New season of HBO’s ‘True Blood’ adds witches, flirts with 3-D
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When ‘True Blood’ returns for its fourth season on HBO June 26, it might have some surprises in store in the future. Like...3-D?
‘True Blood’s’ cast and producers have always kept the series’ secrets close to the vest, but show creator Alan Ball did tell our brother blog, Hero Complex, that he’s experimented with 3-D. He said he could foresee using the technology in the future, perhaps ‘for a season premiere or a season finale.’
“It was basically a scene that’s in the show anyway, so they just also shot it with 3-D cameras,” Ball said. Read more about the potential to see ‘True Blood’s’ werewolves, shape-shifters, were-panthers, witches and other ‘supes’ in three dimensions here.
HBO, known for striking images and memorable marketing around its original series, just released three monochromatic posters of ‘True Blood’ characters. (See red version at left.) Nowhere as bloody and flesh-baring as the now famous Anna Paquin/Stephen Moyer/Alexander Skarsgard Rolling Stone cover, but sexy/creepy all the same.
The show doesn’t always follow the soapy Southern vampire novels on which it’s based, so viewers had no idea until now that a supernatural coven would be part of the scenery until this trailer for the new season. See Sookie, the telepathic diner waitress, rant about the new additions to the local freak show in the clip here.
The hit series, returning on June 26, will open with an amnesiac (and half-naked!) vampire Eric Northman paying a price for tangling with some powerful witches. He needs help, and who comes to his rescue? Well, Sookie, of course. And, fangbangers, it just heats up from there if the printed page is any guide. (Fingers crossed!)
Charlaine Harris, whose books were bestsellers before the HBO series and have spiked ever higher since, talked Wednesday at the Book Expo America in New York about having the first Sookie Stackhouse novel repeatedly rejected a decade ago. She’d been a conventional mystery writer up to that time, without much success, and decided to throw a paranormal spin on her work.
She crammed ‘a little bit of everything’ into the book, she said. It was not well-received.
‘At that time, there was almost no one writing paranormal,’ she said. ‘It was a bold move, and I felt like that’s what I needed. I thought it was time to shake up my career a little.’
She eventually found a publisher that took a chance and must’ve felt like a Lotto winner when the series took off. It’s become a franchise with 20 million copies in print. The current bestseller, ‘Dead Reckoning,’ is the 11th in the series.
Harris has promised two more Sookie-centric books and then she’s done because, she said, ‘I feel like I’d be repeating myself if I continued.’
All together now: Wah!
RELATED:
Full Show Tracker coverage of ‘True Blood’
Fall TV season: Are witches the new vampires?
-- T.L. Stanley