Castlevania – Hell is other people

#fiction #tv #fantasy #horror

Warning: Contains minor spoilers

The good thing about having low expectations is that you set yourself up to be pleasantly surprised. I didn’t even have high expectations of The Mandalorian and Grogu and still it managed to disappoint. Castlevania was the reverse. I picked it for some light background entertainment and it delivered on that, but also a surprising amount more for an animated television series based on a venerable videogame franchise about vampire hunters. Like the videogames that inspired it, Castlevania tells the story of a member of the monster hunting Belmont family as they square off against the forces of evil, usually represented by Dracula. This time the honour falls to Trevor Belmont, last surviving member of the Wallachian branch of the family. Down on his luck, excommunicated and roving from town to town to drown his sorrows in ale, Trevor does not start off as the hero the world needs to stop Dracula’s war against humanity. One key arc across Castlevania’s four seasons is Trevor’s fairly typical hero’s journey from cynical vagrant to competent saviour

All of this is executed in a visual style that draws heavily on its videogame lineage. The animation is vibrant, violent and visceral. The combat is fast, flashy, and familiar to anyone who has every played a fantasy roleplaying game (RPG). Castlevania is not for the faint of heart. It is the sort of show where half the scenes have blood splattered over them and people’s intestines have a tendency to escape from their bodies. Yet for a series that revels in gothic horror and videogame violence, Castlevania also contains surprising meditations on damnation and redemption, agency and fate, cruelty and kindness. And for a story set in medieval Europe, the cast is pleasantly diverse in terms of ethnicity, sexuality and gender. It’s come for the gore, stay for the existentialism.

Castlevania is a story told in four parts, its corresponding seasons really not meant to stand on their own. The short first season only serves to introduce the story and the main characters, setting the scene for Dracula’s war against humanity to avenge his murdered wife. Season two sees our heroes vanquish Dracula. A surprising move, to kill the main villain only halfway through a series, this creates the space and impetus for the remaining characters to develop and find new purpose in the aftermath of Dracula’s defeat. Without the gravitational pull of Dracula holding friends and foes together, characters are scattered to the winds, confronted with their inner demons and the fact that defeating the devil does not in fact exorcise all evil from the world. Season four is the grand finale, culminating not only in a final epic bossfight, but also our heroes’ search for purpose. Throughout there are nods to Dante’s Divine Comedy, with season three especially representing a descent into Purgatory for most of our protagonists, and season four their ascension back into the land of the living.

Our heroes are Trevor Belmont, disgraced monster hunter, Sypha Benades, mage and scholar, and Alucard, son of Dracula and therefore half vampire. Opposing them are Dracula and his war council composed of vampire aristocracy, as well as two human sorcerers, Isaac and Hector, who have their reasons for siding with the vampires against humanity. Yet the war council is riven with dissent, animosity and plotting, most prominently by Carmilla of Styria who has her own reasons for joining the fight. A depressed and disinterested Dracula is unable to either exercise control, or prosecute the war with the zeal expected of him, creating a power vacuum in which other players seek to make their moves. With Dracula’s defeat at the end of season two, both heroes and villains must discover who they are, and who they might become.

Sympathy for the devil

Casting Dracula as a vengeful but also depressed and mournful widower is one way in which Castlevania complicates the straightforward ‘good versus evil’ story of humans against vampires. This Dracula is not evil incarnate, driven by cruelty or power for its own sake, but a man whose wife was brutally murdered by the Church. Eradicating all humans in response is not exactly reasonable and Dracula falls well within the category of ‘men who should have gone to therapy’, but it nonetheless frames his motivations as driven by something more human and understandable than mere bloodthirst, even if the dead wife trope is worn and problematic. At least Castlevania has the decency not to turn the vengeful widower into its hero, unlike some recent popular movie franchises.

The nuance is not limited to Dracula, but extends to the show’s other vampires and demons. Dracula’s night creatures (souls summoned from Hell into demon bodies) are introduced as simple rampaging monsters, but are revealed to have capacity for thought, reflection and suffering. We are prompted to wonder whether their predisposition for murder is really their own, or that of the masters who summon them and give them purpose, and whether under different circumstances they might not be capable of construction as well as destruction. But the most interesting and complex character is Carmilla: a female vampire leader on Dracula’s war council. She is Machiavellian, cynical and power-hungry, and yet as we discover more about her, it is impossible not to feel sympathetic towards her. Carmilla is a woman who has suffered at the hands of a deeply patriarchal and misogynist society, ruled by “stupid old men” she despises but who also hold power over her even now that she has vampiric powers. Within the context of medieval Europe, she is the logic of ‘girlboss feminism’ incarnate: the philosophy that if you cannot dismantle the structures of oppression, your only path to emancipation lies in the accumulation of power. But because there are always men with more power than you, complete security can only be achieved through complete world domination. Driven by this logic, Carmilla’s ambitions gradually but inexorably expand as the series progresses, starting with the desire to take over Dracula’s castle but ending with plans to subjugate all the kingdoms of Europe. And it is hard to fault Carmilla for her analysis, even if she does turn into a megalomaniac villain who repulses even her closest allies, because this is after all a story that started with a strong woman being burned at the stake merely for being more learned than a bunch of insecure and deeply reactionary men.

Hell is other people

The nuanced representation of Castlevania’s vampires is mirrored in its ambivalent view of humanity. The Wallachia of Castlevania is a place where life is violent and as per Thomas Hobbes often solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Neither just victims or heroes, much of the violence and treachery we see is inflicted on humans by humans, not any supernatural creatures. The first act of violence in Castlevania is after all the murder of Dracula’s wife by the overzealous clergy of Targovishte, and the suffering, pain and death inflicted by humans does not end there. Season three presents the nadir in this regard for heroes Sypha and Trevor, as they are confronted with some deeply unpleasant characters not just among their enemies, but also among their supposed allies.

Suffering is everywhere in Castlevania, and for some characters this means humanity is beyond redemption. Dracula’s war council includes two humans, Isaac and Hector, who after being hurt and cast out from their communities have thrown in their lot with the vampires because they believe the world is better off without humans at all. During their travels, Trevor and Sypha similarly come across people who have either gone over to the dark side of Dracula, or concluded that there is simply no point in going on living. The sense of futility is heightened because the onslaught of vampires and demons across Wallachia means that while some people may survive individually, communities are fractured and broken. It is the social web that humans rely on for meaningful existence beyond survival that is lost.

Nor does faith offer solace. Castlevania’s Christianity is that of a vengeful Old Testament God, with punishingly strict rules on sin and damnation. If lying to save yourself from being tortured to death can land you in Hell, then what hope is there for anyone? And yet, while most characters in Castlevania assume they are damned to go to hell, their reality is equally so grim that it leads some of them to wonder what difference there really is between a life or afterlife of suffering.

Beyond good and evil

You cannot order a society based on a moral doctrine that condemns everyone equally to hell. If you are damned no matter how small the sin, you might as well be selfish while you can. Castlevania definitely has no love to spare for the Church as an institution or for Christian doctrine, but this does not mean it has no sense of good and evil. It is just not based on theology. Instead, in Castlevania the greatest sin is stasis: the inability to grow and change. It is the characters who through introspection or action learn to exercise agency, develop, and adapt who ultimately survive. Our hero Trevor Belmont is the most obvious example, but Castlevania’s most interesting story belongs to Isaac, the erstwhile servant of Dracula turned saviour of demons and men. If Trevor’s arc is the traditional hero’s journey, Isaac much more closely follows in the footsteps of Dante, passing through his personal purgatory before emerging transformed on the other side.

Contrary to our human heroes, Castlevania’s vampires are unable to change, and that is what causes their demise. In a way, its vampires can be seen as the ultimate existentialists, thrown into an existence they cannot change not once, but twice. Born as human, reborn as vampire. Neither birth is a choice, and if the human life is short and full of suffering, vampiric life is an eternity of hunger spent in darkness. Castlevania asks whether vampires are indeed in some sense beyond good and evil, because if preying on humans is necessary for survival, then is it really a moral choice at all? But the consequence of being placed beyond human morality, of being damned by definition, is that vampires also cannot transform, either themselves or the world. This point is made explicitly: if for humans the greatest virtue is growth, for vampires it is stability and stasis. A world that, like vampires themselves, never changes and never dies. An undead existence that is indeed neither dead nor alive, but just an eternal now, though not in the mindful sense.

The lesson Castlevania imparts that we are only truly alive when we purposefully act in the world, not in isolation but together with others. It is agency grounded in both introspection and cooperation. I would like to say that the show also promotes agency for the sake of kindness towards others, but while it points in that direction towards the end, it has racked up too tremendous a body count to sustain that a pure message of kindness. It is an animated series about vampire hunters after all, not a treatise of existentialist philosophy or a socialist instruction manual. But for a show about vampires and violence, it has surprising depth and rewards viewing with an eye for more than just the epic battles, blood and gore that it shows you on the surface.

Notes & Suggestions

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