From the very beginning, First Kill launches a playful, spooky and head-over-heels romantic arrow at your affection. The theme song, Stephanie Mabey’s “The Zombie Song” from 2012, does that heavy lifting with Mabey’s heart-hungry crooning presaging the series’ forbidden romance. And the lyrics have probably been stuck in your head since, especially that Twilight shoutout: “All of your friends, they’d try to kill us / But only because they’d be jealous / Our love is deeper than Edward and Bella’s.” First Kill showrunner Felicia Henderson — a self-professed music obsessive — had the exact same feeling when she first stumbled upon the song during a late-night Spotify deep-dive.

“It’s time to go to bed. It’s five in the morning. And then something just said type in the word zombie, just for fun,” Henderson tells Tudum. “‘The Zombie Song’ came up and I’m, like, ‘Well, this should be interesting.’ I listened to it, and I’m like, ‘Oh, we will be using this song!’” 

It’s easy to see why Henderson was so drawn to the track, from Mabey’s album Wake Up Dreaming, for First Kill. As singer-songwriter Mabey sings in the opening bars of the theme song, “Our love story could be kind of gory, far from boring / We’d meet at a post-apocalypse / Yeah, I’d be slowly walking in a group stalking you.” It’s a perfect encapsulation of the tension between vampire hunter Calliope (Imani Lewis) and vampire Juliette (Sarah Catherine Hook) as would-be supernatural enemies who can’t help but be drawn to each other. 

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Interestingly, the First Kill theme makes an important swap in the next line. Mabey sings over the illustrated credits, “You’d be the only one alive that I could not resist,” out of recognition for Cal and Juliette’s queer love story. In the original track, she sings “only man.”

Initially, Henderson thought First Kill would use “The Zombie Song” as part of the soundtrack for one of its eight episodes. She dispatched her assistant to track down Mabey and any details on her song, since Henderson wasn’t having any luck. “I looked on Instagram, [Stephanie’s] account was down for, like, the last two years,” Henderson says. “I looked on YouTube. She was not active there anymore. She no longer had her deal at the record [label].” Henderson eventually found Mabey “living her life” in Utah and talked to the performer about finalizing a deal for her song. Obviously, everything came together — particularly once Henderson realized “The Zombie Song” fit into her vision for the comic book-style First Kill credits. 

“I had a very early draft of what I created for the main title, with the comic book characters and played the song [for Netflix’s director of content acquisition Cole Galvin],” Henderson says. He loved it. “He goes, ‘Oh, my goodness, I have goosebumps.’ And I go, ‘It’s the one, isn’t it?’ He goes, ‘It’s the one.’” During post-production, Henderson continuously caught members of the post production team “humming the song” during their lunch breaks. 

Just like the zombies in the song, Mabey’s track is getting a whole new life through First Kill. That’s a piece of irony no one could have seen coming. As the singer joked in her acoustic YouTube video of the song in 2009, “Vampires are still getting way too much love these days.” Thirteen years later, First Kill’s’ fanger-killing Burns family would agree. 

With additional reporting by Jean Bentley.