"The Twilight series is not based on a true story, of course, but within it is the true story, the original one," she writes. "Twilight centers on a boy who loves a girl so much that he refuses to defile her, and on a girl who loves him so dearly that she is desperate for him to do just that, even if the wages of the act are expulsion from her family and from everything she has ever known. We haven't seen that tale in a girls' book in a very long time. And it's selling through the roof."
Indeed, while Twilight (the movie) and Let the Right One In are on the surface very chaste, there's a terrific current of desire and want that runs through their veins. Their plots depend on newly discovered, unfulfilled wants.
True Blood, on the other hand, tackles these cravings head-on; as if to symbolize the lack of control that comes along with human-vampire interactions, show creator Alan Ball gleefully inserts wanton lust throughout his episodes.
"Certainly, sexuality, I think, is a real window into somebody's psyche, so I'm not as freaked out by characters being depicted in sexual situations [as] maybe some other people are," Ball said in a recent interview. As opposed to Ball's other famous HBO series, Six Feet Under (which he says was "all about repression"), True Blood "seems to me to be something that's about abandon."
But even more important than sex, in vampire movies, is love. The main couples here — Edward and Bella, Oskar and Eli, and Sookie and Bill — are shockingly, intensely drawn to each other. Perhaps these forbidden, confusing loves are even scarier than the whole blood-sucking thing. After all, love is the emotion of the heart, and the heart pumps blood, and vampires can't live without blood. Like us, vampires just wish everyone would try a little tenderness.
