Fox Buys ‘World War Z’-esque ‘A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising’

The amazing thing about vampire movies is that there’s seemingly no end to the original spins that can be put on the genre. They‘ve filled out Westerns, comedies, social dramas, softcore romance, really the full gamut — and now it looks like Hollywood has ginned up yet another new wrinkle on the vampiric formula. Just as World War Z attempted to depict a zombie outbreak as a global international crisis complete with politicized responses from various superpowers (the extent to which they were successful is up to you), a new film will take a boots-on-the-ground vantage point to a revolution of vampires.

Deadline reports that Fox has laid claim to the rights to upcoming novel A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising and has tapped Star Trek Beyond writers JD Payne and Patrick McKay to begin work on a script treatment post-haste. As the Howard Zinn-aping title suggests, the film will relate a vampirism epidemic through multiple points of view in a “grounded political ensemble” that the Deadline item compares to Traffic. While True Blood was good about wedding horror lore with the day’s geopolitical issues even when it wasn’t good at anything else, this film would be among the first to consider the more far-reaching consequences of vampires in the world stage.

If this film wants to learn from the errors of World War Z, its first step will be to embrace its own political context instead of trying to resist it. Whether for the sake of time or simplicity, that zombie flick ditched a lot of the source material’s finer details that placed it in a recognizable real world. The people expect action, but not at the cost of what makes an idea like this unique.