Yes, vampires want to drink your blood. But they’re also game for sex with “fangbangers” – and possibly even true love.

That’s the premise of the darkly delicious True Blood, the cult HBO series that’s due for a comeback next year. 

A new version of the hit fantasy horror show is currently in development, according to reports in The Hollywood Reporter and Variety today.

Playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, best known for his work on Glee and Riverdale, is set to create a script for the reboot. 

He’ll be joined by Flesh and Bone writer Jami O’Brien, and the show’s original creator Alan Ball – who is also the brains behind Six Feet Under, with a similar style of gothic comedy.

True Blood, starring Anna Paquin, ran for seven seasons between 2008 and 2014 on HBO. At the height of its popularity, it was one of the channel’s most-watched shows, with an average of over five million viewers per episode.

Based on the The Southern Vampire Mysteries books by Charlaine Harris, the story centres around Sookie Stackhouse (Paquin), a Louisiana waitress with telepathic powers.

With the invention of synthetic blood (“Tru Blood”) by Japanese scientists, vampires from all walks of life are able to “come out of the coffin” and interact with humans – without necessarily eating them. 

This happy development puts Sookie on a collision path with Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer), a vampire born in 1835 who has recently returned to her hometown of Bon Temps.

The pair soon fall head-over-heels for one another. But the course of vampire love never did run smooth, and together, they must navigate the perils of blood-fuelled intimacy. 

At the same time, fracture lines are appearing right across the town of Bon Temps: some vampires want to be integrated into human society, while others view it as an abomination. Humans are equally divided. Certain members of the Bon Temp community want to give their new blood-sucking neighbours fundamental rights and others are full of vampire prejudice.

As the series continues, shapeshifters, werewolves and more otherworldly creatures emerge, in a wonderfully witty and macabre take on everyday vampire life. 

True Blood had a real-life storyline, too: co-stars Paquin and Moyer started dating on-set and ended up getting married in 2010.

“I get the opportunity to see my husband all the time as opposed to being stuck in a random country making a movie and not seeing him for five months,” Paquin said, when asked what it was like working with her spouse on the show in a 2011 interview.

The actress also revealed that the series was so off-the-wall, its cast had no idea how it would be received when it first came out in 2008.

“It was just one of those things where it’s like either we’re all crazy and after this airs people with straight-jackets are gonna be coming and collecting us and taking us somewhere to some nice facility to figure out what’s wrong with us, or people are gonna be really into it and they’ll get what we all love about it,” Paquin told an episode of Couch Surfing last year.

They needn’t have worried: the reaction was instant, with True Blood amassing a huge fan community of “Truebies” in a matter of months.

There’s no word yet on when the new version of the show will air, or who will be in it: but we’ve got all our vampire instincts on alert for more news as it arrives. 

Images: Getty