Netflix has tapped Bumblebee and Kubo and the Two Strings director Travis Knight to helm an adaptation of Raymond A. Villareal’s 2018 novel, A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising.
According to Deadline, the film will shorten that title to Uprising. It will be produced by Shawn Levy and Dan Cohen of 21 Laps, the company that produced Stranger Things for the streaming service.
The novel is Villareal’s debut, recounted as an oral history of an outbreak of vampirism that begins when the body of a young woman is found in Arizona and vanishes. The book follows the rise of the pandemic as bodies start turning up, and a new society of vampires emerges around the world. Some people are willing to be changed, while others aren’t. The story is told through a variety of characters: an FBI Agent, a political campaign manager, and many more.
A review of the book from Liz Bourke called it “an overambitious mess without anything like a narrative arc, and filled with characters who are at best shallow caricatures of real people and at worst are unmitigated cardboard cutouts.”
But what doesn’t make great material for a book might make for a decent film—something that you can pop onto Netflix at the end of the day and just zone out for a while. That approach worked for World War Z, right? And Knight is a competent filmmaker: Bumblebee was one of the better installments of the Transformers franchise, and Deadline notes that “ability to deliver a film that looks like a box-office production on a reasonable budget has studios very intrigued by his skillset.”
There’s no word on when this film will debut on the platform, or who will be cast in it.
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A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising
