True Blood
Recently there have been a couple of vampire programmes to hit our screens, such as Moonlight and Blood Ties that have put a slightly different slant on the Bela Lugosi/Christopher Lee vampire stereotype and now there's a new one.
Currently being shown on the Fox Channel (FX) in England and HBO in the States it follows Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin - X-Men's Rogue, Almost Famous), a waitress in the town of Bon Temps in Louisiana, who lives with her grandmother (Lois Smith - Fried Green Tomatoes, Falling Down) and brother, Jason (Ryan Kwanten - Summerland, Law and Order).
Things are hard for Sookie as she can read people's minds - well actually, it's more difficult for her to stop people's thoughts coming through in one big jumbled heap, than her actively having to 'read' them.
Then one night, Bill (Stephen Moyer - 88 Minutes, Waking the dead), a vampire comes into the bar.
Now, two years previously, vampires came out of the coffin on national television. Since the Japanese perfected synthetic blood, which vampires can live on perfectly well (yeah, right), removing the need for vampires to actually kill humans and therefore the threat that vampires once were to humans, they have been demanding equal rights (or should that be rites?).
So far so good, but not everyone's up there with the vampires and segregation, ostracisation and even hunting are things the vamps have to contend with. Their blood is like a drug to humans and when Sookie stops a couple of trailer-trash blood-hunters from draining Bill, they form a bond.
That's good, right?
Well, not entirely.
Not all the vampires are actually particularly nice and not everyone sees Sookie's 'good samaritan' act as positive, but Bill's mind is a mystery to Sookie as she can't hear his thoughts.
Add to that the fact that people are being murdered in Bon Temps, which seems to implicate Jason and you have a melting pot of intrigue.
The language is ripe, the sex is fairly... well, explicit (though not pornographic) and the characters moody, bringing together something that is not only different, but highly watchable. The vampires are scary and have those characteristics that made Hammer synonymous with the vampire genre, but with a twist - or several.
Nick B
