Smash hit

This being Alan Ball, he likes to play. “When we were getting ready for series one, Alan said, ‘Is there anything I could do to help our characters grow?’” Moyer says. “I said if I was that old, I’d want to learn music, languages, go to every place, read every book. And Alan, being the twisted bloke he is, went with the idea of the music. So now I’m an expert in Tuvan throat singing and Cambodian disco.”

Outside Compton’s elegant mansion, filled with haunting Tuvan throats, True Blood drips with the sweat of repressed and confused sexuality, even when the bedtime frolics are played for laughs.

Sookie’s horny redneck brother Jason (former Home and Awayer Ryan Kwanten) begins as comic relief, working his buff butt between the sheets of virtually every hot girl in town. As Sookie’s love for Compton deepens, however, Jason finds his previously untamed libido frightened into submission by vampire potency and the unfortunate issue of someone killing every girl he sleeps with. This leads to a disastrous bout of priapism after he necks half a litre of V-Juice, and all of this conspires to push Jason into the arms of a sinister Christian cult bent on destroying all vamps.

“He was almost verging into that one-dimensional thing where he has no redeeming qualities whatsoever,” Kwanten explains of Jason. “But over the season we realise he comes from a place of innocence — he’s not a conventional bigot.”

That’s the real beauty of True Blood: it takes the best-known rules in horror (the garlic, the stake, the cross, the fangs) and makes them unconventional. Whether it’s the shy smile Compton gives Sookie when he comes to call, saying, “You have to invite me in”, or the fangbangers who crave vampire love, or the mysterious corporation behind synthetic blood, or the haunting Baptist imagery in the unnerving title sequence, this is a vampire show for the 21st century.

What’s curious is that Ball’s inspiration could have been taken from Bates’s account of the vampire’s literary origins. Sex was repressed by Victorian society, Bates argues, so vampires became its artistic metaphor. For Ball, there’s a new repression afoot. “I feel as if America is weirdly dysfunctional in its relationship with sex,” he argues. “The puritan streak that was there at the beginning is still in place. Meanwhile, in mainstream American entertainment, sex is fetishised and deified and vilified, while people are encouraged to deny pleasure and sensuality and replace them with ‘buying stuff’. That’s really what this show is all about,” he concludes with the ghost of a smile. “It’s the paralysing terror of intimacy.”

True Blood starts on FX on July 17 and is on Channel 4 later in the year

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