The Twilightcore hive is eating well this Pride Month, thanks to First Kill.
There’s a new supernatural teen vampire romance to sink our teeth into, and it’s more deliciously sapphic than any other mainstream teen drama on TV has ever dared to be. Among a certain cross-section of niches, First Kill quickly became one of the most hotly anticipated summer releases of 2022. From queer trash TV lovers to the multi-generational coalition of TikTokers who memed Twilight into an online renaissance, the show’s trailer promised us everything we could want.
A Romeo and Juliet-style enemy-turned-lover, biracial, lesbian high school relationship caught between their feuding vampire and monster-hunter families? Say less, and just give us more already.
Then the reviews came in, with a 57 percent Rotten Tomatoes critics rating that didn’t bode well for this Pride Month event. As we all cautiously started watching First Kill anyway though (since sapphic trash-lovers will almost always watch anything that at least attempts to give us what we want regardless of Tomatometrics), that wariness turned away from the show itself and toward everyone who obviously just did not Get It. If the 92 percent audience score is any indication, LGBTQ YA fiction fans are ready to die on any hill for Calliope “Cal” Burns (Imani Lewis) and Juliette Fairmont (Sarah Catherine Hook).
On Twitter, Variety‘s review got ratioed for a headline calling First Kill a “tired take” on “teen lesbian vampires,” with folks piling on to rightfully call out the irony of labeling one of the only TV shows centered on a young lesbian love story “tired.” Of course, there’s a rich history of lesbian vampirism in literature, with Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla almost single-handedly kicking off the vampire gothic genre back in 1872. But that storied sapphic tradition has not carried over into mainstream TV or film with nearly enough frequency to warrant calling the Netflix show’s nascent attempt “tired.”
The oversight stings worse when you consider just how many recent shows about gay male relationships, like Heartstopper and Our Flag Means Death, receive near-unanimous critical praise for their revolutionary queer representation. I’m not saying First Kill is on the same level as either of those (particularly a show with a Taika Waititi HBO budget). But what you can’t take away from First Kill is that it’s something we don’t often see on TV, for better and for worse.
Now, to be fair to the critics, Netflix’s queer answer to heteronormative CW hits like Vampire Diaries and Teen Wolf is far from The Best in Show, even by the relatively low standards set by the supernatural teen TV drama genre.
Its production (particularly the completely goofy CGI monsters) is giving film-school-final-project-budget energy at best. The plot spins several webs of nonsense, while the script ambitiously overreaches toward lofty themes of marginalized persecution by using cringe allegorical terms like “monster-phobe” (an accusation wielded by a queer Black character in the name of being an “ally” to a white queer character, mind you). Like classic U-Haul lesbians, Cal and Juliette jump into the passions of everlasting love faster than their characters can develop as individuals.
The unavoidable truth is that First Kill isn’t perfect. But you know what? It really, really doesn’t have to be perfect in order to fulfill some of our deepest desire for women-loving-women representation, the kind we’ve craved like Edward Cullen getting his first whiff of Bella Swan in science class.
By the way, First Kill includes several references to Twilight, with a direct shout-out in the catchy opening credits song, and an almost shot-for-shot recreation of that infamously memed scene. Instead of biology, though, they’re in English class and doing a lesson on Flannery O’Connor (which could very well be a nod to another pair of star-crossed lesbian lovers often erased from the mainstream discourse).
Credit: netflix
As many TikToks from young LGBTQ folks watching First Kill capture, we as a community “love mess.” No amount of low-quality CGI, poor scripting, or intentionally melodramatic acting will keep us from mindlessly consuming this delightfully sapphic trash like the army of queer garbage goblins we are.
Moreover, as TikToker lyinoptimist notes, First Kill is Blacker and queerer than any of us could’ve ever anticipated. Much of the promotional material made it seem like Cal, who is Black, would only play love interest to Juliette’s protagonist in a story mainly focused on her white “legacy vampire” family — but the show quickly dispels that illusion.
Episode 2 makes it clear that they share the title of protagonist equally when Cal takes over the internal dialogue voice-over narration. Written in an intimate second-person POV, the “you” each of the lovers addresses is the other. The rest of the season goes on to reveal Cal’s family of top-ranked monster-hunters as not only sharing equal plot significance, but also arguably carrying most of the show’s emotional weight outside the main romance.
Overwrought, chaotic messiness is exactly what I want and expect from such an unabashedly sapphic teen drama.
If First Kill got even half the budget similar Netflix shows like The Chilling Adventures ofSabrina (which features queer characters but does not center them as protagonists), most of its quality control issues would likely go away. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with its endearing and scintillating foundation — nothing that higher production budgets and values, and perhaps a longer runtime to flesh out the characters, wouldn’t fix.
But even if it doesn’t get all that, the underserved audience that First Kill reached seems like it couldn’t care less about that. The high key camp of its middling quality is a bit queer in itself. Overwrought, chaotic messiness is exactly what I want and expect from such an unabashedly sapphic teen drama. For folks who always find themselves in the margins, you learn to forgive or even grow fond of the kind of fumbling growing pains that come with finally being given a spotlight for once.
So shine bright, First Kill, with the sparkly skin of a killer that would make even Edward Cullen quake.
