Anemic from Twilight and True Blood? Perhaps the answer lies with Guillermo Del Toro...

"Think more along the lines of a man with a black cape, fangs, and a funny accent… now take away the cape, the fangs, and the funny accent… in fact, take away anything funny about it at all."

Sick of Stephenie Meyer's moody stares or the bodice-ripping antics of True Blood? Guillermo del Toro's latest project could make the vampire genre genuinely frightening again.

If you're looking for a filmmaker to inject some excitement into a genre rapidly growing sterile and oversexed, Guillermo del Toro's name would be top of the list. Other than Sam Raimi, it's hard to pinpoint a director who would have elicited anything other than a sigh of relief from Tolkien devotees when handed the reins to The Hobbit and the imagination the Mexican's exhibited throughout his career means you could expect a little more than dripping fangs and a camp villain hissing "I vant to suck your blood". Thankfully, Del Toro's sojourn onto the printed page could give the vampire genre some extra bite.

"If you're looking for a filmmaker to inject some excitement into a genre rapidly growing sterile and oversexed, Guillermo del Toro's name would be top of the list"

The Strain, co-written with bestselling thriller author Chuck Hogan and released in paperback in April this year, is the first of a trilogy detailing the rise of a supernatural pandemic after a plane load of dead passengers is discovered at JFK International Airport bearing no signs of fatal trauma. Though Hogan's prose occasionally dips into the genre convention of listing the exact calibre of weapon carried by FBI officers, or the model of kidney dialysis machine used by a shady and wealthy villain, just so we're aware he's done his research, it's also a gripping modern thriller, full of outstanding set pieces that practically beg for a bigscreen adaptation. Del Toro's handiwork is unmistakeable, with the rise of the vampiric virus rooted in eastern European folklore and driven by an ageing Armenian professor with a personal vendetta against these most vicious and terrifying bloodsuckers.

As if the premise of the trilogy wasn't exciting enough, publishers William Morrow (it's a HarperCollins release in the UK) saw the screen potential of The Strain so clearly that a teaser trailer was released in July last year. Yes, for a novel.

It's as ready made for the studio floor as a Dan Brown mystery. Only, you know, it's actually a bearable novel as well. But is there actually going to be a film or films based on the trilogy? If there is, it surely won't be from Del Toro. As well as being booked up to turn Tolkien into box office gold with The Hobbit films, he's got a four-picture deal with Universal to make films based on Frankenstein, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and another vampire project entitled Drood.

A TV adaptation seems a much more likely preposition, with Del Toro suggesting his Hellboy buddy Ron Perlman could play the novel's rat catcher Vasily Get, and talk from Variety last July of a planned three-season series from Grady Twins Productions, the firm formed by Prison Break producer Dawn Parouse Olmstead and Marti Noxon, a former Buffy the Vampire Slayer producer. The Strain could have slipped into the same development hell as the Preacher graphic novels if those bright sparks at Fox had had their way - as Del Toro told io9.com last June, he approached the network with a long-form series narrative, in the vein of The Wire, only to be asked "Can you turn it into a comedy?" He thankfully turned on his heels before Grady Twins came into the picture. But that was almost a year ago and we're yet to learn more.

The Fall, the second novel in the Strain Trilogy, isn't released until September, but if Dreamworks and DJ Caruso can begin photography on the film version of James Frey and Jobie Hughes' novel I Am Number Four before the book's even been published, then hopefully Grady Twins Prods can kick a truly exciting vampire project into life in the near future. Until then, what are we left with to sate our onscreen bloodlust? Wire-work and melodrama from the Twilight Saga? Sex and the South from True Blood? Another Cirque du Freak film? Sigh…

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