With Halloween just around the corner, the time is ripe to honour ghouls, goblins, and especially vampires. The Scream Awards, held on October 17th and broadcast on the 27th on Spike TV, celebrate the best in horror, sci fi, and fantasy. This year, I’m sure to no one’s surprise, vampire blockbuster franchise Twilight took home four of the fan-based awards. Perhaps a little more surprisingly, HBO’s vampire series True Blood tied Twilight for the number of awards, taking home Best Horror Show, Best Horror Actress (Anna Paquin), Best Horror Actor (Stephen Moyer), and Best Villain (Alexander Skarsgård).

Then again, maybe it’s not so surprising: Anna Paquin won a Golden Globe this year for best actress in a television series, making True Blood one of the few series toasted by both fans and critics. Initially a little skeptical of the vampire premise, show-runner Alan Ball’s reputation made me give it a try—and I now count myself among the many fans that made the show the biggest hit this year for HBO since The Sopranos. With lots of time to kill until True Blood’s third season airs in June 2010, I decided to ponder the reasons this show has grabbed my imagination.

To start with, vampires are all the rage right now, with Twilight a huge hit at both the book store and the cinema, so True Blood is trendy. But the undead have long been a part of popular culture and trendiness alone doesn’t a hit series make. Just as Buffy the Vampire Slayer used vampire mythology to explore the travails of growing up, True Blood also draws upon the vampire’s rich history as a cultural touchstone. The undead have been used to explore many different societal anxieties, most of which at heart are about transgression of boundaries and fear of the “other.” And no entry into vampire lore has been more influential than Bram Stoker’s Dracula. True Blood explores similar questions about sexuality and oppression as the iconic novel and these embedded themes help give the series the kind of dramatic weight Buffy had during its successful run.

Dracula was not the first novel to transform the vampire from a decidedly unsexy bloodsucking monster into an attractive if dangerous foreigner. The same ghost story competition that produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein also generated a story called Vampyre by Byron’s physician, John Polidori. Polidori’s vampire was a bloodthirsty monster, but his exterior was that of a suave sexy aristocrat. The connection to Byron is a pleasing one, as this vampire could also be described as mad, bad, and dangerous to know—but attractive nonetheless. Stoker’s Dracula followed in this vein, as he used the vampire to explore anxieties about Britain’s crumbling empire and suppressed sexuality.

Article Author: Gerry Weaver

Gerry loves film, books, a few television shows (House, True Blood and Lie To Me come to mind), and writing about them.

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