We're still months away from the arrival of Vampire Academy in theaters, but we've already seen a trailer for the film, and this week comes a new still from the movie. The story centers around a school for Vampires and "Dhampirs," the latter of which applies to the two characters featured in the photo above. In the still, we're looking at stars Zoey Deutch and Danila Kozlovsky, who play Dhampirs Rose Hathaway and Dimitri Belikov, and it looks like they're doing a bit of stake-training outdoors. Readers of Richelle Mead's series of novels on which this film is based might notice a couple of things amiss in this image, the first of which is the fact that it appears to be daylight out. In the book, due to the numerous sun-sensitive Moroi vampires that attend St. Vladimirs, the school is set up on a nocturnal schedule, which means class time is generally during the evening. But since the sunlight isn't an issue for dhampirs -- half vampire, half humans -- there's technically no reason these two couldn't be outside training during the day.
The other technicality worth noting here are the use of stakes, though that's not a huge spoiler, as we caught a glimpse of Rose using a stake in the previously released trailer, which is a shift from the book. Stakes are a great way to kill the evil Strigoi vampires -- not to be confused with the living Moroi vampires that attend St. Vlads -- but in the books, Rose doesn't begin stake-training until after the first book, and that's something screenwriter Daniel Waters spoke openly about when we talked to him about the adaptation earlier this month:
I think a movie is like a bullet and a lot of times the novel is like gunpowder and you have to try to pack as much of that novel into the bullet, but then you’ve also got to put your own silver casing on it, so even though I’m pretty faithfully taking a lot of the elements of the book, I have to kind of make my own kind of transitions, my own way of dealing with things. The fans sometimes get too hysterical, like for instance, there’s a sight of Rose holding the silver stake in the teaser and, oh my gosh, what have I done. Yes, I’m sorry, put the handcuffs on me, I accelerated Rose’s training from the second book so she now gets trained with the silver stake, and you can’t help making those changes.
So fans should anticipate some changes in the adaptation, but that's to be expected.
In the meantime, the scene in the image above looks like it might be from the same scene we glimpse in the trailer of Rose and Dimitri training together outdoors:
Vampire Academy is set to arrive in theaters February 14. The adaptation was written by Daniel Waters (Heathers) and directed by his brother Mark (Mean Girls).
