In Impact Winter, a commit plunges Earth into darkness, and an endless winter, vampires rise and humans scatter to hide underground. A band of survivors hiding out in a medieval castle fallout shelter in the British countryside starts to form a resistance. Two sisters are at the center of the story: a battle-ready vampire hunter and her younger sister Hope, who yearns for what life was like above ground before the endless winter began. Each sister will do what it takes to continue their journey, potentially risking everything.

Impact Winter was created and written by Travis Beacham (Carnival Row, Pacific Rim). Impact Winter has a stacked cast led by Holliday Grainger, Esme Creed-Miles, Liam Cunningham, Sacha Dhawan, David Gyasi, Caroline Ford, Chloe Pirrie, and Bella Ramsey. Impact Winter, the audio drama with immersive 3D sound, debuted its second season on Audible on June 13, and season 1 is available now.

Related: Impact Winter Returns For Season 2 With New Victims For Penelope & Hope To Find

Screen Rant spoke with Impact Winter creator Travis Beacham at San Diego Comic-Con about the second season of his audio drama. He discusses how he approaches audio drama storytelling and how he makes his vampires stand out from others. Beachman also shares his excitement about potentially expanding the world of Impact Winter and his thoughts on the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.

Travis Beacham on Impact Winter

Screen Rant: Guys, we are here at San Diego Comic-Con 2023. I'm here with Travis Beacham for Audible's Impact Winter. You're in Season 2 now. What inspired the story of Impact Winter, and how did you approach this as an audio drama?

Travis Beacham: Oh, wow, it's hard to say what exactly inspired it. I don't know what came first, if it was the comet or the vampires. But it's a very short jump in my head, or in my imagination at least, from having a world without sun to, "Maybe vampires would like that and come out and try to rule things.”

I think what I liked about it initially and what really made it catch fire in my imagination was that I loved the mixing of fantasy and sci-fi elements. I feel like in a lot of especially modern vampire things, you see them as this disease or this mutation, which is cool. But what I really, really liked was Bram Stoker's Dracula, the Coppola one, where it's unclear what the scope of his powers are. It's like, "He's a wolf. He's a bat person. He's a fog slipping through the cracks under the door," that kind of thing, where vampires were this explicitly magical god-like thing.

I love the idea of mixing that with this very sci-fi, post-apocalyptic setting. You hear a comet impact in Impact Winter, and your head goes to a sci-fi place. So I like mixing that with bringing in the occult and the supernatural and mixing those two ideas in this.

What separates the vampires in Impact Winter from other vampires we may have seen in the past?

Travis Beacham: I wanted them to have this folkloric gravitas. It's like magic to them. And not to say that we don't get the other kinds, as well. We get the ravening hordes, because that’s part of what separates these vampires from other vampire sorts of things [is that] we have this caste system. So in the lowest caste, you have the very feral, animalistic, slobbering, zombie-like vampires. And going up, you have the ones that look like humans, in the middle, that look like humans and can pass for humans. And then at the top are your Bram Stoker's Dracula ones. They can do anything. They have all these weird powers. They can shapeshift.

I like the idea, because in folklore a lot, when you read about old vampire stories, they really tend to conflate the idea of vampires and werewolves and witches, and they're all treated as the same thing. So I really tried in this to codify that into the mythology and have shape-shifting and vampirism and magic all be intertwined.

I love the fact that you really deep-dive into the history of vampires. When you were doing your research on vampires, was there anything that stood out to you that you wanted to stay away from, or anything that you wanted to dive into more?

Travis Beacham: I don't know that there was anything I really wanted to stay away from. I did want to keep a bit of a distance and had to stop myself from explaining them too much because I do come at things from, I think, more of a sci-fi mindset. And I think turning that off and letting things be mysterious and letting things, like, "Oh, I don't want to explain this too much. I don't want to make them too biological."

But just getting enough to keep them serious. I do still add things; when you change into a vampire, you become a cocoon. Your skin hardens, and inside, you liquefy and reform as sometimes a younger version of yourself, but without scars, without any kind of whatever. And you hatch into this immaculate entity. But I don't know; I just thought that was fun, adding that Ridley Scott alien body horror thing, like a cocoon yielding this magical vampire creature.

Can you talk to me about how your experience with film and television helped influence the audio style that we have in Impact Winter?

Travis Beacham: I feel like you rarely hear this with audio dramas, but with Impact Winter I wanted this messiness. I feel like you hear a lot of audio series nowadays, and what you hear is this very clean quality, all the voices very discreetly isolated. And I wanted Impact Winter to sound like a movie that you just happened onto, that you were looking away.

Whereas in another series, you might have very purposeful sounds, like a door creaking or footsteps or a phone ringing. All those are very isolated and very identifiable. I wanted Impact Winter to be bristling with sounds, some of which you could identify, some of which you couldn't. But that all felt like part of the sound design of a film, and in doing that, we got a film sound team. They don't usually do radio stuff or audio stuff. They usually do sound design for movies and TV shows. So, that was part of what separated it.

Talk to me about where we left off in season 1 and how we see some of these characters evolve in season 2.

Travis Beacham: Darcy, of course, began season 1 as this vampire hunter and defender of this survivor community, who ends up being turned herself. I think she spends a lot of season 1 grappling with what that means and what kind of person she's going to be, now that she's a vampire. She ends up in this place where she discovers that being the most recent anointed one, the first one of this winter period, has given her this prophetic import. She's this prophesied character who's foretold to end the winter and kill the queen, and she is really all about that. I think once she hears that, she's like, "Yes, finally a purpose that I understand, something that intersects with my life before. I can be a crusader. I can be a defender of humanity, a defender of the world."

She's gone off to begin her training. If it was Star Wars, it would be like she's going to Dagobah to meet Yoda, basically. And so that's where she's going off to, and she's ultimately going to discover, in Season Two, that all of that is a bit more complicated than she initially thought, and she's not quite out of the woods just yet.

[There’s also] her younger sister, who was quite the opposite of Darcy and had spent most of her life in this bunker. She’s grown up and become a teenager in this bunker, never seeing the sky, never being around more than however many hundred people were there. She’s now had to step in to fill in her sister's shoes as a defender of that community. In season 2, we'll get to see her stepping into those shoes and seeing how she handles it differently from her sister.

Which character dynamics were you most excited to play with in season 2?

Travis Beacham: I wanted to bring in new characters, as well. I wanted to populate it with new characters because I figure you've always got people coming into this bunker, and what's the fun in having Darcy go off into this world without meeting new people in this world, like her maker's maker and that kind of thing?

But also, there's the character of Penelope, who I love. She spent most of the first season as this prisoner in this castle, who was interrogated and poked and prodded and has now been accepted as part of the community and is actually filling in for Liam Cunningham's character, Jepson, who was killed at the end of the first season. Now it's a vampire who's become the head of security at the castle, that they've all grown to accept and trust.

What were you most excited to explore in season 2 that you didn't really have the time to really explore in season 1?

Travis Beacham: I think probably the size of the world. Season One, it was very isolated to just this corner of England, the southwest corner of England, which is a location that I really love. It's got those moors and the fog. It's Hound of the Baskervilles, whatever, all that stuff. Or Daphne du Maurier, sorry, and a setting that I really, really loved.

But this, again, is a thing that's happened across the world. The Impact Winter is impacting the entire globe, and I think the fun of Season Two is that we get to expand that, and we get to leave this nest that we spent so much time in, in Season One. We get to go up north and find out what the Vampire Resistance is doing. We get to go down south, into the hub of vampire politics, where the ruling class is and all their machinations. So it's having a lot of fun with that and just seeing the bigness, the scope of the world.

Talking about world-building, I know you guys did a prequel comic to expand this world. It's set years before the events of the show. Can you talk to me about how you guys decided to expand the world through that medium?

Travis Beacham: I think part of the fun in working with Skybound is they have a very wide-angle lens, and so when you're telling a story, it's like, "What mediums can this story exist in?" Immediately, we're talking about not only the audio series, but the comic books, and always talking about a video game, which I can't wait to play. I picture it would be early on, you pick human or vampire, and you see how it turns out. I would love to play something like that.

But in terms of comics, it's something I did in Pacific Rim, as well: coming in late to a story. Pacific Rim is 10 years or something after the Kaiju come. And when we come into Impact Winter, it's seven years after the impact, and part of the fun in that is I like the lateness of coming into a story like that, but it also gives you all this pre-history that you get then get to go back and fill in, and with comic books and whatnot.

And so our first prequel comic was set a few years before the series begins, still after the winter, but a few years before the series begins. And in this latest one to come out, we get to go all the way back. It tells the story of one of the main characters, who's a vampire, and it goes all the way back to Roman Britain, so way, way back. And I just thought that was a fun turn, and an unexpected turn in a post-apocalypse, to veer left and be like, "Let's go way back into history."

Now, we have things being expanded in all forms of media, and you talked about expanding this world through a video game. Is there anywhere else? We have comics, audio dramas. Anywhere else you'd like to see Impact Winter expanded?

Travis Beacham: I would love to see a TV series, honestly. I think when I first had the idea, I pictured it as a TV series, and it just came together as an audio series in a funny way. I would definitely love to see that. I would love to see the video game. I would love to see more comics. Yeah, I think just anywhere where a story can be told, I would love to see some version of it.

Audio dramas are a different animal than film, television, and video games. Can you talk to me about what you learned that you can now apply to other forms of the medium?

Travis Beacham: I do a lot of genre writing for screen, and always there's this thing that you have to do, where you have action scenes. I'm not a big fan of writing action scenes. I love watching them, but they're tedious to write, because you're just like, "I'm going to write this," and then the stunt coordinator is just going to come in, and the director's going to come in, and they're going to do their own thing anyway. A lot of times, I wish I could just write, "They fight," and whatever.

But the thing about telling stories in audio drama is those scenes really don't work. Action does not work in audio, because it just sounds like mush, like, "pound, pound, pound," and you don't know who's hitting who or whatever. So you have to learn to create tension and learn to really drive scenes with dialogue, which I found to be extremely fun. You can't lean on action scenes, and you can't lean on chase scenes. You have to figure out new ways to create tension, just using dialogue, just using sound effects.

Did you know that that was going to be the challenge going in? Or is that something you discovered as you were doing the project?

Travis Beacham: It's something I discovered as I was doing the project. Going in, I knew it was going to be a little bit of a challenge, and I think part of what drew me to doing it as an audio series was this idea of, "Well, maybe you could mine the fact that you don't see something for tension." If you have two characters, and they're looking out the window, and they're like, "Oh, my God, what's that?" And you can't see; you're listening. You're just waiting for someone to tell you what they're seeing.

I was like, "Well, maybe you could have fun with that. You could build tension with that." And I think as I was doing it, I just realized, "Wow, this is a constant thing." It's not like sometimes you can't see. You never can see what's going on. I feel like my dialogue chops got much, much more finely honed after two seasons of Impact Winter than after all the previous work on TV and film.

Can you talk to me about the collaboration process and working with Skybound?

Travis Beacham: Oh, yes, they've been extraordinary. They've been very, very good partners. I think they're a very creator-friendly company, obviously, with Robert Kirkman. They've really just been incredible enablers. And the execs there, Rick, has talked to me, and he's just said, "The important thing here is that you're having fun," he says, "because when you're having fun, it shows, and the work is good, and it's engaging." And I'm just not used to execs talking to me, as a writer, like that, so that's been very rewarding and very fun to have this cool sanctuary where you're enabled to be your best creative self.

We're here at San Diego Comic-Con 2023, and look, it's fair to say that this convention has been affected by the SAG strike and the WGA strike. We at Screen Rant stand with the SAG and the WGA. Can you share your thoughts on SAG and WGA strikes? And how you’d like to see the industry change?

Travis Beacham: It has to change, honestly. It's an existential thing, and not only for the sake of continued employment of writers and actors as a field that you can make a living in, but also just for the creative authenticity of the work itself.

I think AI is massively, massively important. And I remember there was a time when I was telling myself, "Oh, well, it's never going to be able to tell a story." And messing with Chad GPT now, it's not great, but it's great in the eyes of some execs. It's serviceable. An exec could type in, "Give me an Ant-Man movie," and be like, "Oh, that's good." Which is terrifying. Because I feel like audiences and fans, it would make all the difference in the world to them, who have such a finely-tuned sense of, "Oh, that works and that's great," or, "Oh, that's crap."

I do think it's not only for the employment of the writers, but it's for the art itself, and I think it's an incredibly important moment. Both guilds have never been more determined. I remember the previous strike; it didn't even feel like this. This feels like everyone's in it for the long haul.

Impact Winter season 1 & 2 are available on Audible now.