Vive Les Vampires! ‘Castlevania: Nocturne’ Showrunners Sink Their Teeth into Season 2

This article was written for the February ’25 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 347).

Castlevania: Nocturne and its aristocratic vampires will be taking a sizable bite out of Netflix’s animated programming as it returns with a vengeance for its second season in 2025. Creator and showrunner Clive Bradley and co-showrunner Kevin Kolde have promised fans more arcane adventures, shocking fight scenes and monstrous encounters in their follow-up outing.

This spirited supernatural saga, based on characters from Konami’s successful Castlevania horror video game empire, began in 2017 with Warren Ellis’ flagship Castlevania animated TV series, which ran on Netflix for four blood-soaked seasons. Castlevania: Nocturne first came to life last year as a spinoff set three centuries later during the French Revolution and centers on Richter Belmont, an offspring of Castlevania’s Trevor and Sypha Belmont.

Nocturne is loosely based on ’90s-era Castlevania titles Rondo of Blood, Symphony of the Night and 2002’s Harmony of Dissonance, particularly the backdrop of that monumental upheaval and the legendary Hungarian noblewoman and killer Erzsebet Báthory.

Now, in a sophomore season that traverses the French countryside between Machecoul and Paris, Richter Belmont and his crew of vampire hunters race to stop Erzsebet, the Vampire Messiah, from acquiring the full power of goddess Sekhmet. Alucard (Dracula’s son) joins the team and becomes a reluctant mentor to Richter and Annette, leading them to the City of Lights to find — before Erzsebet does — the final element that will fortify her with the skills to become a more frightening force.

Like Father, Like Son

James Callis reprises his role as Dracula’s charismatic son from the first Castlevania series, joining Nocturne’s exceptional vocal cast that includes Edward Bluemel (Richter), Pixie Davies (Maria Renard), Thuso Mbedu (Annette), Sydney James Harcourt (Edouard), Nastassja Kinski (Tera), Zahn McClarnon (Olrox) and Franka Potente (Erzsebet).

“The French Revolution as a setting is very exciting, and we’re also picking up our characters from where we left them,” Bradley tells Animation Magazine. “They’ve just suffered this terrible defeat at the hands of the Vampire Messiah, but Alucard has now turned up, who therefore is going to help them. And for the French Revolution, you have to go to Paris, so our team is going to split up, and some of them are going to head to the center of the revolution, which is Paris, so our journey is taking us there.”

Kolde further breaks down what this season’s adventure will mean for our core characters, who are fiercely dedicated to ending Erzsebet’s obsessive quest to summon inky eternal darkness in the aptly titled Nocturne.

“The beginning of the season, the characters are going to split up pretty early,” he adds. “They have this need to go to Paris to try and stop Erzsebet from getting the last thing that’s going to cement her power. At the same time, Maria has just lost her mother, being turned into a vampire, and so she’s going to stay behind. Juste Belmont also takes turns to babysit and keep an eye on her as she deals with continuing issues with her family, her father (the Abbot), and her mother being turned into a vampire.”

When crafting this bold series in the shadow of the award-winning original, Bradley had some specific notions in mind for Nocturne’s distinctive tone and style.

“The first thing, really, was the historical setting,” says Bradley. “Rondo of Blood, the first of the games that it draws on, is set in 1792, in the middle of the French Revolution. So that seemed like a good place to start. Telling a story of the struggle for freedom was kind of the point of departure. The most radical thing that the French Revolution did was abolish slavery several decades before it was abolished in the U.S. The reason they did that was because the slaves in the French colony of Saint-Domingue had risen up and were in the process of throwing out colonialism, so I wanted to tell that story too. Grounding it, as far as you can with a story about vampires and monsters, in the history was part of what we were trying to do.”

For Kolde, it made sense to anchor Nocturne inside this pivotal point of sociological departure to look at vampires and their insidious role in society. As the story suggests, vampires would likely be part of the aristocracy and on the wrong side of things.

“That’s a great framework to begin with,” he says. “Richter is a much different character than Trevor. Richter is 19 and has none of the real-world experience that Trevor has. He’s got the traumatic start with his mother in America, but after that he’s gone back to France with Tera and Maria and has lived a sheltered life there, dealing with the occasional vampire. For him, it’s a story about understanding his family legacy and understanding what it means to fight for something and believe in it, so it’s a different journey for him.”

“From a color and background design standpoint, Nocturne follows a completely different language than the original series. It’s pretty spectacular.”

— Showrunner Kevin Kolde

Vampire legends and lore, with their undying sense of romantic tragedy, have remained a fixture in popular culture for countless ages. Nocturne celebrates that rich mythological vein.

“I think the question of ‘What’s the appeal of vampires?’ is very interesting,” Bradley muses. “There’s an element that although they’re evil, they’re also sexy, and so the need for the vampire to not be evil is quite a common thing. I’m a huge Buffy [the Vampire Slayer] fan, and central to Buffy is the whole story of Angel and the vampire with a soul. I’m a big fan of Anne Rice too and the recent adaptations of Interview With the Vampire. It’s the ambiguity of characters that live in the shadows because they’re tormented by needing to kill people and drink their blood. There’s something immensely fascinating about that kind of ambiguous character who is both evil and not evil in some way, and certainly desirable.”

Austin, Texas-based Powerhouse Animation and its immeasurably talented team return for Castlevania: Nocturne Season 2, sticking mostly to the same striking character design, shape language, color palette and shadowy backgrounds as the first season but also exploring new territory.

Expanding Artistic Horizons

“They’re artists, so they’re always stretching and trying to get better at their craft,” Kolde adds. “Whether it’s the animators, character designers, colorists, the compositing team; I think you’ll see, as the season goes on, sort of an evolution of that. As the story builds, the craft builds, and by the time we get to the sixth, seventh, eighth episodes of the season you really see them stretch their wings even further and shine way more. You can see this in the in-house layouts and animation, gorgeous drawings of the characters, the color palette, the lighting. There’s an amazing thought and skill that goes behind it. From a color and background design standpoint, Nocturne follows a completely different language than the original series. It’s pretty spectacular.”

As the show’s mastermind, Bradley has discovered immense gratification in fleshing out this intriguing realm of classy vampires entwined in the history of the French Revolution.

“To have told the story on the scale of this, with the French Revolution and all the fantastical creatures, if this were live action it would have been expensive,” he says. “As a writer, you’re given a sandpit to play in that is much bigger than it seems to be. The equivalent thing in live action would be off the scale. It’s so much fun to be able to have the limits so wide.”

Castlevania: Nocturne returns for a second season on Netflix on January 16.