First Look at 'Vampire Academy' from the Writer of 'Heathers'

Oh, and you thought we'd seen the last of vampire love stories and YA adaptations? Perhaps you've never heard of Vampire Academy, then? Sure, the title evokes thoughts of the CW's Vampire Diaries, and perhaps the two aren't that different (I wouldn't know), but there are a couple of reasons to be excited about the big screen version of Richelle Mead's popular novels: Mark and Daniel Waters.

Mark Waters directed the terrific teen comedy Mean Girls, while his brother Daniel wrote the definitive anti-teen comedy Heathers, and according to USA Today they've managed to infuse some of their cynical, subversive humor into a story about Dhampirs and Morois and other stuff that just sounds really confusing...

While [Mark] Waters was loathe to return to a movie “where I heard locker doors slamming,” he and his brother found ways to pump Vampire Academy with subversive comedy a la Mean Girls and Heathers.

“We have this great juicy drama dynamic, where the stakes are particularly high, but that didn’t keep us from wanting to inject some of the humor that comes from teenagers trying to get along,” Water says.

So it's probably no coincidence that the most striking of the first images released could have been taken straight from Mean Girls, with three beautiful ladies looking like they're ready to pounce. The photo includes star Zoey Deutch on the left, who plays Rose Hathaway, a Dhampir (half vampire/half human) who acts as guardian to her best friend Lissa, who stands in the center played by Lucy Fry. Lissa comes from a peaceful race of mortal vampires known as the Moroi, who are under constant threat while attending St. Vladimir's Academy. On the right is Sarah Hyland as Lissa's cousin, Natalie. Another image is of Rose and her trainer Dimitri (Danila Kozlovsky), and it looks like the two will probably be sucking face at some point.

Let's hope the film lives up to the potential of the talent behind the camera, and that it does for these YA movies what Heathers did for 1980s high school comedies. Vampire Academy opens on February 14th.