Love, lust and vampires

29th Jan 2010

WITH the Twi­light saga set­ting the world into a vam­pire frenzy, ITV2 have grabbed the lat­est in the super­nat­ural craze with new drama The Vam­pire Diaries, hit­ting our screens Tues­day 2nd February.

Cre­ated by Kevin Williamson, the writer behind Dawson’s Creek, this Gos­sip Girl–esque drama sees the unsus­pect­ing Elena Gilbert trapped between two vam­pire broth­ers in a strug­gle for her soul – it just sucks to be a teenager sometimes.

Fol­low­ing the death of her par­ents, Elena (played by Nina Dobrev) finally finds a light at the end of the tun­nel in the form of the new stereo­typ­i­cally handsome-yet-mysterious vam­pire, Ste­fan Sal­va­tore (Paul Wes­ley, Smal­l­ville) in the suit­ably eerie set­ting of Mys­tic Falls.

Just to make sure it fol­lows the suc­cess of Twilight’s romance, Ste­fan is con­tin­u­ally repress­ing his blood lust, prov­ing a con­stant dan­ger to the unaware Elena.

The bad guy comes in the form of Ian Somer­halder, last notably seen as Boone on Lost. Play­ing Stefan’s evil brother Damon, he returns to Mys­tic Falls and makes the entire vil­lage his prey in a series of vio­lent attacks, and Damon makes it his plan to claim Elena for him­self after real­is­ing his brother’s inter­est isn’t based on Elena her­self: she’s a phys­i­cal reminder of a key fig­ure from their past.

The first episode sees Elena and her brother, Jeremy, adapt­ing to life as orphans in dif­fer­ent ways: while Elena finds com­fort in her best friend and new­found inter­est in Ste­fan, Jeremy falls in with the bad crowd after being rejected by his crush for his rival (cheesy teen heart­break drama at its best).

How­ever, the drama kicks into action when Damon attacks Jeremy’s crush Vicki, with her mem­o­ries of the attack slowly seep­ing back through­out the sec­ond episode, threat­en­ing the secrecy behind Damon’s cruelty.

With a love tri­an­gle, war­ring broth­ers, tur­bu­lent teens and, most impor­tantly, some gor­geous vam­pires, The Vam­pire Diaries looks set to fill the small-screen void for vam­pire drama left in the wake of True Blood.

Let’s face it, it’s about time ITV gave us some­thing bloody good to sink our teeth into.