Vampires staking a bloody claim on audiences' hearts

..... Ball's previous show was the acclaimed Six Feet Under, about a family of morticians, and the show is based on a series by murder-mystery novelist Charlaine Harris.

True Blood vampire Bill Compton maintains there's nothing demonic about vampires, who, he says, "can stand before a cross, or a Bible, or in a church, just as readily as any other creature of God".

He just wants to rejoin human society.

He drinks synthetic O-negative, romances a human girl and defends himself against vampires who disagree with his desire to mainstream.

The show satirises the debate between mainstream and isolationist vampires as standard identity politics, with a vampire lobby group (the American Vampire League) facing off against a bigoted anti-vampire TV preacher whose wife looks like Tammy Faye Bakker.

The townspeople aren't too sure what to make of the undead in their midst either, particularly when the immortals start catching the eyes of attractive women.

As one character grumbles: "You know what I really wish would come to Marthaville? Buffy or Blade."

It's said wistfully.

Vampires are out of the coffin, and they're not going back in.

No matter how mundane their politics or morals, vampires will always be cool, because sex and death never go out of style.

More and more, vampires are not hard to sympathise with: They eternally have to choose between loving us and feeding on us.

Given that rapacious dilemma, Hollywood can't help but to keep feeding us the morally ambiguous vampire.

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