Underworld

Len Wiseman’s 2003 debut has Selene investigating why one human is hunted in the long war between vampires and the werewolves called Lycans. The idea came from Kevin Grevioux, who also plays Raze. He studied microbiology at Howard University, grounded vampirism and lycanthropy in a viral mutation rather than a curse, took Romeo and Juliet as a template, and drew the feud from his own experience of interracial dating. A family tree settles this plot, not a monster. Wiseman got the job by pushing the vampire half onto a studio that wanted only a werewolf picture, and he refused offers to buy the script without him. Kate Beckinsale, until then a period and romance actor, was cast fast. The shoot was entirely in Hungary: the Budapest metro, and the Nádasdy Mansion at Nádasdladány as the vampire house, with Lycan suits built at Mafilm. White Wolf and Nancy A. Collins sued, arguing the film derived from the Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse games; it closed in a confidential settlement. A good fit if you want the feud treated as a genetics and succession problem settled by a bloodline. Not for you if you need a scene legible at a glance, since Tony Pierce-Roberts’s images run blue from end to end and the middle is mostly recounted history.