Actor Doug Hutchison, perhaps best-known to genre fans for his attention-stealing scenes in the TV series The X-Files, Millennium and Lost, will soon be seen on the big screen in the horror feature The Burrowers, a scary creature feature set in the Old West. Where you will not see him is on your computer screen, in Vampire Killers! a new web-series in which he's created, co-written and produced, but does not act in.

Hutchison sat down with Horror.com's Staci Layne Wilson to give her an exclusive first look at the series, and to explain a little bit about what's at stake for his own immortal creatures.

Staci Layne Wilson / Horror.com:  You’re set to launch your horror vampire shorts-series on the first of October [2008], so how will this play out? Will you be running a new episode every week? Will people be able to look at archival episodes if they’ve missed the first few?

Doug Hutchison:  People will be able to go to the site on and after October 1st. All six of our episodes, which are about two minutes long, will be airing in consecutive order, so you can click on and watch all six. They will be up at VampireKillers.tv forever, so you can go back and watch them as many times as you like. New people can watch them. You can have friends come on and watch them.

Our hope with Vampire Killers! is that depending on our popularity and how many hits we may accrue after we launch, we’re hoping to snag a few sponsors; some really cool sponsors that might want to sponsor our site, sponsor the series, and therefore, allow us to shoot more. That’s really our dream, and if that happens, then yes, we’re going to start shooting more episodes. My hope is that we would air a new episode at least every other week if not every week once we get the ball rolling. That’s the master plan right now.

Wilson:  Who is your audience? Would you say its fans of horror movies or teens who read the Twilight book series, or what? Who’s going to be tuning in?

Hutchison:  I think obviously horror fans, but vampires, as you know, is just a genre that people can’t get enough of. They’re voracious for anything vampire, and I’ve always loved vampires, and so this is just another twist on the genre. My hope is that we’re going to hit all those people who love vampires. The other thing is, yes, we have the sexy babes. We have the allure of sex, so I think we’ll probably have a pretty heavy male audience in their 20s even going into their 30s, but I don’t know. You can be the judge of this because you’ve seen it, Staci, but I think the sex in our series is seductive. I think women can get turned on by it, too, and the power of women and the incarnation of vampires is also a sexy thing.

So I’m not discounting the fact that a lot of women might dig it, too. I showed my mom the final product the other day. She’s, like, 68 years old. She hates vampires, and she would never rent a vampire movie, but she was totally intrigued, biting her nails, and at the end, she said something that I really took to heart. She said, “You know, I want to see more because it’s not about the gore to me. It’s about the story, and I’m really into these four kids, these four 20-somethings.”  So, she got involved in the characters and that’s really my hope [for a wider audience]. This isn’t just a vampiric sensation where we’re just throwing bloody images at our viewers and scary images. My hope is that we’re integrating a good solid story line, a killer cast acting their little hearts out, some good writing, and the vampire twist.

Wilson:  I like how you have almost the Old World seductiveness of it, even though it's in a present-day setting. A lot of it is kind of implied, you know, back in the Victorian days when vampires were alluring and sexy, and they were mysterious whereas a lot of the vampire stories today are watered down or they’re, like, your everyday people in jeans and tee-shirts just sitting around having a cup of coffee. They can go out in the day time, they don't need blood to survive. True Blood, the new cable series is like that. So what was it that made you decide to stick with the more traditional vampire with the fangs and just the whole look and attire for them that’s so sophisticated and polished?

Hutchison:  Huh. I didn’t see it that way. It’s interesting that that was your take. I mean, we’re sticking with a lot of the mythology, but we’re also making up our own rules as we go along to make it more contemporary. I’m kind of excited that you got that feeling from it because it tells me that we’re possibly tapping into something mythological, but by the same token, I really want that first scene in the motel room to be something out of any day life in L.A., any motel room in L.A. where something potentially horrific is going on inside of it. In that regard, I think we’re probably a little more contemporary than having jacked into the tradition of the past.

Also, we just touch upon in the first six episodes and we’ll allow it to unfold as the series goes on, but we’re not sticking to the old “a vampire has to be stabbed in the heart with a wooden stake.”  Our premise is you take down a vampire by piercing the heart any means necessary. If you’re in a class room, and a vampire is sitting next to you, you can pick up a #2 pencil and jam it into the vampire’s heart, and they’re going to expire. You can take them down with just about anything – a kitchen knife, anything you want, but it’s not necessarily the wooden stake. Our vampires could care less about garlic. They can also walk into churches and genuflect, and they can even dip their fingers into the holy water and laugh.

Wilson:  Since they do have this vulnerability of being able to be killed by anything that penetrates their heart, what kind of things do they use to keep their attackers from doing that? Do they have a mesmerizing quality that they can dazzle people into not hurting them?

Hutchison: Well, yes, and I think that our vampires, at least now, are these alluring women.  I think that they can use their sexuality to lure their victims in without too much suspicion or worry that they’re going to be killed by anybody except for our four vampire killers. I think what we’re setting up is that the coven is starting to realize that there’s this little group out there hell bent on their destruction. We might be seeing more of their defense, or offense as it might be, toward this group in order to get rid of them so that they can achieve what they’re here to achieve.

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Staci Layne Wilson reporting

Read Horror.com's review of Vampire Killers! here [1]