Season 3 of "True Blood" - one of the better outcomes of the current vampire mania - premiered tonight on HBO, and I wanted to offer up some commentary.
Unfortunately, I was scooped! But fortunately for discerning readers, much of what I wanted to say was better expressed by Jason Zinoman in his Slate article. "True Blood" is gleefully and wildly excessive, Tennessee Williams on acid, and the season opener amped up the lurid sex and Southern Gothic Grotesque (a friend recently brought the term to my attention when discussing the show). As well it should - whether or not it's just a blatant bid to be the "Anti-Twilight." Season Two's "big bad", the Maenad Maryann (one of the more interesting horror villains to emerge in recent years) was an apt metaphor for the show itself.
I'm considering posting on each episode, if time allows. If you follow, please note that I'm more compelled by the peripheral characters: Tara, Lafayette, Sam Merlotte, Jessica, Hoyt. I'll be following closely, and I'm very concerned about Tara, one of the show's best characters. I'm not terribly fascinated by the romantic triangle between Sookie, Bill and Eric, although I do appreciate that it doesn't infantilize Sookie and it's evolving into more than just a lonely shy girl's longing for attention from powerful and attractive men.
After the closing credits of the first episode, a wonderful behind the scenes bit aired on the newly introduced werewolves. You can see the clip here. "True Blood" is using real wolves to portray its werewolves! There have been, in the history of werewolf cinema, some truly atrocious transformations, as well as some iterations of the monster that don't resemble anything more than bad carpeting with teeth. And rival "Twilight" has CGI wolves.
Cutting down on CGI is always welcome, but apart from that, we can avoid werewolves that look like this:
What other films or shows have used real wolves? (to my distant memory, I can only think of "Wolf" with Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer, and the splendidly awful "The Beast Must Die"). What do you think are some of the better werewolf-themed fictions out there?
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movies, television, books, the beast must die, wolf, sam merlotte,maenad, michelle forbes, alan ball, rutina wesley, southern grotesque, southern gothic, alexander skaarsgard, stephen moyer,ryan kwanten, maenad, werewolves, terror, horror, vampires, anna paquin, true blood, hbo, horror, chillerpopYOUR TAGS:
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