Fox8 Scores Guillermo Del Toro's Vampire Series, 'The Strain'

Zombies are out and vampires are back in on Fox8 this year, with the Foxtel-based channel revealing this morning it has secured the rights to screen The Strain, a blood-suckin' horror series co-created by visual revolutionary Guillermo Del Toro.

The 13-episode thriller, adapted from the novel trilogy of the same name by Del Toro and Chuck Hogan, will have its movie-length premiere episode at 8.30pm on Wednesday, July 30. Acclaimed screenwriter Regina Corrado, who has previously worked on Sons Of Anarchy and won awards for her writing on Deadwood, rounds out the pilot episode's creative triumvirate.

The Strain focuses on Dr Ephraim Goodweather (Corey Stoll), the head of the Centre for Disease Control's New York-based Canary Team, who are called upon to investigate a viral outbreak in the city that looks an awful lot like its sufferers should be developing allergies to sunlight and garlic, and a sudden interest in heavy cloaks and darkness.

After a plane arrives at JFK Airport with its shutters down and lights off, Canary Team arrive on the scene to find the cabin chock-full of dead folks, whose bodies start mysteriously disappearing from the morgue, while the plot gets ever thicker.

Joining Stoll (who you might remember as Ernest Hemingway in Woody Allen's Midnight In Paris) will be Harry Potter/Game Of Thrones veteran David Bradley (Argus Filch/Walder Frey) – who will fill the role played briefly by John Hurt, Professor Abraham Setrakian, a Holocaust survivor who may know more about the vampirism epidemic than he's letting on – Lost alumnus Kevin Durand, Mía Maestro (Alias, the Twilight saga), Jumanji game hunter Jonathan Hyde, seasoned extra Natalie Brown, and the Most Impressive Hobbit Of All himself, Samwise Gamgee, Sean Astin.

Have a look at the series' trailer, below, and start salivating now over the cast, the premise, the crew, and the fact there's not a single goddamn sparkle to be seen.