True Blood: why young women are lapping it up

Are retroviral drugs the reason today's vampires are so sexy and ubiquitous? For much of the 1980s and 1990s, as the spectre of rampant and then untreatable Aids haunted the world, blood-sucking was a distinctly fatal and unappealing pursuit. A metaphor for "an act of love that kills", author Neil Gaiman called it.
 
Today's vampires are not about death, or even its cursed mirror, immortality, as True Blood, the red-hot new vampire series from HBO, illustrates. No. According to the show's creator Alan Ball: "Vampires are sex." Sex without the attendant fear of death.

These vampires have come ‘out of the coffin’ to join normal societyBut even that doesn't quite catch the phenomenon, or explain why the new strain of vampires who have overrun popular culture have particularly seduced impressionable young women. Truth is, women know that these sexed-up new vampires, like Bill Compton, the 173-year-old blood-sucker played by Stephen Moyer in True Blood, are really about the ultimate penetration - of the soul.

Yet True Blood had a shaky start when it premiered in the States last autumn. Critics were initially cold about the show, which is based on the best-selling Southern Vampire Mysteries novels by Charlaine Harris.

True Blood features Sookie Stackhouse, played by Anna Paquin, a telepathic cocktail waitress who works at Merlotte's bar in the decidedly gothic town of Bon Temps, Louisiana. Sookie falls in love with vampire Bill. "You don't know how many people he's sucked the blood out of," one of Sookie's friends warns her.

Actually what really intrigues Sookie about Bill is that, because he is technically dead - or perhaps undead, who knows? - he is the first person whose mind she cannot read. There's also his smouldering good looks, his broody, haunted demeanour, his seductively restrained manner... and, of course, his long fangs, which show when sexually aroused. Bela Lugosi he is not.

True Blood cleverly upends many of the conventions of popular portrayals of vampirism. These vampires have come "out of the coffin" and are trying to "mainstream" into normal society. That's a lot more palatable because they now have access to synthetic human blood – called Tru Blood (sic) – dispensed at bars like Fangtasia.

Which means they are less inclined to stick their fangs into the tempting, swan-like necks of the young women who seem to abound in the True Blood world. Humans who have sex with vampires are 'fang-bangers', and there are a lot of them. True Blood bares more young flesh for our delectation than any mainstream American drama series.

"Women love the story-telling and the romance," believes Ball, whose last HBO series was Six Feet Under, "and men love the sex and violence."

In fact, women seem to love it all. Viewing figures, which show a predominantly female audience, climbed dramatically in the US after the first few episodes and the show is now HBO's most successful since The Sopranos. The second season, which finished in the middle of September, notched up audience figures of an average 12.4 million viewers a week, very big numbers for a cable network. The show has already been renewed for another season and next Wednesday Channel 4 starts screening it in Britain.

The knock-on effect has given a huge boost to Harris's books, which took an astonishing seven spots in last week's top 20 New York Times mass market paperback list.

Some see True Blood's success as simply a spin-off of the Twilight craze, the book series by Stephanie Meyers. Twilight became a movie starring young British heart-throb Robert Pattinson as teen vampire Edward Cullen for whom Bella, played by Kristin Stewart, yearns. New Moon, the second film in the series, will be released in November.

But what's really fascinating is how today's vampire phenomenon reaches so widely across demographic and even political lines. While True Blood is aimed at adults - its creator is a politically liberal gay man - Twilight, with its chaste protagonists, has female tweens in mind. Not surprising given that author Stephanie Meyers is a conservative Mormon. Now a new American TV series, The Vampire Diaries/ - devised by Kevin Williamson, the creator of Dawson's Creek - which premiered a few weeks ago, is targeting the late teens.

Alan Ball says that while he's having a blast with his de-coffined vampires, he's also aware that the changing nature of vampire stories reveals "the general state of the cultural psyche". In the end, you see, vampires are us. And long may they live. ·