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The Strain (2014)

The Strain (2014)

The Strain (2014)

The Strain is a 2014 sci-fi & fantasy series created by Guillermo del Toro and Carlton Cuse. It stars Corey Stoll, Kevin Durand and Miguel Gómez.

A virus moves through New York behaving like nothing in the medical literature, and the doctor chasing it finds its closest match in folklore.

Dr. Ephraim Goodweather leads the CDC's Canary team in the city, the rapid-response unit called in when a pathogen looks unfamiliar. The strain in front of him carries the marks of something ancient, a vampirism that spreads by infection and obeys rules closer to parasitology than to gothic romance. Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan created the series for FX out of their own novel trilogy, wrote the pilot "Night Zero" together, and let del Toro direct it. Carlton Cuse ran the show as showrunner and executive producer from July 2014 to September 2017.

The register is del Toro's: practical creature design, wet biological detail, real affection for the ordinary working people who end up holding the line. Corey Stoll heads a cast with Kevin Durand, David Bradley, Mía Maestro, Miguel Gómez and Jonathan Hyde, and the story keeps widening out from a containment procedural into an account of New Yorkers with day jobs defending their own blocks.

Anyone after elegant, romantic vampires should look elsewhere. This one treats the creature as a disease vector and the city as the patient.

Where to watch The Strain

Stream: AMC+, DirecTV On Demand, Disney+, Hulu, Philo, Shudder, Shudder (Via Amazon Prime), Spectrum On Demand, YouTube TV

Rent: Google Play

Buy: Amazon, AppleTV, Fandango at Home, Google Play

Official site

http://www.fxnetworks.com/thestrain

Cast

Similar series

Explore The Strain guides

The Strain in our writing

A few thoughts on The Strain

The source novels come first: The Strain and The Fall are del Toro and Hogan's own telling, denser on the biology of the strain than a season of television has room for. For the same director on the same creature, Blade II gives vampires as an infected species with their own hierarchy, and Mimic is his earlier run at insect logic loose under New York. Rabid drops the mythology and keeps the contagion, Cronenberg turning one patient into a citywide emergency, while The Stand scales an outbreak up to a continent. American Vampire is the comic to read next, a predator species evolving across American history. Gamers get The Last of Us, which makes infection the antagonist and improvised neighbors the drama.

Outbreak stories where the science stays in the room

The Strain treats vampirism as an outbreak: Ephraim Goodweather's CDC team traces exposure, quarantines a plane, and works the case with lab results rather than legend. These share that discipline. Each one puts investigators in hazmat gear, counts the hours since exposure, and lets the spread follow rules a scientist can chart.

If you want the novels behind the show

The Strain began as a novel trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, so the parasitology, the Old World antagonist and the New York quarantine all start on the page. Begin with the first book, carry on into The Fall, then stay with the infection horror that works the same clinical register.

Vampire stories that keep the monster monstrous

The Strain gives its vampires a parasite, a feeding stinger and a pack instinct, and hunts them through the sodium light of outer Queens. Nothing here courts sympathy for the creature. These titles work the same way: biology over romance, physical violence, and humans improvising weapons out of whatever a hardware store stocks.

Specialists handed a case outside their field

Goodweather runs the CDC's Canary team, the unit called in when a pathogen looks unfamiliar, and The Strain spends its opening hours on one specialist arguing against people who want a tidier answer. These follow experts in that same position: strange evidence, a nervous institution, and a diagnosis that lands once someone widens the field.