Firebite Sounds Like The Australian Hunters Versus Vampires Series We May Need
Australian hunters fighting vampires in the desert? Yes, please. That's the concept behind "Firebite," a new series coming to AMC+.
The series centers on two Indigenous hunters, played by two Indigenous actors, Rob Collins and Shantae Barnes-Cowan. Deadline reports that they're on "a quest to battle the last colony of vampires in the middle of the South Australian desert." Yael Stone ("Orange is the New Black") and Callan Mulvey ("Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice") co-star. Mulvey has already portrayed a Russian terrorist in "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" and an evil HYDRA agent in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so unless they're casting him against type, it seems reasonable to assume that he'll be playing one of the vampires.
"Firebite" is an 8-episode, hour-long fantasy drama and has just gone into production in South Australia, and it's expected to premiere on the AMC+ streaming service this winter. The series is an AMC Studios/See-Saw Films co-production, created and written by Warwick Thornton, who will share directorial duties on the episodes with Brendan Fletcher and Tony Krawitz.
After trading heavily in zombies for eleven years and counting via "The Walking Dead" franchise, AMC is officially getting in the vampire business with "Firebite." Season 11 will bring an end to the main "Walking Dead" series, but there are more zombie spin-offs on the way along with the return of existing ones like "Fear the Walking Dead," which is now gearing up for it seventh season. In a way, this brings AMC full circle, since zombies themselves are arguably a spin-off of the vampire sub-genre of horror.
Vampires and zombies are close cousins
If you want to trace the shared lineage of vampires and zombies, it all goes back to Haitian folklore, "Night of the Living Dead," and the horror novel, "I Am Legend," published in 1954. This novel, authored by Richard Matheson, was the source material for the 1971 Charlton Heston movie, "The Omega Man," and the 2008 Will Smith movie, "I Am Legend," which hewed closer to the book in name but bore only a passing resemblance to it in other respects.
More importantly, Matheson's post-apocalyptic vampires inspired George Romero and his world-ending zombies in "Night of the Living Dead." So great was their influence on Romero that you could almost say his zombies and all their screen descendants were vampire mutations of a sort.
Vampires and zombies: all part of the same happy horror family. One will drink your blood. The other will eat your flesh. It's like they're enacting their own fiendish version of the Last Supper.
Just yesterday, we counted down the 12 Best Vampire Movies of All Time, and our list included some international titles, but one country not covered by it was Australia. Here comes AMC's "Firebite" to represent the Land Down Under. However, it's not only a place that this show will be representing. It's also an Indigenous people, some of whom "are flying in from remote Aboriginal communities [to] light up the screen with natural presence," as Thornton and Fletcher put it.
"Firebite" ignites on AMC+ this winter.