True Blood

HBO's sultry vampire drama "True Blood" has become a surprise hit for the pay cable network and has almost single-handedly taken the network back to the top of the cultural zeitgeist. The show, whose second season premiered Sunday to numbers the network hasn't seen since the last days of its mob drama "The Sopranos," is also on track to become HBO's next cash cow. For Time Warner Inc.'s HBO, it couldn't come at a more opportune time.

THE BEST thing about Alan Ball's new vampire series "True Blood," which premieres on HBO Sunday, is the opening credits. The jittery compilation of unnerving images -- prayer meetings and road kill, ghostly children and swamp scenery -- is creepy, evocative and tantalizing. Unfortunately, it is also utterly unconnected to the show that follows. For reasons known only to himself, Ball decided to take Charlaine Harris' light, fun series of Southern Vampire Mysteries and turn it into a heavy-handed political fable with vampires, recently rendered "safe" by the creation of the synthetic Tru Blood as stand-ins for the disenfranchised.

Old Westerns never die. They're dug up and revived as street Westerns, flailing away with dead eyes and a fine drool of cliches. The latest example of this cinematic ghoulery is "True Blood" (selected theaters, MPAA-rated R), a grimly vacuous Lower East Side shoot-up, where bothers Ray and Donnie Trueblood--separated by fate for 10 years--find true love, brotherhood and blood, in no special order. This is male bonding with a vengeance: Younger brother Donnie, deserted by Ray in youth, has had his heart stolen away by the insidious Spider (Billy Drago)

When IT comes to on-screen romances, Anna Paquin has found that true love hurts. It can even be deadly. In the "X-Men" franchise, Paquin played Rogue, a mutant superhero who absorbed the life force of anyone she touched -- a condition that made just holding hands a lethal proposition. And now in HBO's new drama "True Blood," which premieres Sunday, the 26-year-old actress stars as the plucky, upbeat Sookie Stackhouse, a virginal waitress who has a potentially fatal attraction to a mysterious, brooding vampire (Stephen Moyer)

Actors love to "stretch," taking that out-of-my-wheelhouse part that subverts typecasting. For two TV nice guys, Mike Farrell, 71, the beloved B.J. Hunnicutt of "MASH," and Jim Parrack, 29, who plays puppy-dog Hoyt Fortenberry on "True Blood," the Blank Theatre Company's production of Edmund White's "Terre Haute" offers a daunting stretch. The 2006 drama is based on imagined encounters between only-the-names-are-changed versions of writer Gore Vidal and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

A Kansas wife and mother faces down four problematic characters, all of them facets of her own shattered personality. In California, a charming former con man uses his manipulative powers for good instead of gain. In Washington, D.C., a doctor has developed a method to decipher what people are really saying, despite their words. In Louisiana, vampires fight for equal rights; in Botswana, a woman sets up a detective agency in her quiet little town.

The bomb that shattered the living room left carnage in its wake. The floor is slick with blood, tattered bodies litter the room, entrails dangle from the ceiling and an unrecognizable mass of goo stuck to the wall erratically spurts jets of mauve blood.

Universal Studios Hollywood has announced plans for haunted attractions based on "The Thing," "The Wolfman," "Scream," "Hostel" and "House of 1000 Corpses" films as well as shock rocker Alice Cooper and the La Llorona folk legend while continuing to drop online hints about more scare zones and shows for Halloween Horror Nights 2011. > Photos: Halloween Horror Nights 2011 at Universal Studios Hollywood The Thing: Assimilation, a creature-based maze, will be based on the film remake about a scientific research facility overrun by an epidemic.

Pity the poor vampire bat. It's bad enough that it's called a vampire bat, but lately the creature has been in need of some spin control. Last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that about a year ago a young man in the U.S. died from rabies linked to a vampire bat, the first such reported death in the country. The CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report noted that the man was bitten while in Michoacan, Mexico, then later traveled to the U.S. for work, where he eventually sought treatment and died.