It’s Smorgasbord for Summertime Horror TV Shows

It’s summer, and I can’t believe I’m going to discuss TV, because if ever there were a time to NOT sit in front of the boob tube, summer is surely it.

And…yet, the summertime has two of my favorite horror TV series: HBO’s True Blood and Netflix’s Hemlock Grove. Both are horror-based stories and if you know me at all, you know, I’m a fool for horror stories.

Perhaps it’s the advent of these two shows, but now I start associating summer with horror movies and Halloween.

True to True Blood to the End

First I was hooked on Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series. It was the most original concept for vampires and telepaths and a podunk town in Louisiana, since 1976 when Ann Rice’s Interview with a Vampire was first published.

The book series that started it all:
Sookie Stackhouse Series by Charlaine Harris

Then, on September 7, 2008 HBO premiered True Blood, a horror TV series based on the Sookie Stackhouse story and an unusual cast of characters. I was instantly hooked, even though the TV show storylines never remained true to the book storylines.

In the second season, the show moved to the summertime, and has been the summer staple ever since.

Each season I found myself comparing the story arcs with the books, and while they rarely matched, there was enough similarity and great entertainment value that I could look past the incongruities between the two mediums. My favorite characters are Lafayette, Eric Northman and Pam.

This year, it’s seventh, is also it’s last. The time came for the end of the story, and while the first 5 years were thoroughly enjoyable, season 6 was troubling, as is the first two episodes of season 7. I’m still hooked, but even I know that it’s time to let the show go.

My Other Summertime Horror TV Series Love

Last year, NetFlix broke new ground in producing a TV series AND releasing all episodes at the same time to cash in on the binge-watching phenomenon. It has three shows in its roster: House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black and Hemlock Grove – a trifecta of series for the folks who can’t get enough stories or intrigue about our nation’s politicos, a woman behind bars drama, and the horror genre. I, as you can already imagine, fell in love with Hemlock Grove.

It’s a simple and not so simple story of an outcast gypsy teenage boy who’s a good-hearted werewolf, strikes up an unlikely, but symbiotic friendship with the town’s loner, rich kid, who turns out to have a few of his own familial skeletons in the closet.

Scintillating, I tell yet. And yet I’m hooked.

The new season (2) of Hemlock Grove came out July 11, and I’ve already devoured the first 9 episodes. Only one more to go to the end. And then I’ll watch them again.

What makes you binge-watch a show?