Steven Moffat’s new Dracula appears to have forgotten the story’s women

It’s official: Steven Moffat’s new Dracula will hit Netflix in January. But if the trailer is anything to go by, it seems to be leaving out an important part of the story.

Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss new adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula will be available on Netflix this January,

According to the streaming giant, Dracula arrive on January 4, just a few short days after the series airs on BBC One. This feels largely similar to the way Sherlock was handled – with only a few days passing between the British and American airings. (Though we’ll have to wait and see if this Gothic tale ends up as big of a hit as its predecessor.)

But it may not entirely be the Dracula you’re expecting. In this version of the story, the legendary vampire moves to England in 1897 in search of new blood and…probably murders a whole lot of people in a variety of gruesome ways.

Eagle-eyed fans will no doubt notice that this teaser is the same trailer that was released by the BBC a a month or so ago, just with Netflix branding attached. But, never fear, the BBC released also released a new, longer trailer to promote the series’ impending release.

And it features even more blood, body horror and vaguely blasphemous iconography than ever before.

But it’s missing something fairly important: Female characters.

Throughout the clip, there are several shots of what appear to be women, it’s true. It appears that Dracula faces off against a stake-armed squad of nuns at some point, and there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of what appears to be a ball. But there’s no sign of any significant female presence in the story, despite the fact that Dracula himself isn’t the main driver of Stoker’s tale.

It’s actually a pair of women.

In the story, Lucy’s end is tragic, to be sure, but Mina is the real hero of Stoker’s novel. She’s clever, capable, brave and decisive – certainly no damsel in distress. And both these female characters turn out to be just as important to the story as the vampire at its center.

But in all the promotion for this show thus far, you’d never know it.

I couldn’t even tell you who’s playing Lucy Westenra or Mina Harker, or if either of them even exist in this particular Dracula tale. But we’re all now painfully aware of Moffat’s thoughts on Dracula’s sexuality – spoiler alert, he considers the vampire “bi-homicidal” rather than bisexual, and if you were ever involved in the Sherlock fandom at any point, you probably aren’t surprised by any of this. (Sigh.)

Of course, this series is merely “inspired” by Stoker’s famous novel, which means that Moffat and Gatiss have some degree of room to play around with what characters exist in it. But it does feel rather impossible to tell the story of Dracula – particularly any version of it that features Jonathan Harker – without also including Mina in some way, even if it’s only in a flashback.

So, you know, her absence here is certainly concerning. But not quite as much as the almost total absence of significant women in any part of the footage we’ve seen thus far.

Perhaps Moffat, Gatiss and the BBC are simply leaning into their bad boy murder fiend thing for promotional purposes and there’s more at work her than the idea that a hot serial killer has a story worth telling. We can hope, at least.

What do you think of the look of Dracula? What kind of show do you think it will turn out to be?