First Kill

First Kill is a supernatural-young adult-queer romance-thriller series that released on Netflix on June 10, 2022, created by Victoria Schwab and based on her short story of the same name from the anthology Vampires Never Get Old.

Juliette Fairmont (Sarah Catherine Hook) is a standard socially awkward lesbian teenager who turned sixteen a few weeks ago - bad news for her, because it means that her vampire lineage is starting to fully assert itself. Now her family expects her to perform her first kill so she may enter the ranks of legacy vampire society, something that horrifies Juliette since she just wants to live her life on her terms. But things go sideways when she plays Seven Minutes in Heaven with Calliope "Cal" Burns (Imani Lewis), the new girl in school who she's been crushing on since they met.

She loses control, bites Cal, and gets a stake through the chest, as Cal and her family are all monster hunters who've arrived to clear the town of anything dangerous and supernatural. When the staking doesn't take, the two families are forced to confront each other while trying to hide their truths from the mundane world around them. And all the while, Juliette and Cal must choose to either fight their rapidly growing attraction to each other...or give in to first love.

On August 2, 2022, it was announced that the show had been cancelled after one season.

No relation to Orphan's prequel film, or the 2017 film of the same name.

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First Kill contains examples of:

• Affectionate Nickname:
  • Calliope is called "Cal" by many who know her.
  • Theseus is usually called "Theo" by his family.
  • While most people shorten Juliette to "Jules", Ben will refer to her as "Letty".
  • Elinor often calls Juliette "Sweet Little".
• Amicable Exes: Cal is friends with her ex-girlfriend, Tess, although she confides to Juliette that going back to being best friends hasn't worked out too well.
• Arranged Marriage: These are common among Legacy vampire families. Margot in the past rejected one to marry the human man she loved. Her daughter Elinor, in contrast, willingly agrees to one, though she pulls out over the issue of being expected to keep getting pregnant until the union produces a daughter.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Jack and Talia are about as happy as you'd expect that Cal lied to them and brought a vampire into their home. The thing they focus on when they come to Cal's room to hear her out is that the door is closed while she is with another girl, since she's a lesbian.
• As You Know: In 1x3 Davina reminds Juliette, her granddaughter, about how the Emeral Malkia works. Juliette can be seen wordlessly repeating what she says with a weary look, clearly having heard this all before and being pretty tired of getting it again.
• Best Friend: Ben and Juliette have been this for each other from childhood.
• Brought Down to Normal: Oliver claims he's found a spell to turn a vampire into a human, and offers to use it on Juliette so she can be with Cal.
• Central Theme: The series deals with a number of themes, such as:
  • Love, as primarily seen through the romance between Cal and Juliette.
  • Morality, as noted when Davina calls the Burns family monsters for attacking the Fairmont estate for no reason and when Cal starts to scrutinize the hunters' actions after Juliette shows her that not all supernatural creatures are ravenous maneaters.
  • Self-discovery, touting Juliette's desire to find out who she really is and what that means for her.
  • Destiny, referring to how Juliette is apparently destined to become a part of the legacy community, as well as how fate seems to drive her and Cal together.
  • Family, alluding to the girls' love for their respective families as well as how far they're willing to go to protect them.
  • Vengeance, such as how Oliver wants to get even with Elinor for betraying him, Theo wants to get even with the legacy who killed his birth mother, and Cal seeks revenge on Juliette for accidentally turning Theo into a vampire.
  • Bigotry, as we see the hunters for obvious reasons, as well as the legacies looking down on humans and made vampires. This is also deconstructed by Cal, who starts to question her upbringing after meeting Juliette.
• Conflicting Loyalty: When it's revealed that Cal was bitten by Juliette and has started wondering if not all monsters are bad, the Guild believes her loyalty is compromised.
• Creature-Hunter Organization: The Guild, an ancient order that trains hunters to kill any monster they can find and keeps records of everything they know about killing them. Though it's not discussed in-depth in the first season, we're told they have various ranks (the Burns family are "Blades" while their friends are above them as "Helms") and they have an academy somewhere that gives hunters more training. Hunters go there at age 24, so they can have as much as a decade of hunting experience before the academy gives them a polish.
• Dating What Daddy Hates: Cal, though it's the objections of her mother that get the most attention. As she's a vampire hunter dating Juliette, who's a vampire, both of their families are obviously less than thrilled about their relationship. Margot herself having fallen in love with a human, Sebastian (Juliette's father) and turned him, their objections are about what Cal and her family do rather than the fact that she's human.
• Daywalking Vampire: Vampires or at least legacy vampires in this series are completely unaffected by sunlight and freely go around during the day with no danger or discomfort.
• Downer Ending: The series ends with Elinor and Juliette disowning each other, leading to Juliette giving Oliver the key to the storage shed where Elinor keeps the IDs of her victims, which he gives to the police who take in Elinor for her crimes. We find out that while Oliver accepts his actions, they were fueled by Elinor's persuasion in the same way she attempted with Juliette and when asked why she targeted him and got him disowned and exiled, she simply states that she "just felt like it". Sebastian and Margot find out that the Legacy Council is calling Davina and Elinor in due to the family's recent behavior to see if they're still worthy of being Keepers of the Emerald Malkia, but Elinor is in police custody for her murders and Sebastian ate Davina. Juliette accidentally turns Theo into a vampire and Cal swears to find a way to kill Juliette for this. Theo's father and brother decide to kill him now, but Talia sneaks him out of the house and hands him over to Oliver to protect him - only for Oliver to reveal that he intends to incorporate Theo into his plans to overrun the town with all manner of monsters.
• Emergency Transformation
  • After Juliette's debut is attacked, Sebastian is dying because he's the only vampire present who isn't a full legacy. Davina is convinced to save him, which she does by placing the Queen Serpent within him and making him a full legacy.
  • Juliette and Cal find Theo bleeding out and practically dead. It's only when Cal has left that Juliette hears him ask for help and bites him. She says she was trying to drain Theo to ease his suffering, but Cal believes she knew entirely what she was doing and intended for him to be turned.
• Erotic Dream: The first shot of the series is Juliette having an erotic dream about Cal. The two have several more over the course of the show, as the link created by Juliette biting Cal causes them to have shared dreams.
• Establishing Series Moment: We start with flashes of a Juliette and Calliope making out, peaches being picked from a tree, blood dripping from a knife, and a zombie rising from the ground, followed by Juliette waking from a dream. We immediately know this show is going to involve romance, supernatural elements, action, violence, and tons of symbolism.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Elinor may be a vampiric serial killer who enjoys her killings and collects her victims' IDs as mementos, but she appears to genuinely care about Juliette and her father, expressing worry when the latter is mortally wounded, and agreeing to an arranged marriage to get Davina to save his life. Subverted as for her siblings, because Juliette and Elinor disown each other in the finale and she tells Oliver that it was For the Evulz when she set him up and manipulated him into committing the acts that would get him exiled by the family and disowned.
• Flash Step: In contrast to more common portrayals, zombies are fast enough to do this. Elinor also does this one time for no apparent reason, showing that vampires can do it, but they're otherwise never shown moving any faster than a human, probably due to the show's low budget.
• Foregone Conclusion: Anyone who's familiar with a Star-Crossed Lovers story, especially Romeo & Juliet itself, already knows that the story won't end well for Cal and Juliette. While it's not stated flat-out (spare what Margot says at the end of 1x07) that they'll break up and go back to being enemies, a few of the narrations make it clear that this relationship is going to hit rough patches to say the least.
• Full-Name Ultimatum:
  • "Juliette Anastasia Fairmont, do you have any idea what time it is?"
  • "Calliope Antigone Burns, you have crossed my absolute limit. Closing a door when a girl's in your room? It's not how it works in my house and you know that."
• Groin Attack: Cal kicks Cook between the legs when he gets violent with her.
• Healing Factor: Legacy vampires have one, easily healing from most injuries. It's first seen after Juliette gets staked by Cal. She passes out, but on regaining consciousness, she pulls out the stake and the wound heals instantly.
• Hereditary Homosexuality: Juliette, one of the lead characters, is a lesbian. Her older sister Elinor turns out to be a bisexual woman.
• He Who Fights Monsters: Cal is worried that the Guild's relentless hunting of monsters could lead to them killing ones who don't pose a threat to humans. The Guild doesn't believe that there are any such things and seems to view considering this trope at all to be a major red flag.
• Horror Hunger: As a legacy vampire, Juliette must kill someone shortly after her sixteenth birthday as that's when the hunger becomes strong enough to take over. She's is terrified of taking someone's life, but her sister and family as a whole remind her that if she doesn't do it on her terms, she'll eventually be forced to feed on the nearest human whether she wants to or not. In the show it's represented by the lights around her turning red and all noises other than nearby pulses fading away. When Cal begins bleeding from a zombie attack later, Juliette struggles to control herself despite her insistence that she'd never feed on her earlier in the episode.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Each episode is two words long, always starting with "First".
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: The hunters attack a gathering of legacy vampires in the hopes of killing them with a collection of silver spears, leading to many of them getting stabbed through the heart with them. It doesn't stick, however.
• Incompatible Orientation: Juliette and Ben dated when they were younger, but realized they were both gay shortly after their first kiss.
• Interspecies Romance: Juliette, a vampire, falls for Cal, a human, who wants her back.
• It Amused Me: When Sesbastian asks why Elinor manipulated him and made him into the family scapegoat, she responds that she "just felt like it."
• It Gets Easier: Elinor tells this to Juliette when she stresses about taking a life, reminding her that doing so doesn't change who she is but rather "tips the scales" further towards her vampiric lineage. And since they need to feed on blood, death is always a risk, so she needs to be prepared either way. Legacy vampires like them have to kill someone shortly after their sixteenth birthday as that's when the Horror Hunger become strong enough to take over. Juliette is terrified of taking someone's life, but her sister and family as a whole remind her that if she doesn't do it on her terms she'll eventually be forced to feed on the nearest human whether she wants to or not.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Elinor can make humans forget about things (such as her feeding on things) using her Compelling Voice and hypnotic gaze.
• Last Het Romance: Juliette and Ben once dated briefly before they both realized they're gay. Since then they've remained best friends.
• Lesbian Vampire:
  • Juliette, a lesbian teenager who's also a vampire. She's pretty normal aside from this.
  • Her older sister Elinor meanwhile fits more with the negative trope, as she seduces people to drain them fatally (a bisexual vampire, as it's both men and women) while she's entirely unrepentant about this.
• Lilith: Portrayed here as the big sister of Eve. She accepted what the serpent had to offer, which came in the form of a bite that turned her into the first ever legacy vampire. She's revered by all legacies and even spoken of as a goddess.
• Love Across Battlelines: As with Romeo and Juliet before them, Cal and Juliet are in love and try to be together in spite of their families being bitter enemies.
• Love Hurts: The season ends with this for both Cal and Jules.
• Love Theme: "Bloodlust Wins" for Cal and Jules.
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places: Juliette and Cal have sex in the pantry at the party in the first episode.
• Maligned Mixed Marriage: Juliette's mother Margot has been shunned by her family for many years over marrying Juliette's father Sebastian, a human she eventually turned, and rejecting her prior arranged marriage. Some still dislike it though since he wasn't born a vampire, unlike the legacies.
• Mama Bear:
  • Both Margot and Talia are fiercely protective of their children, often nearly coming to blows themselves to protect Juliette and Cal respectively.
  • Talia also nearly comes to blows with Jack after Theo becomes a vampire. He wants to kill him, as he thinks Theo is no different from the monsters they hunt, but Talia cannot see him as anything other than her son.

    Talia: Over my dead body. There. You made me say it. You will kill our son over my dead body.

• Masculine–Feminine Gay Couple: Girly Juliette and tomboyish Cal become a couple.
• The Masquerade: Averted. While some monsters are able to stay hidden (some vampires are even prominent people, such as the Savannah District Attorney and other local wealthy families) the existence of vampires and other beings is public knowledge.
• Matriarchy: Legacy vampire society is run by the female heads of their families, with the keepers of the Emerald Malkia (a kind of magical snake) as the preeminent family, led by their eldest woman. There is a ruling Legacy Council made up of the matriarchs which governs them all.
• Meet Cute: Juliette first meets Cal (whom she finds attractive but is too shy to initially approach) through bumping into her accidentally, spilling some of her drink on Cal's shirt. Cal brushes off this and it leads to them being at a party later where they kiss.
• Mercy Kill Arrangement: Jack and Theo had discussed the possibility and agreed to kill each other should one be turned into a vampire or other monster during a hunt.
• Monster/Slayer Romance: A romance between vampire Juliette and vampire hunter Calliope.
• Nice Mean And In Between: There's Juliette, who's a sweetheart; Elinor, who enjoys killing people and got her twin brother exiled from the family for shits 'n giggles; and Oliver, who took Theo in and tells Juliette she doesn't have to live the way Elinor wants her to, but killed Ashley and Noah and apparently has some nasty surprises planned for Savannah.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: Legacy vampires are incredibly hard to kill - sunlight doesn't hurt them, staking them through the heart only incapacitates them, and pure silver causes pain but nothing lethal. There is record of a guild member killing a legacy and living to tell the tale, but the silver spears made from the stake allegedly used to do the deed don't work. By the end of the season, there's still no firm way to take out a legacy, except by having Sebastian devour one alive.
• No Ending: The first season ended on a huge cliffhanger, with Netflix announcing two months after its release that the show was cancelled. As a result, viewers are left with no resolution for what will happen with Elinor being in custody, how Margot and Sebastian will approach the Legacy Council about the Emerald Malkia, if the infighting of the Burns family will ever be resolved, if Theo will ever restore his humanity, what will become of Oliver's plans for Savannah, or whether Calliope and Juliette will fall into animosity or reconcile their romance.
• Oh, Crap!: The hunters when the vampires they staked pick themselves up with obvious designs on retaliating.
• Our Ghouls Are Different: In 1x1 Cal and her brothers hunt ghouls inside a graveyard. They look just like zombies in most fiction, though faster than usual.
• Our Vampires Are Different: While it's implied that made vampires are akin to more traditional examples, the show mostly deals with legacy vampires. They are direct descendants of Lilith bonding with the serpent of Eden, now known as the Queen Serpent. As such they can pass easily for human, reproduce naturally, have reflections, can eat human food, and are immune to both sunlight and stakes (though the latter can incapacitate them for a moment). Their only weaknesses are their need for blood, requiring an invitation to enter a private home, and being burned by pure silver (though not killed). They have greater strength and more enhanced senses than humans, and Juliette implies that legacies have innate fighting skill. Legacies have paralyzing blood, certain sounds affect them, and their venom affects humans' minds whom they've bitten, including causing shared dreams. The bites they leave on humans' instantly vanish afteward. It's left unclear on the show how they can be killed. Draining a human it seems can turn them into a vampire as well, at least in some cases.
• Precision F-Strike:
  • The word shows up when the Fairmonts' home is vandalized with, among other things, "FUCK THE DA".
  • Again when Theo is turned into a vampire. Talia tells Jack, "You stay away from my fucking son."
• Protective Charm: In the pilot Jo Jo, a Guild Guardian, put wards on the Burns family's house with candles, sage and sea salt.
• Queer Romance: The romance between Juliette and Cal is the crux of the series.
• Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: The Burns kids are named after figures from Greek mythology - Theseus, Apollo, and Calliope, whose middle name is Antigone.
• Rule of Symbolism:
  • In the middle of rutting with Cal in the pantry, Juliette accidentally knocks down a couple of jars of cherries — she's in the middle of losing her cherry!
  • After Theo is turned into a vampire, he's restrained by Apollo wrapping a silver chain around his arm, burning him so his hunter's tattoo is bisected.
• Runaway Bride: Margot ran away from her wedding, leaving her fiancé at the altar, as it was the result of an arranged marriage she'd wanted out of. She later apologizes to her fiancé, who forgives her, having come to understand it over time.
• Shout-Out to Shakespeare: Cal appropriately compares herself and Juliette (who even has the same name with a different spelling as Juliet) with Romeo and Juliet, to the point that she quotes the play's prologue while they hide out in their school theatre. Being a legacy vampire and scion of vampire hunters respectively, they both note how much it applies to them. Comparisons continue to be made and the play often quoted throughout the rest of the first season.
• Shown Their Work: When Juliette is shown to be dreaming, her eyes are hopping back and forth beneath her eyelids. This is an actual process, called Rapid Eye Movement, that happens when people are having dreams in their slumber.
• Sibling Rivalry: Oliver and Elinor are twins, but at some point before the series Oliver was exiled from his home for being wantonly violent. When he returns, the two do nothing but butt heads. In the finale he tells Elinor that he blames her for manipulating him into his prior acts of cruelty and asks why she did that before leaving her in prison, only to be told by Elinor that she "just felt like it".
• Silver Has Mystic Powers: In the first episode, Cal purposely drops a piece of jewelry that's pure silver and waits for Juliette to pick it up in order to confirm her suspicion that Juliette is a vampire.
• Snakes Are Sinister: The Queen Serpent from the Garden of Eden, which the legacy vampires draw all their power from.
• Staking the Loved One: Discussed by Theo and Jack, who had decided that should either of them be turned into a monster, the other must kill him.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Juliette and Cal, a vampire and monster hunter, are drawn to each other despite their different worlds. They're well aware of this; after all the school is putting on Romeo and Juliet and of course Juliette is named after its lead. The show plays with this trope to a certain degree; the girls figure out what the other is like and that a relationship would be almost impossible before they become a couple, yet they still fall for each other anyway.
• Straight Gay: Ben and his on-again, off-again love interest Noah both lack any stereotypical traits of gay men.
• Summoning Artifact: In 1x2 Apollo accidentally gets a Summoner, a 3,000 year old artifict that calls a Shambler, a kind of monster, into the house past its wards. He gets chewed out for this by his family after its killed.
• Swallowed Whole: Davina is on the receiving end of this after pushing Elinor and Sebastian too far, thanks to Sebastian's fusion with the Queen Serpent giving him snake-like attributes.
• Their First Time: In the first episode, Cal and Juliette lose their virginities together (or Juliette does at least-Cal had a girlfriend before).
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: “The worst monsters are the ones that appear human”, Talia instructs her daughter Cal repeatedly.
• Vampires Are Rich: The legacy vampires are all old-money families, including the Atwoods. Though not a born vampire, Sebastian is a lawyer and may well have made plenty of money before becoming a D.A.
• Vampire Invitation: Legacy vampires need an invitation to enter someone's house. Cal's parents attempt to forbid Juliette entering theirs, though it doesn't work since Cal previously let her in.
• Voluntary Vampire Victim: There are some humans that willfully agree to allow legacies to feed from them, though Davina points out that there aren't that many anymore.
• Wall Bang Her: Juliette and Cal have sex up against a tree by a bonfire in a forest.
• Weird Trade Union: The vampire hunters are part of a guild that regulates and provides for them, with rules they enforce on members.
• Wham Episode: Everything changes for the worst in 1x08, most of which being a major fallout from the end of 1x07 wherein Apollo accidentally stakes Theo. Juliette has Elinor arrested for numerous kills, the Fairmont/Atwood family is under investigation by the Legacy Council, Juliette accidentally turns Theo into a vampire, Jack now wants to kill Theo, Talia sneaks Theo away to Oliver's for his own safety, Cal breaks up with Juliette and swears to kill her and the entire legacy society, and Oliver reveals he plans to overrun Savannah with monsters.
• Wham Line: After Cal's severing, she breaks up with Juliette and tells her about the ritual. Juliette then asks the question below, indicating the severing failed.

  Juliette: Then why are you in my dream?

• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Of the supernatural variety. Such creatures, categorized as "monsters", are treated as Always Chaotic Evil by both the Hunters Guild and the general public, with the more humanoid ones getting the worst of it. Even Juliette is a victim of this. Calliope would become the first to challenge these views. While this gets her reprimanded by the Guild and her family, Apollo and even their mother start to question it as well (albeit to a much smaller degree). Ben also fights this view upon discovering that the girl he's been friends with since childhood is a vampire.
• Wild Teen Party: Noah throws a party at his house. Cal stakes Juliette and Ashley is murdered by Oliver.
• Workout Fanservice:
  • In 1x3 Cal trains for combat wearing spandex exercise clothes which show off her good-looking, athletic body.
  • Apollo trains the local moms in how to stake vampires while wearing exercise clothes during 1x6, with them all obviously turned on at seeing his fit, muscular body.
• You Are What You Hate: Juliette transforms Theo into a vampire (apparently by accident), an action that nobody approves of. As Cal states, she turned him into the thing he hates the most because his mother was killed by a vampire in front of him, which Theo swore revenge over along with his father.

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