3-Part 'Tarantino Meets Buffy' Series Currently On Prime Deserves To Be As Big As Supernatural

Published Oct 26, 2026, 6:00 PM EDT Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020. While Prime Video’s three-part vampire horror series should have been as big a hit as Supernatural, the show never got its proverbial flowers despite mixing Tarantino’s brutality with Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s self-aware edge. There is no denying the fact that Twin Peaks influenced countless TV shows after the ABC murder mystery ended, from Desperate Housewives to Gravity Falls to The X-Files. Similarly, it is impossible to deny the reality that The X-Files itself also spawned countless imitators, as TV creators realized that adding fantasy, sci-fi, and horror elements to the typical police procedural format was a profitable spin on this familiar setup. However, while Grimm, Lucifer, Evil, and Supernatural all owe a debt to The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was so influential that the classic ‘90s teen show became a cultural benchmark in itself. An acknowledged influence on everything from Smallville to Lost to Riverdale, Wednesday, the aforementioned Supernatural, and even shows like Orphan Black and Jessica Jones, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s self-aware style radically altered the way stories were told on television. Playful but often brutal, tragic but still winking and ironic, Buffy the Vampire Slayer found a delicate tonal balance countless later shows tried to replicate. One, El Rey’s From Dusk Til Dawn: The Series, never got the credit it deserved for coming close. From Dusk Til Dawn: The Series Is As Dark And Brutal As The Original Movie Released in 1996, From Dusk Til Dawn was a blackly comic action thriller that turned into an entirely different sort of movie about halfway through its runtime. The first half of the story focuses on two brothers, George Clooney’s Seth and Quentin Tarantino’s Richie, cutting a bloody swathe across the southern US after a daring jailbreak. The duo take a family hostage, and the stage is seemingly set for a tense siege thriller. Then From Dusk Til Dawn’s protagonists arrive at a Mexican strip club, and they’re attacked by vampires. In an audacious twist that has been copied countless times since but never bettered, From Dusk Til Dawn completely changes its genre midway through the movie’s story and becomes a violent horror wherein the surviving characters must work out how to avoid the bar’s many monstrous vampire patrons. From Dusk Til Dawn was a big hit, earning almost $60 million on a budget of only $19 million and turning supporting star Salma Hayek into an A-list name. Followed by a pair of straight-to-video sequels, the series never became a massive horror franchise to rival Friday the 13th or Halloween, but did spawn a video game and tie-in comics. However, it was 2014’s TV show reboot that truly redeemed From Dusk Til Dawn’s untapped potential. Starring DJ Cotrona as Seth, Zane Holtz as Richie, and breakout star Eiza González as Hayek’s stripper character Santanico Pandemonium, From Dusk Til Dawn: The Series technically retold the events of the movie, but with a twist. The show provided much more backstory for the vampire bar, which dates all the way back to the Aztec era, and for the two criminal brothers, who feel far more human in this incarnation. In the process, From Dusk Til Dawn: The Series managed to make a more tense, immersive, and thrilling version of the original movie. This was a pretty amazing achievement since, this time, everyone already knew the big plot twist was going in, so the show couldn’t rely on novelty value in the way that the original movie did. As numerous critics noted, the longer runtime ensured that viewers actually cared about the characters of the spinoff show, unlike the movie’s thinly sketched characters. From Dusk Til Dawn’s Three-Season Story Perfectly Expands On Tarantino’s Story While From Dusk Til Dawn is a good movie, director Robert Rodriguez’s cult classic is also truly threadbare when it comes to plot. Fortunately, like Friday the 13th’s ingenious prequel series Crystal Lake, From Dusk Til Dawn: The Series uses the missing details from the original movie to craft a ore compelling narrative. This series manages the achievement almost every prequel promises by actually explaining the lore of the world and its characters, telling a bigger, more immersive story in the process. Screenwriter Quentin Tarantino’s script for From Dusk Til Dawn is a lot of fun, but the story doesn’t concern itself with explaining how the bar’s vampires have disguised its existence and their crimes, and how long they have managed to operate this human trap. From Dusk Til Dawn: The Series explains all that and more, as well as finally redeeming the original movie’s most interesting character. From the moment that Salma Hayek stepped onstage with a snake wrapped around her neck in From Dusk Til Dawn, Santanico Pandemonium was ensured a place in horror movie history. However, it wasn’t until 3 Body Problem star Eiza González took over the role in From Dusk Til Dawn: The Series that the character received a role worthy of her iconic stage presence. Admittedly, Hayek does steal every scene she appears in during the original movie. From Dusk Til Dawn: The Series Fixed The Original Movie’s Biggest Mistake Image via MovieStillsDB However, this makes it easy to forget that Santanico Pandemonium receives a grand total of only a few minutes of screen time, and is unceremoniously killed off about ten minutes after she is first introduced. Making her the star instead of a breakout character who appears in one scene and walks off with the entire movie was the best choice From Dusk Til Dawn: The Series made, and González is a perfect replacement for Hayek in the role. While Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House is more moving and HBO Max’s Stephen King prequel show It: Welcome to Derry is more outright scary, From Dusk Til Dawn: The Series still deserves to be ranked alongside Midnight Mass and Interview with the Vampire as one of the great post-Buffy vampire shows. Even more so than either of those later hits, the three-season series did a phenomenal job of recapturing Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s blend of snarky self-aware humor and genuine stakes (pardon the pun). There are few shows that can claim to be darkly funny, unpredictable, tense, gory, and emotionally engaging, but this 2010s hit is one of them. Although From Dusk Til Dawn: The Series only lasted three seasons, this gorier Buffy the Vampire Slayer replacement deserves to be sought out by fans of horror TV. Release Date 2014 - 2016-00-00 Network El Rey Network Showrunner Robert Rodriguez Cast Kurly Tlapoyawa Nacho (uncredited) Directors Robert Rodriguez, Joe Menendez, Dwight H. Little, Eduardo Sánchez, Eagle Egilsson, Alejandro Brugués, Nick Copus, Rebecca Rodriguez Writers Diego Gutierrez, Juan Carlos Coto, Marcel Rodriguez, Matt Morgan, Ian Sobel, Álvaro Rodríguez Franchise(s) From Dusk Till Dawn Creator(s) Robert Rodriguez