Stream It Or Skip It: ‘I Woke Up A Vampire’ On Netflix, Where A Girl Becomes A Vampire On Her 13th Birthday

Adults tend to know what to expect from kid-oriented comedies with teens or tweens. Lots of fast-talking, precocious kids, with some over-the-top gags. But they also expect a story full of friends, family and at least some sort of interesting backstory for the characters. The main character in a new Netflix tween series certainly has that interesting backstory.

I WOKE UP A VAMPIRE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A girl walks in her neighborhood. She sees a black cloud rapidly approaching, and she tries to outrun it. When the cloud consumes her, she wakes up from her nightmare.

The Gist: Carmie Henley (Kaileen Angelic Chang) wakes up on her thirteenth birthday and doesn’t realize at first that something’s different. She takes a birthday selfie and sees there’s a glow over her face in the picture. Her dog is suddenly talking. And she’s now floating six feet above her bed.

On the way to school, she tells her best friend Kev Gardner (Niko Ceci) about what’s going on, and he sees what’s up when she kicks a trash can up into a tree across the street.

At school, there are more pressing matters, like her audition for the school musical. Carmie has been practicing her TikTok dances, but her main rival is Leanna Timmons (Ana Araujo), who is taking it very seriously. During the audition, Carmie speeds onto her mark when she misses a cue, hovers as she steps off the stage, then accidentally pushes Leanna so hard, a pipe busts and shorts out all the stage lights.

In order to help her figure out what’s going on, Kev takes Carmie to his favorite comics shop, owned by a man just known as The Collector (Kris Siddiqi). The owner trusts Kev enough to give him access to the basement, where he finds comics that explains how there are Mystics, people with special powers, and Blendeds, which are half-Mystic, half-human. Specifically, given the powers she’s been showing, she could be a vampling. Neither of her parents are Mystics, but since she was adopted, one of her birth parents was likely a vampling, as well.

In the meantime, The Collector meets with a new kid in town, Dylan Helsing (Zebastin Borjeau), whom we see earlier dropping a smoke bomb into a building to flush out a Blended Hugar, who he shrinks and puts in a jar.

Carmie discovers what her abilities can do when she meets a new student, Madison Spencer (Aaliyah Cinello), whom she first ran into outside the principal’s office after the audition incident. She saves Madison from a runaway car, but Madison knows that what happened isn’t physically possible.

Carmie then discovers another power: She can fly, and when she lands at her house, she also discovers she has fangs. Somehow, though, she hides them just in time to celebrate her birthday with her father Bill (Rainbow Sun Francks), mother Aasha (Ipsita Paul) and siblings Aiden (Jayd Deroché) and Jayden (Delia Lisette Chambers).

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? I Woke Up A Vampire would be the result of crossing early-era Boy Meets World with The Umbrella Academy.

Our Take: The creator of I Woke Up A Vampire, Tommy Lynch, is a veteran producer and writer of kids’ and teens’ TV (The Secret World Of Alex Mack, The Troop), so he knows the beats of a good teen series pretty well. And the first episode of this series has a pretty standard teen/tween series setup: Precocious main character, her best friend, a new situation, and a danger lurking in plain sight.

It’s not a bad story at all, given that much of the supernatural elements of it are rooted in how Carmie deals with them in the real world. And the idea that both Dylan and The Collector are conspiring to capture as many Blendeds as possible is a credible, if benign, threat for Carmie and Kev to deal with as Carmie figures out her powers.

Do the teens on this show talk a bit too fast? Yep. Teens on comedies like this tend to talk in a speed more attuned to younger ears than ours. The acting is a little uneven and sometimes over the top, though Chang is a charming lead who is easy to root for. But I Woke Up A Vampire is the type of shows families can watch together without having any of the family members (i.e. the parents) feel like they want to scroll their phones instead of paying attention.

What Age Group Is This For?: Because it’s ever-so-slightly scary, we’d recommend I Woke Up A Vampire for kids 7 and up.

Parting Shot: “That kid is weird, but he delivers. So many more to catch,” says The Collector to the Hugar that Dylan caught for him.

Sleeper Star: Aaliyah Cinello’s character Madison is new in town and has something mysterious about her, which we wonder if Carmie will figure out as they become better friends.

Most Pilot-y Line: The way the car happened to veer into the alleyway so Carmie could save Madison was very kid-show cartoonish, as was the pile of party supplies the car bashed into. Confetti was everywhere!

Our Call: STREAM IT. There’s just enough mythology in I Woke Up A Vampire to make the show engaging for fans of such things, and while the show’s not perfect, it’s a fun watch for the entire family.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.