Dead Until Dark v. True Blood: Similar Yet Very Different

Dead Until Dark v. True Blood: Similar Yet Very Different

By: Isabella Hess

            

            Charlaine Harris’ Dead Until Dark is a novel centered around vampires attempting to live in a human world with a struggle between some wanting to mainstream/integrate into society and others wanting to continue to live in their nests and avoid conformity. The book focuses on the relationships between vampires and humans, specifically romantic relationships as well as the hatred of vampires from humans. True Blood is an HBO television series based off the Charlaine Harris book with some adjustments to characters and story lines. Between the novel and the TV series there is a good amount of overlap, and the two closely relate to each other. Most of the relationships between characters and the plot are the same, but the show did make some creative choices that differed from the original text. The first notable difference between the book and the television series is the introduction of Sookie’s friend Tara. The book doesn’t mention or include anyone by the name of Tara, but the show decides to add her into the series. The shows creative liberty to add the young woman could be seen as a way to add another story arch to help the shows complexity or it could be that they were trying to fill their diversity quota, but I see Tara’s role as being just another woman whose main focus is on trying to get the attention of a man. In the show Tara is constantly pining after Jason Stackhouse and eventually sleeps with Sam Merlotte, but there isn’t much character development for her other than some backstory on her home life. It seems that Tara is there to only further any romantic plotlines the writers seem fit, as if there weren’t enough of them already. The second difference that stood out between the book and the TV series was the switch from Sino-AIDS to Hepatitis D. Charlaine Harris originally wrote that the disease that could infect vampires and make them weak enough to kill was called Sino-AIDS which becomes even more problematic with how closely Harris related vampires to individuals in the LGBT+ community. The choice to take AIDS and slightly change them to Sino-AIDS as if that makes it any different really speaks to Harris’ view of gay people and how much she projected homosexuality into the vampires in her novel. The show decided that Sino-AIDS was too closely related to the gay community and opted to change the disease to Hep D, which was a good move on their part. By taking the different form of AIDS out of the story, it helped to take some of the explicit homophobic views out of the series and lessen the obvious comparison between undead vampires and homosexual individuals. While the TV series does have mostly similarities, for better or for worse, the show does offer some important differences to make note of. Unlike Dead Until Dark, the character named Tara is not present and only seems important in furthering romantic plotlines within the show. The last important difference to take into account is the adjustment from Sino-AIDS in the book to Hep D in the TV show. This adjustment seemed to create less of a comparison between the LGBT+ community and the strongly disliked undead. However, the differences between the two are few, they are still important creative differences to note and understand their reasoning behind them.