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The Castlevania video game series has always been about the legacy of its heroes and vampiric villains—a battle between good and evil that plays out across generations of slayers as they battle the returning evil of Dracula and his allies. After a few years away from Netflix, Powerhouse’s animated adaptation is taking that idea to heart for a fresh revival.
Castlevania: Nocturne, which begins streaming today, is a fresh start for the series after a four-season run that concluded in 2021. There’s a new setting and time period—revolutionary France, rather than 15th century Romania; a new cast of heroes—led by Rondo of Blood’s Richter Belmont (Edward Bluemel), a distant descendant of the original show’s Trevor Belmont and Sypha Belnades; and new foes to face—like the mysterious ascendant “Vampire Messiah,” Erzsebet Báthory (Franke Potente) and her agents. But for all the surface-level newness this premise brings, Nocturne still has all the things that made the original Castlevania adaptation a hit across its eight episodes: brutal, bloody action; compelling, charming characters; and a keen love of the source material that knows just when to geek out and when to twist expectations and do its own thing with the decades of worldbuilding Konami’s iconic action series is built on.
What Nocturne brings to the table to hone all these points to a sharp, effective whip-crack is a welcome focus in its fresh perspective. Unburdened by the story and character arcs that had been built up across the original show’s four seasons—occasionally, to the point of frustration, laboriously so—Nocturne is an effective reset of what Castlevania as an adaptation is, pulling back from the high cosmic horror and theological threats it regularly tussled with in its back half to a much simpler premise. It’s the height of the French Revolution and vampires have ganged up with a desperate societal elite to metaphorically and literally drain the common folk dry, two desperate groups diminished in the face of popular revolt. The bad guys are literal bloodsuckers, the themes and backdrop of the revolution reinforce that, and Richter and his young impulsive friends are here to kick supernatural ass and fight the system along the way.
That’s not to say that Nocturne is necessarily a more simplistic series than its predecessor, it’s more that it’s leaner. The purple prose and indulgent pontification that defined the writing of the prior series—which was penned by now-controversial scribe Warren Ellis, replaced here with new lead writer and showrunner Clive Bradley—gives way to cleaner, snappier, but still emotionally deep character work, that makes the moments the series does dive into more nuanced subjects, leveraging its setting in revolutionary France as well as the wider time period to dive into broader issues of trauma and injustice, all the more resonant and personable. Things feel more grounded in the emotional arcs of Nocturne’s focal characters on both sides of the conflict—even if these characters are a mix of monsters, vampires, and their magically enhanced hunters. The series embraces its place in a specific, historical setting compared to the vague late-medieval backdrop of its predecessor, to root its heightened supernatural struggles in something tangible.
This kind of measured approach is also effectively leveraged when Nocturne begins to embrace its generational story, connecting itself to the wider Castlevania story in smart ways. The perspective of its heroes offers a crucial, compelling framing device for this exploration. Richter, his almost adoptive-sister figure Maria Renard (Pixie Davies), and their eventual hunter allies Annette (Thuso Mbedu, who shines in a standout episode exploring her character’s backstory that elevates her far beyond her status as Richter’s love interest in the games) and Edouard (Sydney James Harcourt) are all significantly younger than Trevor and Sypha were, and with that youth bring an energy to Nocturne that amplifies its fresh tone.
They’re idealist and impulsive, brash and yet curious to learn, and they all grow and develop from their failings across the season in ways Trevor’s charmingly cynical, world-weary persona couldn’t tap into in his own journey. And as Nocturne reaches its climax and begins to tie in threads to its predecessor, it does so to examine and strengthen its own characters’ part in that vast legacy—especially Richter’s, as he tackles the traumas of his childhood—rather than to simply check off Easter egg nods and references. Nocturne is an effective onboarding place for people eager to see what Powerhouse’s work on Castlevania is all about, but long term fans of both the games and the prior animated series will be rewarded with a loving, nuance embrace of Castlevania’s generational struggles.
It’s this smart exploration of these themes, and its new setting, that make Nocturne a more than worthy successor to the original Castlevania series. A clever reset on its world and story brings a focus and nuance that lets Nocturne really drill in on keeping what made the original show such a surprise hit in the first place, while winnowing away a lot of the frustrations and bloat that had started to drag the series down beyond its visceral, sumptuous action by the time of its conclusion. In doing so, the stage is set to leave you hungry for much more of this version of Castlevania’s world and these characters in the future—and the promise that, wherever Castlevania could eventually go beyond Nocturne, the series already keenly understands how to embrace its place in a larger, grander bloodline.
Castlevania: Nocturne is now streaming on Netflix.
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