Castlevania: A Faithful Adaptation? Not Quite, But It's Still a Great Show

Video game fans tend to get pretty defensive about their beloved source material, so it takes a brave filmmaker to adapt one of those games for the screen. Whether it’s a movie or TV show, the claws are out. Since video game movies have been notoriously terrible for decades, there’s naturally some skepticism whenever a Hollywood studio decides to make a quick buck from the brand recognition of something like Minecraft or Super Mario Bros.

There are some cases where the adaptation is faithful to the source material — the first season of HBO’s The Last of Us is practically a shot-for-shot remake of the game — and other cases where the creators seem to have thrown out the source material altogether. Amazon’s Fallout series goes in its own direction, but it’s at least informed by the games. Paramount’s Halo series has little in common with the games besides its title and main character design; it’s as if someone saw the cover of Halo and imagined what the game itself might be like.

Usually, the more faithful adaptations, like Arcane, are met with a much warmer reception than the less faithful ones, like Until Dawn. So, the lesson for Hollywood seems to be: respect the source material, stick to what works, and appease the fans. The Five Nights at Freddy’s films have been boosted to box office glory by their Easter eggs alone; it’s certainly not the nuanced storytelling that keeps audiences coming back.

But there’s one wildly unfaithful video game adaptation that bears almost no resemblance to its source material, but is still a great show. Warren Ellis came aboard Netflix’s Castlevania cartoon with his own vision entirely. It’s a rare game adaptation that completely and intentionally alienates long-time fans of the franchise, but is still fantastic. It’s like a unicorn.

Castlevania Is Nothing Like Its Source Material, But It's Still A Great Show

When Ellis was first contacted about writing an animated adaptation of the Castlevania games, he’d never heard of the franchise. But as he started looking into it, he really connected to the tone and aesthetic. The Konami video games take place in and around Count Dracula’s castle, and follow the vampire-hunting Belmont clan as they take on the bloodsucking undead.

Ellis felt that the games were a Japanese reimagining of the classic Hammer horror movies he’d grown up watching. So, he was more interested in the genre and the gothic visual style than the specifics of the plot and characters. He came up with his own lore and mythology around the franchise, and essentially just did his own modern reimagining of the Hammer horror classics. Naturally, fans of the source material were unhappy with all these changes. Any adaptation that can be labeled “fan fiction” is poison in Hollywood: Halloween 2018, the Star Wars sequels, etc.

But, faithful or not, Castlevania is still a fantastic show. That gothic horror vibe struck a chord with a whole different audience, and the Netflix version of Castlevania found a fan base of its own. It’s a rare TV franchise where even the spinoff is great (Cheers, Breaking Bad, The Boys — it’s in elite company). Castlevania: Nocturne, following Richter Belmont during the French Revolution, is another solid vampire story that, while it has nothing in common with its namesake, is still an absolute gem.

Now, there are two separate Castlevania universes. There are the games, which have been around for decades and aren’t going anywhere, and there’s the Netflix cinematic universe. They’re very different, but they’re both great in their own way. This is like if Paramount’s brazenly unfaithful Halo series had actually turned out to be as good as the games (in other words, a near-impossibility).