Our skin is still crawling from the vamp-tastic first season of Guillermo del Toro’s FX horror series The Strain, and production is now underway on season two.

The first season was a bit of a gory mixed bag, but the series had finally hit its weird-awesome stride by the time the season finale rolled around. Considering del Toro went into the show with a 3-5-year plan already in mind — since it’s based on the book trilogy of the same name — we’re glad to hear he’ll get a chance to tell more of the tale.

With filming underway on the season-two premiere, del Toro chatted with Collider about the progress they’re making and how things will change in the second year. Not surprisingly, they’ll be changing a lot. Believe it or not, del Toro says things are getting even darker — and they plan on going a bit “off book” from the established story:

“We started shooting last week. We’ve been prepping for about two months. I’m going to, god willing, direct the prologue of the first episode and some second unit and direct the black and white Mexican wrestler B-movie pictures that appear in the season, because one of our characters is a masked Mexican wrestler [laughs], so it will be a lot of fun for me. The pilot is being directed by Gregory Hoblit whom I admire and loved his work for many decades. We start, I think, with a really great episode. We’re about two days away from being done, second and third are in the pipeline, the sets are looking fantastic, we’re doing a lot of new makeup effects, we’re doing a lot of surprises. We’re going a little more off book this season than the last season. The last season went quite a bit off book on the last third, but this season we are introducing new characters even to the books and some characters are going to have really interesting arcs. Eph is going to a much darker place after losing Kelly. It’s a really interesting new world. And it’s great to be back on the show and see everybody back, like a family reunion.”

The new season of The Strain is expected to hit FX in 2015. Do you like the direction they seem to be taking things?

(Via Collider)