stakes.
SD: And you need stakes… especially in a vampire story.
VD: I see what you did there. Well punned.
SD: Thanks for giving me that one.
VD: The characters in Nocturne are also much younger than the main cast in the original series. Perhaps that decision came from the video game itself, but were there other story opportunities that you saw with having younger characters this time around and what they might be dealing with and going through on a psychological level?
KK: These characters’ circumstances and worldviews start from a very different place from where Trevor's and Sypha’s were at the start of Castlevania. Richter and Marina are about 16 years old. All the characters in this series are very young and thrust into very high stakes.
AD: From my perspective, it's like almost like a multi-pronged coming-of-age story. They’re all dealing with certain kinds of trauma or background elements that are following them and they have to grow up a little bit. That goes for Richter, Annette, Maria, all of them.
VD: Harkening back to the start of Castlevania, one of my favorite psychological dives is that scene where Alucard is talking with the handmade doll versions of Trevor and Sypha. On the outside, Alucard appears to be a full-fledged adult talking with these dolls, but we learn he’s much younger than he appears and, while he’s had to grow up quite a lot on his own, he still has a child’s mind in some ways. Were there parts of Nocturne’s character development that were particularly fun to dissect and unravel?
AD: In this show, we have Juste Belmont, from the Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance game, to act as sort of mirror character, or as something that Richter could end up being later in his life if he's not careful. Nocturne, as a whole, is really special because it merges a bunch of Castlevania history together that we don't get to see put together in the game because they are totally separate timelines. But having Richter able to see and reflect on the choices his family has made and go, ‘Oh, crap. I don’t want to end up like this,’ is really interesting.
VD: And it’s not too dissimilar from the things Trevor had to self-reflect on as well a little earlier on in Castlevania.
SD: There is a cyclical feeling, looking back on Season 2 of the original series with Trevor.
VD: What do you feel was the biggest challenge with seeing this new series to fruition?
AD: It’s a lot of content. There are a lot of characters, a lot of plots, but also a lot of sets and crowd shots. Crowd logistics are always tough because you have to choose your shots wisely to ensure that you're not killing the animation crew. We do still want to do heavy, interesting, and big set pieces. We want the spectacle. It is important, but we have to be very calculated about how we do that.
KK: With Nocturne, we hit the ground running with 10 or 12 brand new featured characters, new designs for the world, and there are songs and singing. The sheer scale of it was probably the most daunting.
SD: The episodes are more dense than they have been in the past, which adds an extra level of complexity to production as well. The design team had a lot more to do, the storyboard team obviously had much more to do within the scope of each individual episode, compared to the previous series. And Adam and I, as directors, have had to learn a few new things along the way.
VD: I have to ask; in Castlevania’s Episode 9 of Season 3, “The Harvest,” where there’s a wild battle with Legion, that ball of floating, brainwashed people… is there anything that's even remotely on that same scale, or even bigger, in Nocturne?
AD: It’s funny because I think that this show has plenty of crazy spectacle happening, and a lot of really big stuff. But nothing has compared to the difficulties of that sequence you just described.
SD: That ball of bodies, which was basically just a weirdly moving crowd at all times, was one of the most difficult things that we've ever done.
KK: You can only blame yourselves.
AD: That's the funniest part. The addition of Legion was actually a pitch that Sam and I made, and we made things worse for us. But I was post-production supervisor so I was like, ‘Well, I created this mess. I'm going to figure out how to fix it.’ We just forced that to work. But it was crazy.
VD: So, I’m guessing it was a lesson learned?
AD: Honestly, I’m happy with how it turned out. But we already had enough to contend with in Nocturne.
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
