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In the spirit of maintaining its momentum of critically acclaimed video game adaptations, Netflix began 2025 with the release of the second season of Castlevania: Nocturne on January 16. Because we simply can’t help wondering how the vampiric sausage was made, io9 spoke with directors Samuel and Adam Deats about the pressure of upholding the series’ reputation as the one to break the video game adaptation curse—as well as Gamergate-adjacent discourse brainrot, and their aspirations for the future of the series.
This interview has been edited for length.
Isaiah Colbert, io9: Castlevania has become a staple series of exceptional video game adaptations alongside the Sonic franchise doing gangbusters and Arcane. What is the secret to the series’ success, and what makes Nocturne season two the best season of Castlevania yet?
Adam Deats: I’ve always felt we’ve been chasing Castlevania season two, episode seven for years. It’s been always hard to beat that moment. The best thing I could say about [Nocturne season two] is that the historical references in this season, combined with the last two episodes of this season, are some of the best moments we’ve had in terms of just the general visual flair of it all and getting to see certain characters come into their own.
Samuel Deats: As far as what the secret sauce is for a video game adaptation, that’s such a tough question. When we look back at where we started when we released the first season of the original series in 2017, as everyone likes to put it, we broke the video game adaptation curse, or however you want to call it. At the end of the day, it came down to simply focusing on telling a good story that feels like the source material you’re adapting.
I don’t know what we did in particular, but I think many adaptations up to that point struggled with that focus on strong storytelling, strong characters, and that sort of thing. We still want to make the kinds of references that you want to see as fans that we want to put in there. We put in with love and care. Those are the kinds of things, I think, folks saw that there was genuine love in those references. Whereas in some past adaptations before that point, it felt like it was sometimes done out of obligation or because folks caught themselves up on what a certain adaptation was, then tried their best to make it work without fully understanding its heart. We weren’t thinking about it that much. We just went in wanting to do the best we could as fans of the series.
Adam: The best that we can ever do, and the best that anyone can do, is care about the things they’re working on and the source material. Ensure that whatever you’re putting on screen feels right to you and close enough to the source material so that it does justice to the story you’re telling as well.
Samuel: If it comes from a place of love from people who care about it, then they are putting that effort towards it [and] it naturally comes through. That’s the best guess that I can make. When the first season of the original series came out, no video game adaptation had done particularly well, and adult animation was not something anyone had faith in, in the U.S.
When we made that first couple of seasons, we had a very low budget. There was a lot of, “Is this going to work? Does anyone care about this sort of thing?” We proved that people did care about seeing adult animation made in the west. That was a big deal that had a massive ripple effect on our shock and made us very happy to see. But it’s also shown that good stories can be told through adapting video games. Video games have had stories that can translate to something meaningful. That was frowned upon by a lot of folks for a long time.
Samuel: [Laughs] And I apologize for opening the floodgates. Now everybody’s doing it, and it’s all been a lot of great stuff, including Fallout, Arcane, obviously, and Sonic.
Adam: It is difficult to see it turned into a trend. We’ll see how that plays out, but I am happy to see good shows coming out of it. I really loved Fallout. That was a really good time. I just hope that folks continue to come at it from a place of love for what they’re making.
io9: In line with the entertainment industry getting lambasted with accusations of “peddling DEI” and going “woke,” Castlevania: Nocturne has been hit with that same discourse as well, with the usual crowd accusing the show of “blackwashing” with its depiction of original game character Annette. What’s your reaction to the revolving door of discourse that always seems to rear its head about video game adaptations and black and female representation as a disparaging element to the industry’s widely white, male, Eurocentric status quo?
Adam: I think that we’re just in a right-wing backlash, in general. I think the pendulum is swinging, unfortunately, in a certain direction. We’re not the only ones that have been hit by this. It’s been everything. It’s been all over the map to a degree that’s even tedious. It’s always hard to say whether something we did caused it or if everybody is just hyper-focusing on it now.
Samuel: To that point, this isn’t our first rodeo with this sorta thing, and you can see how there is a difference in how people are reacting now versus how they were responding when season two of the original series came out when we had Isaac in the story. We’re seeing a very different reaction now, and I don’t think that’s necessarily because we did anything differently. I think that’s just the landscape that we’re in right now as a whole. I don’t know that we can do anything about that other than keep putting out the best work we can. As Adam said, I do think there is a weird hyper-focus on it that has changed over the past few years.
Adam: I know that’s frustrating for some people to hear, but the reality is that people have to understand that there should be room to tell stories with any character in it. I don’t feel apologetic that our writers decided to do something that felt right for the source material in a particular period. The reality is that the Haitian Revolution was intrinsically linked to the French Revolution. It’s a historical fact and felt right for the story they’re trying to tell. I’m not going to sit here and feel bad about changes made that were, I think, more than just functional. They really worked. Sorry not sorry, I guess.
Samuel: Adam and I are big fans of the games. We have been very linked to them for most of our lives. We’ve been playing them since the NES era, diving into old forums and all that kind of stuff. We have been fans for longer than we have been making the show. When we look at Rondo of Blood—this particular game that we’ve been adapting—Annette is not a character in the games that was even really discussed a lot amongst fans. The focus was always on Richter, Maria, and Dracula. When I saw what the writers wanted to do to reimagine Annette, give her more of a presence and everything, even as a fan, I thought, that’s great. This is the place to do it because she wasn’t a character that folks talked about or thought about a lot back in the day.
When you’re making an adaptation and looking for places to bring in new interests and life, it is like looking for areas where there’s a character who didn’t have much to them and wasn’t developed a whole lot. What can be done here that ties it into the greater narratives happening? I fully stand behind that decision. I think it was very cool.
Adam: When discussions are had about Castlevania as large, Sam and I end up being more on the purist side of the conversation. Typically, we want it to be as close to the games as possible for the most part, with some exceptions. We’ve had disagreements in the past over eight years. It’s going to happen to any production. We have had disagreements where we thought things were too far away from source material. And there have been disagreements this season, too. But we didn’t disagree about the decision of Annette. We felt that was a right call.
io9: In io9’s review, we wrote that the final team-up fight scene between Richter, Juste, Maria, and Annette against Erzsebet eclipses that of the original series team-up between Trevor, Alucard, and series MVP Sypha against Dracula and his horde of vampires (depending on how we felt on a certain day). Was it a personal challenge for the team at Powerhouse Animation to top the feats it accomplished before with these big team-up ensemble fight scenes?
Adam: [Laughs] It’s a hellscape, man. It’s so hard. The worst thing you can do in animation is crowd battles, and we keep doing crowd battles. It’s so dumb. Because it’s a few characters versus Erzsebet or Drolta, that’s not so bad because you’ve got three to four characters fighting in a group. The logistics of doing lots of special effects work, and action sequences that are dynamic still, with the special effects stuff that was going on, were pretty tough. And we still had crowd stuff in that episode.
Samuel: Episode seven, in particular, was an extremely difficult production that required careful planning and putting a lot of chess pieces in just the right place. But it was one where we finally had an opportunity to focus on a particular fight for longer than we’ve ever been able to. I look back on the Dracula fight in season two, episode seven; you have that great “Bloody Tears” fight at the beginning, the actual Dracula fight, and then it turns into Alucard versus Dracula. The actual length of that fight and everything was relatively short. It’s not like this big long thing where we got to just focus on it for a super long time. I was delighted that we got to get to that Erzsebet fight pretty early on in the episode and then come back to it multiple times along with the Alucard/Drolta fight happening in the background and the hordes of night creatures that is another part of the set piece.
In my experience, particularly with 2D animation when you’re doing big battle scenes with large crowds, many folks think big battle scenes with lots of characters are a spectacle. In 2D animation, I don’t think that it ends up turning out that way because it is so difficult to do big crowds. You have to pull back on certain things. I think folks are more excited by— or at least I am— battles between particular characters or a small group, etc. I think it’s more meaningful from a storytelling perspective. It’s more fun seeing multiple powers clashing, in the case of the group versus Erzsebet. I don’t know how much I was thinking back on the Dracula fight and trying to eclipse it, but for me, that was an exciting opportunity to take some of my favorite characters and have them beat the shit out of each other. A lot of people on the team were really excited about it.
Adam: In a lot of little ways, we’re always trying to show something new because we don’t always want to keep doing the same thing. Some of the puzzle pieces fit into place near the end with the introduction of things like Maria’s dragon, which are things we didn’t really necessarily do before. [Laughs] We didn’t get to fight with a giant Pokémon (I say jokingly). Stuff like that lends itself to doing something new while sustaining within Castlevania lore, and that’s what’s really fun. Being able to play with old special attacks and sub-weapons and all those things from Castlevania.
Samuel: I really enjoy trying to craft a fight where you see characters thinking and trying to be strategic in working together. It was really fun to be able to put something like that together.
Adam: Sam was very excited that Juste jumped back into action this season. He kind of obsessed about ensuring he was present in that last fight.
Samuel: [Laughs] I really wanted his comeback to shine. So I tried my best with that.
io9: For the Easter egg and referential video game fans, what’s one scene from this season that was your most proud moment to adapt this season?
Adam: We have not had a lot of chances to do the traditional Belmont cross boomerang, but Richter, in episode eight, does an almost Harmony of Dissonance version of a double cross boomerang, where he creates ice boomerangs instead that are in the cross formation and throws them. Obviously, Trevor gets to do it, but we get to do a more exciting version of it. Some of Juste’s Harmony of Dissonance magic combination attacks are present throughout this season. They’re kind of all over the place in small degrees. In the last fight, there’s a moment where he summons a frosty ice cross that acts as a drone that hovers above him and fires additional ice shots, directly from Harmony of Dissonance. There’s a lot of fun stuff like that, which I think people who have played the games and dove into the particulars of the attacks will see.
Samuel: For whatever reason, the cross-ice drone from Harmony of Dissonance is my favorite attack, even though I don’t think it’s that good compared to a bunch of his other spells. I think it’s really funny and cool to have a drone floating around shooting like a machine gun so I was delighted to work that in. I was really proud of when I worked in Alucard’s eyes going red in episode eight and him using Dark Inferno, the big magma ball. Not only does it work as a reference to the games, but it’s also making a connection to his father for the storytelling in his development. I was pretty happy about that little nod.
Adam: The red flames and the red eyes are loose references to dark metamorphosis from Symphony of the Night. That’s when Alucard turns on vampire mode and can gain life back from blood. The red flames on his blade are also a reference to some of his weapons from Symphony of the Night, like the Masamune and a couple of other blood-based weapons that he had in that game. We also have a captain get turned into a night creature [who] is a reference to Frozen Shade that I thought visually that came out pretty neat—the see-through effect.
io9: Across its eight episodes, Nocturne concludes with notable finality, with its characters diverging to continue going on more adventures, presumably. With so many characters and moving pieces this season, were there any storylines the team had to cut for time?
Adam: No storylines were cut for time, necessarily. I think that there was a sequence that Sam [story]boarded for Juste in episode seven, I think. Juste had a big, flashy action thing that he did and we had to actually cut it because of scope and time.
Samuel: I think the most heartbreaking thing was probably that. I did a big Juste-focused throw down, but the episode was already running way long and the shot cap was way high. I tried moving it somewhere else, and it didn’t work there either. I think it was the right call because I think we were would have been crushed if we tried to make it work. That was, I think, the first time in series history that I had to cut one of my own action sequences. It wasn’t long. It was like a minute or something like that. It was still a little painful to have to cut something that I was pretty happy with. Maybe it’ll end up in a special feature or something like that in the future. The animatic for it.
io9: In swift order, Castlevania: Nocturne was renewed for a second season within a week of its debut. At the time, you both sent a message to the fans saying they won’t have to wait long for season two. Should lightning strike twice in season two of Nocturne, will fans have to wait long for a possible third season, or are things still in the discussion stage regarding the future of the franchise?
Samuel: We’ve been in this boat before when it comes to the wait between seasons. After season two of the original series, we had a lull of a couple of months before we kicked in with season three and four. Then after season four, there was a much longer wait before we were starting anything with Nocturne. So this isn’t really anything new for us other than the fact that the industry at large is kind of in a weird place that has affected entertainment as a whole. At the end of the day, I don’t think it’s going to impact us in a way that’s different from in the past, but we’re just going to have to wait and see.
If we do get to continue with the logical next step for the storyline with these characters, we would probably want to make sure we take our time with it and do it the best way possible, make sure that it’s something that honors the characters and the source material. I don’t want to make any promises. If it happens, we want to do it right, and that may take time. No matter what, we are hopeful and confident about what we’ve made and the future of the franchise. But we’ll just have to wait and see. Castlevania as a whole is a pretty broad franchise that has a lot of storytelling opportunities in it and there’s interest in that. We’ll see how that all plays out over the coming months and after season two comes out.
Adam: Cross your fingers for us.
Samuel: There’ll be a bit of time with discussions and stuff like that, figuring out what that looks like. So just hang tight for us, guys.
io9: Of all the Castlevania characters, whose story would you love to see explored deeper should a new season come to pass?
Adam: That’s hard because there are a lot of them, right? I think Sam and I have always talked about wanting to get to Symphony of the Night eventually. I think that story that focuses on that, something that’s Alucard-centric, but then includes Richter and whatnot and kind of like putting a button on that stuff, I think, would be interesting. There’s a weird alternate universe where somehow we do a flashback movie that’s just for Juste and Harmony of Dissonance. We’ve even talked about, “Man, wouldn’t it be fun to do a Lament of Innocence and do the whole origin story for the entire series.” I don’t know, it’s tough because there’s a lot of places to go.
io9: What do you hope the fans get out of this season of Nocturne that they before as a continuation of the momentum the series has garnered on Netflix?
Adam: What I think is interesting about the season is, again, the historical grounding that the writers have put there. And the interest in that will hopefully resonate with the audience as well. That’s unique because previous Castlevania seasons tried not to overly reference history in the real world. So I would say that that stands out. There’s also unique stuff going on with Annette’s journey this season that is unique for the Castlevania universe. From that perspective, I hope the audience finds something new in those areas. As always, the stuff that’s more Castlevania, like Richter, Alucard and Juste’s stories, I’m hoping feels at home with fans.
Samuel: I am excited for folks to see Maria’s arc this season. It is doing some fun things, particularly the first half, and it pays off in a way that I hope fans will enjoy.
Adam: Some of the theming going on with Maria’s arc in terms of the costs of revolution and how that can affect its young people, I think, is really interesting. I’m hoping that has the weight we think it does.
All eight episodes of Castlevania: Nocturne are streaming on Netflix.
