World of Darkness, the TTRPG universe where gamers get to play as monsters, is going to be adapted for film and television by Christine Boylan (Constantine, Cloak & Dagger, The Punisher), Eric Heisserer (Shadow & Bone) and Hivemind, the production company behind Netflix‘s The Witcher. World of Darkness was born in 1991 with Vampire: The Masquerade, a single-volume RPG set in a goth-punk version of our world. It was soon followed by Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Wraith: The Oblivion, Mage: The Ascension, Demon: The Fallen and Changeling: The Dreaming.
Vampire: The Masquerade was the star of the show, getting most of the adaptations — including a TV series in 1996, Kindred: The Embraced, which didn’t have the best reception. Considering their past work, it seems Boylan and Heisserer will be up to the challenge of bringing the massive corpus of World of Darkness to life. Not only are they serial adapters who specialize in dark, modern fantasy media, but they actually love gothic punk and have played Vampire: The Masquerade since it originally hit shelves.
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Christine Boylan’s first credits were as Leverage’s writer and executive producer. Leverage was a series about a group of idealistic criminals specialized in conning rich people, where every episode felt like an anarchic heist against a different member of the Camarilla. She was also an executive producer and writer on Once Upon A Time from 2012 to 2014, a modern fantasy series with a sprawling cast of characters that has real Changeling: The Dreaming vibes. After that, Boylan’s portfolio becomes the stuff of comic geek dreams: she worked as the co-executive producer of Constantine as well as Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger and The Punisher.
Both Constantine, which was about a hard-boiled atheist with hellish powers who regularly battled demons and talked to angels, and The Punisher, about a vigilante hell-bent on avenging his family, have many themes in common with the World of Darkness. Both are stories about men on the brink of losing their humanity, with Constantine veering more toward Mage: The Ascension or even Demon: The Falling, and The Punisher resembling the rage-fueled tales of Werewolf: The Apocalypse.
Cloak & Dagger, which was about two teenagers who controlled the powers of light and shadow, really looks like a tale from the Vampire: the Masquerade coterie, starring two fledglings, a Lasombra and a Ravnos. Boylan also made a short film, HOSS, that could be defined as a one-shot Western TTRPG campaign set in post-apocalyptic California, which is as fun as it sounds.
Eric Heisserer is a screenwriter who’s been adapting sci-fi and fantasy to the silver screen for years. He played Vampire: The Masquerade when it was first released, and was an avid reader of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Heisserer considers himself the custodian of the works he adapts, and will go to extreme lengths to make those rich, imaginary worlds are as textured and believable as our own, from inventing Arrival‘s Heptapod alien language to designing the alphabet, board games and currency of Shadow & Bone‘s Grishaverse — even those elements that were never on screen.
Heisserer started as a writer for A Nightmare On Elm Street (2010), Final Destination 5 (2011) and The Thing (2011) before moving on to more unique projects. Hours (2013) was an incredibly stressful thriller about a father trying to keep his newborn daughter alive during Hurricane Katrina, while Lights Out (2016), a horror film about a vengeful spirit haunting a family’s matriarch for decades, is a lot like a Wraith: The Oblivion storyline.
But it was Arrival (2016) that gained him critical acclaim. Arrival was a sci-fi film about the challenge of communicating with an alien species, and how language affects our perception of the world. Arrival‘s aliens were not at all evil, but the gift that their language brought to those who learned to speak it was beautiful and terrible, forcing the protagonist to confront her own mortality, the inescapable nature of time and the intense, fleeting beauty of life — themes that were reprised in his 2018 Birdbox, another sci-fi horror film.
On the surface, those films don’t have anything to do with vampires, werewolves or wraiths — until one remembers that the only way to remain sane in the World of Darkness is to hold on to whatever humanity is left, regardless of the horrors that the players encounter. It’s actually one of the franchise’s core mechanics across its many properties. Additionally, Heisserer might love horror, but he tends to give his screenplays happy endings — a key trait for any successful storyteller.
But the proof is in the pie, as they say, and his job adapting the intricate plots of Shadow & Bone and Six of Crows into the Netflix show are the best proof of his ability to tackle the massive amount of material that forms the World of Darkness, whether they are planning just one film or one series to test the waters or an interconnected cinematic empire à la Marvel or DC.
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