The Strain delivers a lot: 'Salem's Lot

I love Guillermo del Toro and summer always seems like a great time for scares, so I was pretty excited for The Strain, del Toro’s new FX channel vampire series, based on his novel with Chuck Hogan. I haven’t read the novel, but I’ve sampled a few of the comics based on The Strain, enough to know that these bloodsuckers have a lot more in common with the ones del Toro’s earlier Blade II than with any of the more teen-friendly gossamer ilk. A gory vampire apocalypse for the Walking Dead era? What’s not to like!

What I wasn’t prepared for was the heavy helpings of déjà vu I’d be experiencing in The Strain’s pilot. We start with a commercial flight from Germany landing in the U.S. with seemingly not a single soul left alive. Fans of Fringe may remember the pilot, wherein a commercial flight from Germany also lands in the U.S. with seemingly not a single soul left alive (The novel The Strain was published in 2009, Fringe first aired in the fall of 2008 – but those kind of similarities happen all the time in entertainment, no cause for alarm). The CDC sends a team to check out the mysterious plane, fearing an epidemic. Dr. Ephraim Goodweather – a estranged but devoted father who’s too into his work (his phone keeps ringing during family therapy!), Sean Astin (Sam Gamgee!) and woefully underwritten Nora Martinez (Mía Maestro). You know time is of the essence when we pause to allow Dr. Martinez to show us her underwear while changing into her haz-mat suit). Something’s turned the all of the plane’s occupants into seemingly lifeless corpses – and something was hidden down in the plane’s cargo hold that needed a nine-foot coffin full of dirt. If you took issue with any of the quarantine and safety procedures employed by the crew of the Prometheus, you’re going to have a stroke at how “Eph” and his CDC team roll here – they’re one step short of stopping off at Key Food for Ziploc bags.

Then we meet “The Stoneheart Group,” some kind of elite corporation that’s clearly been expecting this flight’s arrival, along with its ominous cargo. It’s at this point that The Strain begins dramatically resembling a remake of ‘Salem’s Lot. Stoneheart has a creepy German guy named Eichorst (Richard Sammel), all smooth and European, who’s tasked with paving the way for the more monstrous, bestial super vampire, The Master – he of the nine-foot coffin. Stoneheart doesn’t exactly believe in advance planning, because it’s only after the plane lands that Eichorst hires a sketchy, disposable hoodlum to drive a van to the airport and retrieve The Master’s coffin, giving him a set of very specific instructions. In ‘Salem’s Lot we had Mr. Straker (Austrian), who is also paving the way for the arrival of a monstrous nosferatu “Mr. Barlow” (who’ll come to be known as The Master), who hires sketchy ne’er-do-wells to take a truck and retrieve this enormous crate full of dirt (and its passenger), likewise giving them some very precise handling instructions. There’s a great scene in ‘Salem’s Lot where newly vampirized young Ralphie Glick appears at the window, scratching to get in, because how can you not let a little kid in? Well, near the end of The Strain, ghoulishly innocent young Emma, whose father feared her dead, appears at the glass doors of the family home, pleading for daddy to let her inside.

Admittedly, many of these elements are tropes from the Bram Stoker playbook, but The Strain uncomfortably squeezes in so many that I have to wonder if Steven King made any phone calls after tuning in.

The Strain doesn’t take itself too seriously, and it’s most successful when del Toro amps up the supernatural factor. The big reveal of The Master as he makes a Big Gulp out of an air traffic controller (the awesome Andrew Divoff!) is graphic and excellent. Plus, you’ve never heard “Sweet Caroline” the way you do in The Strain’s morgue scene. The standout in Night Zero (the pilot’s title) is David Bradley as the sword-wielding holocaust surviving Van Helsing of the story. Bradley is always excellent, and his character’s eccentric determination is something I hope The Strain makes full use of.

Word has it The Strain improves dramatically, and that by episode 4, they’re on much more secure footing, establishing a unique and creepy tone. I’ll stick around in the hopes that the pulp promise of a vampire apocalypse can find fresh ways to disturb while giving us more character than the thumbnails we glimpsed in the pilot. At 13 episodes, The Strain will be gnashing its teeth from now until mid-October. Here’s hoping Guillermo and company can find its pulse.