SCREAM Creator is Bringing Universal’s Classic Monsters to Netflix in an “Adult Vampire Diaries” Series
Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, and the Wolf Man are headed to Netflix and the mastermind steering the ship is Kevin Williamson, the creator and writer of Scream and director of Scream 7, and he’s cooking up something that sounds like a gothic soap opera with fangs.
Williamson recently opened up about the project and confirmed he’s deep into writing the series centered on Universal’s legendary monsters, and he’s describing it as an “adult Vampire Diaries.”
“Netflix and Universal were very kind to let me go direct Scream 7 and put some projects on hold and now I'm focused on those,” Williamson said.
“The one I'm writing right now is a show. You might call it an adult Vampire Diaries. It's based in the Universal monster land. I get to play with some of those characters like Dracula and Frankenstein and The Wolf Man and have fun there.”
That’s got to be a pretty fun sandbox to be playing in.
Universal’s monster lineup from the 1930s through the 1950s basically invented the shared cinematic universe long before anyone was talking about post-credit scenes. Dracula crossed paths with Frankenstein’s Monster. The Wolf Man fought just about everyone. It all snowballed into crossover chaos that horror fans still adore.
Since then, Universal has tried more than once to reboot that magic. The most high-profile attempt was 2017’s The Mummy starring Tom Cruise, which was supposed to launch a grand “Dark Universe.” Instead, it crash and burned so hard that the planned interconnected monster saga never got off the ground.
The only project in the past few decades that really captured the spirit of those mashups was 1987’s The Monster Squad. It was scrappy, a little cheesy, and very much a B-movie, but it embraced the monsters as icons and let them run wild together. It wasn’t prestige filmmaking, but it had personality.
The tricky part about reviving these characters is that the original Universal films didn’t begin with a master plan. They weren’t reverse-engineered to build toward a mega-crossover.
They started as standalone horror classics like 1931’s Frankenstein and 1931’s Dracula. Over time, as the library of films grew, the crossovers happened naturally.
That’s the lesson a lot of modern shared universes seem to miss. Even 2012’s The Avengers only worked because audiences already knew Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America from their own solo adventures. The foundation came first. The team-up came later.
So what does an “adult Vampire Diaries” set in the Universal monster world actually look like? Williamson has a knack for teen and young adult genre storytelling.
He created Dawson’s Creek and developed The Vampire Diaries for television, and he’s been shaping horror since 1996’s Scream. If anyone knows how to mix romance, danger, and sharp dialogue, it’s him.
The idea of Dracula navigating modern relationships while Frankenstein’s Monster wrestles with identity issues and the Wolf Man struggles with his curse could either lean into melodrama or go full gothic thriller. Hopefully, it strikes a balance that respects the legacy while doing something fresh.
There’s no premiere date yet, and Netflix hasn’t dropped additional details. For now, all we know is that Williamson is deep in the writing process and finally getting to “play” with some of the most iconic monsters in film history.
I’m looking forward to seeing how this turns out!