fandomania | Sep. 12th, 2010

The rise of "True Blood's" nihilistic vampire
Bill Compton's recent bad behavior on the HBO show upends what we learned from "Twilight" and "Buffy"

By Katherine Don

During this season of "True Blood," Bill Compton, the show's "good-guy" vampire love interest, has done some very bad things. It all began during the third episode of the season. Bill had been kidnapped by the Vampire King of Mississippi and forced to live in a mansion with Lorena, his maker and ex-lover. By the end of the episode, Bill had attacked her and initiated a bloody sexual encounter that made the carnage of a Rob Zombie horror film seem like a jaunt in fairyland. In the following episode, Bill ate a stripper. Four episodes later, Bill almost killed Sookie, the very woman he has gone to extra-vampire lengths to protect.

Surely there must be an excuse for all this misbehavior. Bill was confused; he was surrounded by evil vampires, separated from his sweetheart and convinced that he could never truly be "good." But, Freudian issues aside, Bill's behavior is testament to the ways in which "True Blood's" politics diverge dramatically from those two other juggernauts of vampire pop culture: "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Twilight." While these two were, respectively, liberal and conservative in their overall message, "True Blood" (whose season finale airs tonight on HBO) is a new species of vampire saga: A nihilistic pop culture phenomenon.
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