A teenage girl falls in love with a vampire. Hmmm, where have I heard this story before?
Okay, okay, way too much has already been written about how The Vampire Diaries only exists because of the insane popularity of the Twilight books and movie — despite the fact that the new CW series, debuting this Thursday at 8 PM, is based on a series of books that pre-dated by the Twilight ones by more than a decade.
Here’s the set-up: four months after her parents were killed in a car accident, 17 year-old Elena is barely keeping it together in the small Virginia town of Mystic Falls. Then a mysterious new student comes to town, Stefan, and even distraught Elena can’t help but be drawn to him. Alas, Stefan has three big flaws: (1) he’s a vampire (albeit a “good” one), (2) he’s in love with Elena because of her resemblance to his true love, who died ages ago, and (3) his brother, with whom he has an ancient feud, is a “bad” vampire, and he’s suddenly shown up to do everything he can to get between Stefan and Elena.
The Vampire Diaries is created by Kevin Williamson, the influential screenwriter of the Scream movies and the creator of Dawson’s Creek, along with his long-time collaborator, Julie Plec.
It shows. The pace is fast, the angst is thick, and the dialogue is snappy (and, thankfully, much more realistic than the ridiculous Dawson’s Creek).
Meanwhile, the cast is pretty, if a little vapid (although Ian Somerhalder is quite effective in the scene-chewing role of the “evil” vampire brother).
But let’s get something very clear: despite the fact that the CW is pairing this show with Supernatural on Thursday nights, The Vampire Diaries is simply not in the same league as that show, either in terms of Supernatural’s gritty realism or its transcendent themes.
Then again, The Vampire Diaries isn’t trying to be. Even the show’s creators admitted in my recent interview with them: it’s simply a serialized teen soap opera set in a supernatural world.
And for what it’s worth, in that respect, it’s much better than Gossip Girl (although the fangs are arguably much sharper there!).
Anyway, keep in mind that this is what my four-torch review is based on: The Vampire Diaries is simply a teen soap opera riding the current very popular vampire wave.
Given that’s what it set out to be, it pretty much succeeds.
Let’s face it: with Twilight’s teen angst and fresh-faced actors, it was only a matter of time until a Twilight-like TV series ended up on the CW — home of Gossip Girl and Smallville.
This Thursday, that show, The Vampire Diaries, finally debuts.
At the same time, the CW could have done a whole lot worse in who created the show than Kevin Williamson, the screenwriter behind the Scream movies — projects that completely redefined the horror genre simply by including characters who had seen all the horror movies, and knew all the cliches.
A few years after Scream, Williamson struck gold again, creating Dawson’s Creek, a TV show with more hyper-aware, hyper-literate teens.
In short, Williamson was pretty much the perfect person to bring The Vampire Diaries to life.
Kevin’s co-creator on The Vampire Diaries is Julie Plec, who he first met on the set of Scream and who has since worked with him on many projects, including the Scream sequels and Dawson’s Creek.
“I was [director] Wes [Craven's] assistant on Scream,” Plec says. “It was [Kevin's] first movie that ever got made. My first movie. I was 22, just out of college. We were two kids in a candy store, up in Santa Rosa, California, on location, making a movie.”
Recently, I got a chance to sit down with both of them and talk about The Vampire Diaries — how they almost didn’t make it because of the success of Twilight, how the show is, and isn’t, different from that project, and how vampire stories are really all about sex.
TheTorchOnline: Just how sick are you of the comparisons to Twilight?
Kevin Williamson: We’re not sick really, but we don’t know what to say. We can give you the studio answer, which is that they’re based on these books that were released in 1992 or whatever.
Julie Plec: The comparisons are difficult only in that you never want anyone accusing you of ripping something off. But because we have the source material that pre-dates Twilight so significantly, we feel confident that the story we’re telling is our own. But there is going to be a lot of that.
TheTorchOnline: How did the project come about?
Kevin Williamson: In the beginning when I read it, I didn’t want to be involved with it, because I felt like it was sort of a Twilight rip-off, no matter what came first. The premise was the same: girl falls in love with a vampire. But Julie kept saying, “Keep reading, keep reading!”
And then you realize that this is [much more] a story about a small town, about the underbelly of a small town, and what lurks under the surface.
TheTorchOnline: In the beginning, were you told, “Give us a project about vampires,” and then you searched for something that spoke to you?
Julie Plec: We were talking to [executives at the CW] about vampires and how much we love them, and one of us said, “We’d love to do a vampire show, but nobody’s going to do another vampire story.”
Kevin Williamson: And we don’t want to be the one that comes after.
Julie Plec: And they said, “Actually, we have a property that we’ve been dying to do. We absolutely want to do a vampire show, and we’d love for you to look at it, so we did.”
TheTorchOnline: It does seem like the perfect CW show, that if it didn’t exist, it should exist.
Kevin Williamson: That’s what we all thought.
Julie Plec: That’s why when people say, “Are you treading ground that is too familiar?” we say, “Specifically, on our network, it’s the perfect amalgamation of what they’ve been doing, that takes all the genres they’ve been dabbling in and combines them into one show.”
Kevin Williamson: It’s also different from the Buffy and Smallville and Supernatural model in that they’re sort of monster-of-the-week shows, and we’re not that. This is actually closer to Gossip Girl than that. In the sense that it’s a serialized ensemble teen soap with a supernatural element. It’s more about characters and romance.
TheTorchOnline: What do you think accounts for the ongoing fascination with these vampire stories?
Julie Plec: Bandwagon! [laughs]
For me, in a weird way, it’s less about vampires than it is about love. And when you’re telling a love story, the great love stories of all time are always about people who are attracted who are polar opposites. It’s about, “Who is that person who caught my eye across the room, and what is it about that person, why do they seem so different and why do I find myself so drawn to them? What is it about them that fills me up from the inside?”
When you have a love story that’s this powerful, and then you throw this genre element into it, with the great guy across the room who’s moody and brooding and sexy and dangerous, and also happens to be a vampire, then you end up with stories you can tell for days!
Kevin Williamson: I also think sexuality has something to do with it. We’re living in an age where Twilight is being read by thirteen year-old girls. There’s a sophistication to readers today. Subconsciously, they’re reading about sex, but they don’t know it. They’re reading about sex and sexuality, their awakening, and it’s all through the guise of this very safe vampire who goes and bites your neck and does nothing else. It’s a very safe form of releasing sexual tension.
There are those who say that you go to a horror movie so you can be scared and release all your hormones, so you don’t go out in the world and do “it.”
TheTorchOnline: You look at Buffy and Anne Rice, and it seems like a big part of most of these vampire projects is that they take on big moral issues. Is that something you plan to do with this show?
Kevin Williamson: We do deal with morality in the sense of right and wrong and control and betrayal and trust and friendship — all the great themes of coming of age will be told, but with life-and-death stakes.
Julie Plec: You look at Twilight, for example, and they notoriously are an abstinence metaphor, which is a really beautiful and ironic idea when you consider that vampires throughout literature have been a sexualized object.
Kevin Williamson: The seducers.
Julie Plec: We’re not saying we’re going down the abstinence road.
Kevin Williamson: At all!
Julie Plec: But it’s more about the idea of self-control, and finding your inner core, the morality that exists in you: “I have a choice here, I can take this very dark road and be a predator and I can be evil. Or I can fight those darker instincts, and choose to live my life on a clearer, stronger path.”
Kevin Williamson: Which is not his natural instinct. His natural instinct is to kill, and he’s fighting that every day. For the love of a woman!
TheTorchOnline: How closely are you following the books?
Julie Plec: I like to say that if you look at the gross content of the books, we’re following it incredibly closely. But if you look at the timeline, it’s varying quite a bit. We’re telling some of the stories a lot faster, some of them a lot slower. But the core relationships are very specific, and very much what we’re playing with.
We’ve got about five books that we’re hopefully turning into many, many seasons. The lead character in the books is actually dead by book three, she’s a ghost. It might take us a bit longer to do that!
There is a core fan-base for the books. And they’re mad that the lead character is not blond. So when you start there, there’s not a lot you can do.
TheTorchOnline: In Scream, the characters have all seen all the horror movies. In The Vampire Diaries, do the characters live in a world that’s familiar with fictional vampires? Are they aware of Twilight?
Kevin Williamson: A little bit. Look, this isn’t going to be Scream dialogue, or Dawson’s Creek heightened psychobabble. It’s going to be its own show. It’s based on a book, and we’re going to stay true to that book and those characters.
But yes, the characters live in the real world. They go to the movies, they turn on the TV at night. We actually wrote the scene yesterday when one of the characters finds out [the show's star] Ian Somerhalder is a vampire, her first question is, “Why don’t you sparkle [like in the Twilight books]?”
Julie Plec: And Ian says, “Because I live in the real world where vampires and sunlight don’t mix!”
Here’s the set-up: four months after her parents were killed in a car accident, 17 year-old Elena is barely keeping it together in the small Virginia town of Mystic Falls. Then a mysterious new student comes to town, Stefan, and even distraught Elena can’t help but be drawn to him. Alas, Stefan has three big flaws: (1) he’s a vampire (albeit a “good” one), (2) he’s in love with Elena because of her resemblance to his true love, who died ages ago, and (3) his brother, with whom he has an ancient feud, is a “bad” vampire, and he’s suddenly shown up to do everything he can to get between Stefan and Elena.
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TheTorchOnline: Just how sick are you of the comparisons to Twilight?
Julie Plec: That’s why when people say, “Are you treading ground that is too familiar?” we say, “Specifically, on our network, it’s the perfect amalgamation of what they’ve been doing, that takes all the genres they’ve been dabbling in and combines them into one show.”
TheTorchOnline: You look at Buffy and Anne Rice, and it seems like a big part of most of these vampire projects is that they take on big moral issues. Is that something you plan to do with this show?
TheTorchOnline: How closely are you following the books?
