Vampires Stake a Claim on Audiences' Hearts

Vampires were transforming from oversexed Satanic demons into regular antiheroes, imperfect and inhuman but worth rooting for anyway.

And their authors see them that way. "True Blood" creator Alan Ball says: "Vampires are just like humans. Nobody's a hundred percent good, nobody's a hundred percent bad." Meyer agrees, saying that all her vampires have the moral freedom to choose. So does novelist Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, who explains, "Bad guys who are evil for the sake of evil are boring." (Full disclosure: Atwater-Rhodes once created a vampire named Alex Remington. No relation.)

"True Blood" has a noble macabre pedigree. 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.

Recalling Matheson's pluralism, the show satirizes 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 sympathize 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. And evermore, we'll keep biting.