Vanessa Helsing, the daughter of famous vampire hunter and Dracula nemesis Abraham Van Helsing is resurrected five years in the future to find out that vampires have taken over the world and that she possesses unique power over them. She is humanity’s last hope to lead an offensive to take back what has been lost.
Latest episode: S5 E13 Novissima Solis (Jun 25, 2021)
After a catastrophic volcano eruption, the last remaining underground vampires rise up through a dark, ash-filled sky to overtake America. Vanessa Van Helsing, a descendant of the legendary line of vampire hunters, awakens from a three-year coma to discover that she’s not only immune to the bloodthirsty predators – but also has the ability to make them human again.
Season two of Van Helsing pushes Vanessa and the other Survivors further into the world of the vampire apocalypse, where they discover old alliances have crumbled and new connections expose long-buried secrets about the Rising, the Van Helsing heritage, and the survival of humankind itself.
The first of four vampire Elders has been freed (although it proves itself to be loyal to the Van Helsing clan) and legend has it that when their four Totems are combined the Dark One will be resurrected. Now it's a race against time as Vanessa and her ragtag group of heroes faces off against the forces of darkness.
Sam has fulfilled his destiny to become the 4th Elder & now our post-apocalyptic world is even closer to seeing the Dark One resurrected. Vanessa vows to follow the light & fight the darkness that has taken everything she loves. Just when she thought she was alone in her mission she meets two young women, Violet and Jack-who have unique and mysterious vampire fighting abilities all their own.
Vanessa, Violet, and Jack will risk it all to finally bring an end to the Dark One once and for all. The Van Helsings must figure out ways to escape and evade the various obstacles in their path to prevent them from their mission, leading to an epic final showdown between the Van Helsings and the Dark One. Who will win the battle between light and dark?
What stays with me about Van Helsing isn’t the premise — though that’s a pleasingly absurd one, with its resurrected heroine and vampire-run wasteland — but the way it keeps asking a very old question in a very noisy form: after civilization has been gutted, what part of a person still counts as human? By the time the series began in 2016, vampire stories had already been through their teenage swoon, their prestige reinvention, their gothic self-awareness. Van Helsing arrived as something rougher and more practical: a cable-era survival drama wearing horror makeup.
It’s not subtle about this. It doesn’t need to be. The show is interested in hunger, brutality, improvisation, and the humiliating fact that history doesn’t end when the monsters win; it just gets smaller, meaner, and more intimate.
Kelly Overton’s Vanessa Helsing is the show’s best argument for itself. She doesn’t enter as a grand, quippy chosen one. She comes back like someone dragged out of a freezer: stiff, suspicious, slow to trust her own body.
That physical uncertainty matters. Overton plays her with a kind of coiled skepticism, as if every room might contain a trap and every ally might be temporary. The series leans on that resistance.
Vanessa’s power over vampires is the sort of genre conceit that could easily turn into a convenience, but Overton keeps her from becoming a mechanic in the plot. She looks tired before she looks heroic, and that’s a better deal.
The larger conversation around the show, as I remember it and as the reviews made clear at the time, was whether it was too shamelessly pulpy to be taken seriously. That always seemed like the wrong fight. Van Helsing is adapted from the graphic novel series by Zenescope, but it doesn’t behave like a precious literary adaptation or a slick prestige rewrite. It lives in the space where genre TV often ends up: between conviction and opportunism, between a genuine appetite for apocalypse and the need to keep the engine running for five seasons and 65 episodes.
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