Dark Score Stories

Yes, I'm going to finish the Halloween movies, hopefully before next Halloween. In the meantime, check out the website A & E Television has launched that serves as sort of a prequel/backstory for their upcoming miniseries of Stephen King's Bag of Bones, starring Pierce Brosnan and Melissa George. It's called Dark Score Stories, and is fairly creepy. King fans can have fun finding the King references in the background of the photographs.
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Under The Dome: The Series

Stephen King’s novel Under the Dome will become a TV series for the Showtime cable network, according the Deadline Hollywood. This will be developed for television by Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks production company, so look for an addition of a precocious tween boy with a distant father to the story. Hopefully it will do better than the ill-fated plans for The Dark Tower films and series.
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Dark Tower Movie

Comicbookmovie.com has reported (and Universal has confirmed, the release date for the first film in the series adapting Stephen King's Dark Tower series will be May 17, 2013. This is part of an ambitious undertaking which will have three movies, with seasons of a tv series between them as a bridge, to tell the complete Dark Tower story. Some people are leery of Ron Howard a the creative force behind this; and certainly the movie trilogy/tv series concept is one of the most ambitious gambles in entertainment history.
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Locke & Key Goes To Pilot

According to Deadline, Fox has ordered a pilot based on the comic Locke & Key by Joe Hill. The series is tentatively being looked at for a possible summer run. The comic is excellent, and while network television's record with horror series is spotty at best, I look forward to seeing what they do with this.
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The Munsters Redux

According to Entertainment Weekly’s Ausiello Files, NBC is planning a new version of the campy 1960s TV series The Munsters. I’ve been wrong before, but I don’t see how this will turn out well.

Oh, and did you know they’ve done a porn version of The Munsters? Neither did I, until I started googling images to find one to use with this item. Ay caramba! That took me by surprise.
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Under The Dome & On The Screen

If you haven't finished reading Stephen King's new 1074-page novel Under The Dome, you might want to hurry up. Empire Online reports that King and little known filmmaker Steven Spielberg are already working to develop a TV adaptation. With Spielberg's involvement in the project it would seem like this would be a done deal, but the two have been working on The Talisman for many years and we haven't seen it yet.
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True Blood

Despite my affection for all things creepy and spooky, I didn’t really expect much from the HBO series True Blood. It is based on the paranormal romance series by Charlaine Harris, and the romantic part of the paranormal just isn’t for me. A few years ago, someone I know who was into that sort of thing suggested I give them a try, since they weren’t like the rest of the genre. So I started Dead Before Dark, the first book I the series, but quit about 50 pages in. No reflection on the books or Ms. Harris’ ability, it just wasn’t my cup of tea. Still, I decided to check out the show when the first season was released on DVD, in part because the producer was Alan Ball, who had written the script for American Beauty and produced the HBO series Six Feet Under.

The series is set in Bon Temps, Louisiana, in an alternate universe where vampires (and other manner of supernatural creatures) exist. Vampires have just come out into the open with the invention of Tru Blood, a synthetic blood substitute which allows them to forego the usual murder-for-survival. Some of the vampires are trying to assimilate into human life, which is met with resistance by many breathing humans. The obvious over-riding metaphor for the series is the gay rights movement, although no one has marketed a de-gaying soft drink yet.

The town of Bon Temps has a friendly neighborhood bar and grill called Merlotte’s, where a young waitress named Sookie Stackhouse works. Sookie is special in her own right, as she can read minds, something she finds to be more of a curse than an asset. Her life changes when a customer comes in whose mind is inaccessible to her – a vampire named Bill (Stephen Moyer). They embark on a romance that causes friction in both vampire and human communities, and get involved in the overarching story line for the season, uncovering a serial killer stalking Bon Temps. There is a major sub-plot involving the fact that a vampire’s blood acts as a drug on humans, leading to addiction problems and a reverse predator situation where some humans drain vampires for profit.

Other notable character include Merlotte’s owner Sam (Sam Trammell), who has secrets of his own, Tara (Rutina Wesley), Sookie’s best friend, Jason (Ryan Kwanten), Sookie’s moronic brother who careens from one catastrophe to another, and the charismatic Eric (Alexander Skarsgård, son of the great Skellan Skarsgård), who serves as the vampire “sheriff” for the region.

[Some Spoilers Follow]

The series didn’t start off well for me. The first episode or two seemed predictable and dull. Bill and Sookie fell for each other too fast, and since it was necessary for the plot for Sookie to save Bill, he is subdued far too easily by a human man and woman. The opening pre-credits sequence featured a brief scene in which the character you think is a vampire turns out not to be, while the character least likely is, which is trite and is pretty much the same as the opening of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer series.

But a few episodes in, things started to work. The characters acquired more than expected depth, with Sookie, rather than being a typical super-hero type, being very human, showing signs of jealousy, anger and petulance which made her seem much more real to me. Bill was not quite the typical mopey vampire sworn never to do harm to a human being, but rather a creature whose first thought when someone he cares about is threatened is to chow down. The series was also willing to have bad things happen to the characters, including killing some off when needed, injecting an element of danger. Pretty soon, I was hooked.

The story line for the season is brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and the whole thing is told with much humor. By the time we reached the end of the final episode of the first season, I was looking forward to the next one. So, if you have been thinking about giving True Blood a try but were afraid it would be too cute, go ahead. You might be surprised.

A trivial note: Stephen Moyer, who plays the main vampire in this series, was also a (rarely-seen) vampire on the great British TV series Ultraviolet.
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A New Stephen King TV Series Adaptation

According to a news story on the website shocktillyoudrop.com, a new TV series is in the works. It will be called “Stephen King’s Haven” and will reportedly be based on his novella, published by Leisure’s Hard Case Crime imprint, The Colorado Kid. The series will initially last 13 episodes. I am all in favor of as much as possible of King’s work making it to TV/movies, and I was one of those who liked the somewhat controversial (in the context of the HCC line) book, but it will be interesting to see how a short novel that mostly consists of two old-timers sitting talking to a young reporter can be adapted. We’ll see.
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Cell To Infect Your Television

Stephen King’s zombie-ish 2006 novel Cell, much derided by horror fans, will become a television mini-series, according to Fangoria’s website. This will follow numerous other mini-series made from King’s work. Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel) was supposed to direct this as a movie, but plans have apparently changed. Since I’m one of the few who liked Cell (I thought it was a great “popcorn movie” type of novel), I’ll be looking forward to it. The added length of the mini-series will hopefully allow for more character development.
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Ultraviolet

There have been a number of depictions of vampires in movies and television – most of them different shades of terrible. Although undead bloodsuckers have been a staple of filmed entertainment since before the era of talkies, few of them are really worth the time it takes to watch them. A notable exception to this is the television series Ultraviolet. Filmed in 1998 for British television, it is only five hours long, but what it lacks in quantity, it makes up for in quality. The show stars Jack Davenport (Coupling, Pirates of the Caribbean), the great Idris Elba (Stringer Bell on The Wire), Susannah Harker, and Philip Quast.

Davenport plays a London police detective, whose partner, under suspicion for corruption, becomes the target of an investigation by a mysterious agency. When Davenport tries to help his partner, a meeting goes wrong, the partner attacks him, and Davenport kills his partner with a grenade, only to see him explode and turn into ashes. Davenport is then recruited into the agency, which is fighting vampires, such as Davenport’s recently turned partner.

Interestingly enough, the word vampire is never spoken. Instead they are referred to as “leeches”, or, cleverly, as “Class Fives” (think about it and you’ll get it). The central thrust of the series is Davenport’s being caught between two worlds. His new partners believe they are waging a war to save the human race, while the vampires claim they only want to co-exist in peace. Only in the last episode is the truth revealed.

This series is available cheaply on DVD, and anyone interested in the subject matter would be well advised to seek it out. One note, although there is a certain open-endedness about the conclusion, this is how creator Joe Ahearne intended it to be. There were no further episodes planned. A pilot for an American version was shot, but by all accounts, it was a mess, and the series was not picked up.