Vampires Friendship, Thicker Than Blood

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

Published: July 23, 2009

Vampire stories are almost always about dangerous love and forbidden lust, which is probably why every new generation of teenagers wants a taste.

"Being Human," a BBC America series with Aidan Turner, starts on Saturday.

Even before the hit movie “Twilight,” “True Blood” on HBO offered a Southern gothic version of the torment of suppressed desires. There are a slew of other iterations in books, movies and on television, including “The Vampire Diaries,” a CW series scheduled for the fall about a bloodsucking high school hottie who falls for a classmate and struggles to keep his fangs to himself.

The vampire story is as classic as the western, a genre whose pleasures, as the critic Robert Warshow once put it, lie in the minor variations. “Twilight” and “True Blood” and their many imitations offer similar celebrations of swoony love with a pallid stranger.

The tweak to “Twilight” is bourgeois respectability: the hero and his middle-class family in Forks, Wash., have forsaken their inhuman appetites and only occasionally feast on small animals — the vampire equivalent of turning vegetarian. In “True Blood” vampires who can safely feed on a synthetic blood are a militant minority demanding passage of a Vampire Rights Amendment.

“Being Human,” a new series on BBC America that begins on Saturday, offers the Dracula myth in a different chord: it’s structured less as a love story than as a buddy film.

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