Castlevania, the game, started as a pastiche of Universal monster movies, sending an orange guy with a whip to fight a mummy, Frankenstein’s monster, and big bad Dracula. Castlevania, the show, spent its fourth season exploring the relationships of a quartet of immortal vampire queens, reflecting on how we process grief, and looking absolutely incredible in motion. I don’t think it’s an outcome that anyone expected, but seven years after the last (maligned) Castlevania game, the Netflix series has become the new benchmark for videogame adaptations.
I can imagine an alternate universe where we never got Netflix’s Castlevania because Konami was still scarred by a