So I’ve def­i­nitely never been what I’d con­sider a ‘fan’ of vam­pire films, in fact I can’t say I’ve really even enjoyed them. Typ­i­cally they are cov­ered in soft-focus and roman­ti­cize the idea of being a vam­pire or com­pletely ostra­cize them from soci­ety, yet never giv­ing an audi­ence a very detailed under­stand­ing of what a vam­pire is. Insert HBO’s newest release on DVD, True Blood. A show about vam­pires for peo­ple who don’t really even like vam­pires shows. This isn’t Buffy and this isn’t Blade, or what­ever god awful ver­sion of vam­pire show/movie has been around for quite some time. What is amaz­ing about this show is the shear fact that it breaks most all con­ven­tions of ‘vam­pire’ shows, from dis­prov­ing vam­pire myths or at least explain­ing them, the show adds a lot of depth to a genre most of us either don’t like or aren’t informed about.

Alan Ball the cre­ator of my favorite HBO show Six Feet Under is back to tell the tale of Sookie Stack­house, a 25-year-old wait­ress liv­ing in small-town Louisiana where a year or two after the gov­ern­ment has began to offer equal rights to vam­pires (what the show called ‘com­ing out of the cof­fin’). One day the new vam­pire in town strolls into Sookie’s bar they become friends. I won’t go into too much detail on the premise of the show con­sid­er­ing there are lots of other reviews and/or descrip­tions out there. Ball pro­vides a sim­i­lar style of expo­si­tion as he does in Six Feet Under where the show is essen­tially an ensem­ble cast but quickly breaks into the pri­vate lives of all the key play­ers and relates them back to the group. Each of the char­ac­ters is so intrigu­ing, from the main char­ac­ters to the less impor­tant ones, I could really watch a show with any of them as the key actors because they are all very inter­est­ing in their own way.

If you’d like to see a won­der­ful show full of all that HBO good­ness (the sex, vio­lence, lan­guage, and grit) with a fan­tas­tic cast which I can’t get enough of, watch True Blood, out now on DVD with Sea­son 2 start­ing on June 15^th, I’m really want­ing HBO now.

On a equally impor­tant side note, another genre-breaking piece of vam­pire ephemera I recently saw was the amaz­ing Swedish vam­pire film Let the Right One In. This film is won­der­ful in so many ways, from the sub­tle use of color to the aus­tere Swedish land­scapes, the film cap­tures a place in time that feels both old and new while telling a story that feels time­less as well. I won’t bother talk­ing about the details of the film, but highly sug­gest a viewing.