I’ve been watching the HBO series “True Blood”. I have liked vampire stories/movies since I was a kid. My first exposure to the Dracula story happened in 1958 when I saw the Hammer Film version of Dracula starring Christopher Lee as the nasty count. I was hooked. Of course I had to read the Bram Stoker novel after that. Over the years I have seen most of the Vampire themed movies, including all 3 of the movies that were based on Stoker’s novel. Those include the 1931 Bela Lugosi version, the 58 Christopher Lee version and the 1992 Francis Coppola version that starred Gary Oldman as Dracula. And I’ve even seen the ridiculous versions, Blackula,etc. I liked ‘Lost Boys’ and ‘Interview With a Vampire’ and read most of Ann Rice’s novels.
Then a couple of years ago, I was in the checkout at Barnes & Noble when I saw a little book by an Author named Charlaine Harris called ‘Dead Until Dark’. I picked it up and bought it and found it an interesting take on the vampire legend. The primary character was a small town waitress named Sookie Stackhouse from a fictional Louisiana town. In this book, the vampires (some of them) were the good guys. Well I read several more in the series, and like most vampire series, the later books became harder to read as she had to invent new circumstances and improve on the ‘lore’ of the vampire. Then I heard that HBO was filming a series based on Harris’ novels. So, I watched ‘True Blood’ last year. It followed the first novel pretty closely and best of all maintained the irreverent tongue-in-cheek tone of the novel.
On the HBO series, Sookie is played by Canadian/New Zealand actress Anna Paquin. Here is an interview with her from Jimmy Fallon’s TV show last week. About two thirds of the way through, she explains the difference between ‘True Blood’ and the “Twilight’ series…
Update: Well, apparently NBC made Youtube pull down the clip from Jimmy Fallon’s show. I hate this whole Intellectual Property-DRM bull… but that’s another post. If you want to see the clip here’s a link to it on NBC’s site: Anna Paquin on Jimmy Fallon. The reason I posted it was because Anna made a great comment comparing True Blood to the Twilight movies. She said “Well, they’re all about not having sex, and our show is all about (pause) having sex.” Pretty cute. To replace the Jimmy Fallon clip, here is HBO’s trailer for True Blood:
