FX have released a creepy new promo for the upcoming fourth and final season of The Strain and it’s got the fingerprints of creator Guillermo del Toro all over it.
If you’re not familiar with the series, it’s set in a world rapidly being conquered by vampires seeking to set up a totalitarian dictatorship, and we follow the human resistance. As if a planet covered in vampires wasn’t enough, the third season finale saw the world descend into thermonuclear war, which has created a nuclear winter that’s blocked out the sun. Happy days if you’re a vampire. Less so if you’re a human.
This ten-second promo, seen above, teases the return of The Professor, aka Abraham Setrakian (played by David Bradley). He’s a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor and pawn shop owner who lives in New York, but secretly also an expert vampire hunter. You might wonder what good a 94-year-old man could do against the undead, but The Professor has worked out a way to slow the ageing process by creating a vampire potion that allows him to appear younger. But, potion or not, from what we see here, it looks as though he’s about to join the ranks of the many monsters embattling our beleaguered heroes.
The Strain is not exactly high art, but if you’re into imaginative and bloody horror action shows, it’s a definite cut above the rest, and the fevered imagination of del Toro ensures that the monster effects are striking and disturbing (as you can see from the clip above.
Season 4 of The Strain airs on FX on July 16th.