For centuries, two races evolved hidden deeply within human culture –the aristocratic, sophisticated Vampires and the brutal, more feral Lycans, that is, werewolves. To humanity, their existence is but whispers of a myth but to one another, they are lifelong rivals, sworn to a secret war to the end, until only one race is left standing.
This is the story of Underworld, the new film written by Danny McBride and Kevin Grevioux, and directed by Len Wiseman.

A forbidden love

In the midst of this ongoing struggle, a Vampire warrior named Selene (played by Kate Beckinsale), discovers a Lycan plot to kidnap a young human doctor. After shadowing the Lycan's victim (Scott Speedman) throughout the city, she forms an unprecedented bond with him, being human, so when the Lycans make their move, Selene can fend off their vicious assault.

As she races to save Michael and unravel the Lycan intrigue surrounding him, Selene discovers a secret that has terrifying repercussions for both tribes –a nefarious plan to awaken a new invincible species of predator that combines the strengths of both creatures and the weaknesses of neither, that threatens to tip the balance of power in favor of the werewolves, who have been on the losing end of the struggle for centuries.

Kate Beckinsale and Scott Speedman star in a sweeping tale of deadly action, ruthless intrigue and a forbidden love, all set against the backdrop of an ancient tribal rivarly in a timeless Gothic metropolis.

Deeper myths

The tradition of vampires and werewolves goes back to the beginning of the film industry in Hollywood, but a movie like Underworld takes the myths into another, perhaps a more meaningful, direction. Unbeknownst to the humanity around them, Vampires and Lycan werewolves have been engaged in a centuries-long battle for dominance, living alongside them but hidden within certain sectors of the vast urban expanse. This new film takes a classic high concept and gives it another twist when Kate Beckinsale, who plays Selene, a Vampire warrior who hunts down and kills werewolves, one day falls in love with one of her sworn enemies.

Writer and actor Kevin Grevioux came up with the idea when approached by director Len Wiseman: “Len call me and said, ‘What do you think about a werewolf movie?’ and I said, ‘No much, really’” Grevioux recalls in a recent interview. “The reason being that there have only been two werewolf movies to really speak about and those were American Werewolf in London and The Howling”.

But while tossing ideas around for a couple of days, Grevioux recalls, “I said to Len, ‘Now look I’m going to tell you this and don’t laugh, because my idea in a way sounds kind silly, but if you think about it, this could be really cool. What if we did a Romeo and Juliet story, but instead of Montagues and Capulets, we used werewolves on one side and vampires on the other?”.

“I remember –says Grevioux- Len got dead silent and crossed his arms. And I said, ‘Just hear me out’. And so I pitched him a movie that would be more like West Side Story with the antagonism and the interracial interplay. I created this whole world that took place centuries ago. I said, ‘Our premise will be that vampires and werewolves had a symbiotic relationship rooted way back in antiquity”.

A long year of hard work

Len Wiseman and Kevin Grevioux invested a year in developing the story and the script of Underworld. When they run into trouble, Wiseman turned to another friend, screenwriter Danny McBride, who initially was just as reluctant as Grevioux to write a script about werewolves.

“Everyone keeps plugging this as Romeo and Juliet, and Len and I keep running away from that as fast as we can”, McBride says. “It was apparently just a selling point with the studios. We were a little bit nervous, because it isn’t a Titanic-type love story at all. It’s going to be more realistic. As realistic as you can make vampires and werewolves, anyway”.

According with the story created by Grevioux, Wiseman and McBride, Underworld is a milieu where vampires who for centuries have killed werewolves, called Lycans (short for lycanthropes) have been known as Death Dealers.

While humans go about their business in what appears to be a normal world, Death Dealers and Lycans continue their war of annihilation.
“The wars went on for so long, and they’re so tight-lipped about the past, that people just perform their duties”, McBride explain in the same conversation. “Some people involved don’t even know why they’re fighting”.

In some way Death Delers see themselves as necessary, because Lycans are carnivorous. Lycans tear humans apart while vampires stopped feeding on humans hundred of years ago. The vampires in Underworld feed with synthetic plasma and while the Lycans are brutal, vampires have turned to high tech: The next step for them is to drink cloned blood.

The vampires then hunt down the Lycans because if Lycans keep tearing people up, it will prove the werewolves exist. The vampire's line of thinking is, ‘they- and by extension we -can be found out and exposed’. That’s the practice the Death Dealers started back in the Middle Ages when they had people running around with pitchforks.

In Underworld, Selene has learned to hate Lycans from her father, Viktor, the head vampire. She embraces her role as a Death Dealer, but there’s plenty Viktor hasn’t told her. Selene doesn’t know the root of the hatred between vampires and Lycans, or her father’s part in creating it.

The truth is, Viktor had another daughter during the Middles Ages who fell in love with Lucian, a Lycan, and became pregnant.
“Victor feared a baby half Vampire half werewolve -it’s really a play on racism and slavery”, McBride says. “He was so upset, because what happened with his daughter, that he created these rules, this covenant, that there could be no mixing of the species, because the vampires are on top. And if there’s a mixing of species, you’re going to have something more powerful than either side, and the vampires are going to lose their place in the hierarchy. Because he’s the one that creates all the rules, he’s forced to kill his daughter, have her burned alive in front of Lucian. She was the love of his life. Vampires ever since have been out to get Lucian, and Lucian’s been out for revenge. But from Selene’s point of view, the vampires are in the right, because she doesn’t know any of this. It’s all secret."

“Then the past repeats itself. Selene becomes taken with this human, which is bad enough in vampire’s eyes, who then later gets bitten by Lycan. So she has, by default, a thing going on with this Lycan, and Viktor is besides himself because it’s happening all over again. To Viktor, Selene is his perfect daughter; she was his replacement daughter who hated Lycans as much he did”.

A cientific reason to exist

The vision of Kevin Grevioux for Underworld was to avoid mysticism and focus on a scientific reason for vampires and werewolves to exist.
“I based everything on a form of super-rabies and genetic splicing”, he explains. “Way back in antiquity, the first groups of vampires were bitten by bats; which carried this disease (the appetite for blood). On the Lyncan side, they were bitten by wolves.

The disease spread and it caused a virus. It created both vampires and werewolves. If you look at the old Frankenstein/Werewolves movies, the villagers were always after those guys. If they had a symbiotic relationship, the werewolves protected the vampires while they sleep during the day, and vampires would watch over the werewolves when they were uncontrollable during the full moon.

This relationship led them to cross paths and start fraternizing in love. That created this monster called hybrid that had all the powers of both races but none of the weaknesses. So there was an edict and a pact between the two races that none of them would ever co-mingle in that way for fear of creating a hybrid”. This mythology, in his different levels and directions is at the end the heart of our movie".