Way, way back in the 1980s and 1990s, two supernatural teen comedy movies made waves by introducing the sleepy suburbs to monstrous legends. Teen Wolf and Buffy the Vampire Slayer were both built on the absurdity of ancient monsters popping up in the idyllic realm of middle class America, far from the dreary castles and haunted moors of old. It’s wild to see how far their legacies have both stretched because of TV offshoots. Obviously Buffy was first out of the gate, with a decade-defining run where Sarah Michelle Gellar and her Scoobies acted as a last defense at the Hellmouth. Teen Wolf‘s TV dominance came in 2011 when MTV resurrected the concept into a moody show of teen angst that shed most of the movie’s DNA.
But now it’s also a movie, with Teen Wolf: The Movie standing in for a seventh season of the hit show before a spin-off series called Wolf Pack sees screens presumably next year. That series has now pulled the ultimate power move by getting vampire-slaying royalty to star and executive produce.
Based on the book by Edo Van Belkom, Wolf Pack is the story of Blake (Bella Shepard) and Everett (Armani Jackson), two teens whose lives change when a wildfire wakes up a big bad monster. Gellar will play Kristin Ramsey, an arson investigator with her own painful past to deal with (alongside the murderous supernatural baddie).
Interestingly enough, it’s not clear how (or even if) the series will tie into Teen Wolf, or if it’s simply being advertised as a spin-off because it has teen werewolves and Jeff Davis is writing it. Van Belkom’s book is its own creature, so if the series does blend with the existing Teen Wolf universe, it’ll be a kind of Frankenstein’s monster of adaptations: an Aurora Award finalist book smashed together with a TV show based on a 1980s movie. Regardless of whether it ever breaches the Teen Wolf world, Gellar is a fantastic addition.
(via Deadline)
