True Blood is one of our staples here at TheTorchonline.com — a true blend of mystery and fantasy, with a dash of softcore erotica and a heaping helping of horror.

While its main fantastical component is the existence of vampires, other creatures have reared their magical heads, particularly shapeshifters, werewolves, and even a Maenad. (They had a fake-out of a Minotaur, but it was just the Maenad in disguise. Oh, well.)

All these phantasmagorical beings got me thinking about what other creatures could invade the not-so-sleepy town of Bon Temps. Sure, the show is based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels, but they’ve been known to deviate, and it would be really cool, given the nature of True Blood’s awesome production values and special effects, to see some of these beings onscreen.

Incubi and Succubi

On a libidinous show such as True Blood, Incubi and Succubi would fit right in. They are the male and female forms of a type of demon that preys upon humans  by laying on top of them while they sleep. According to some sources, they then invade the sleeper’s mind in the form of erotic dreams, while in other versions they actually have sex with their victim in real life.

Either way, this results in draining the victim of their energy and eventually killing them. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see how Sookie Stackhouse, a telepath, might be able to fight off a psychic attack by an Incubus?

Banshees

In Irish mythology, banshees were female beings that served as omens of death, and are known for their piercing screams. With a little tweaking of the story, the writers could turn the banshees into some serious enemies, possibly pushing people to their deaths with their screams. It sure would be cool to see how the vamps of Louisiana deal with such a threat. Also, Lafayette should definitely tell a banshee, “Hooker, please.” That would be great television.

Mermaids and Mermen

One of the most well-known and recognized fantastical citizens of the sea, merfolk would make an interesting angle on the show, seeing as how they show a lot of skin and can commune with sea animals. While the characters on True Blood don’t spend a lot of time on the coast, it would be pretty awesome if Eric had to go head-to-head with a pissed-off merman.

Maybe the approach they could take is that merfolk are just another form of shifters, like in the movie Splash, and whenever they get wet their more scaly side rears its fins. Who knows? Maybe Arlene has got a real fishy secret.

Gorgons

In Greek mythology, the gorgons were hideously ugly female monsters with snakes for hair. Their most famous member, Medusa, even had the power to turn people to stone with one look. Sure, we might have had an overload of Medusa recently, what with her appearances in both Clash of the Titans and Percy Jackson and the Olympians. But if anybody could give her a fresh spin, it’s Alan Ball, and I’d personally love to see bitchy vamp Pam face off against one of these beasts.

Chupacabras

Of all the cryptids out there, I think chupacabras are my favorite, because, well, they’re tiny. Sure, they’ll suck the guts out of your livestock and ruin your crops, but come on, they”re so adorable. Just look at this guy.

Standing about 3 feet tall, these alien-esque little critters began to catch fame in Puerto Rico before moving to other parts of the world.

There’s a few theories on what these diminutive demons look like, but the prevailing one sort of looks like a prehistoric version of the Gremlins, once they’ve been fed after midnight. Oh, and if they were fed mescaline.

Wouldn’t it be a hoot to see sullen vampire Bill Compton having to shake a few chupacabras off of his boot while he goes off on some mission to save his true love, Sookie?

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Four Torches (Out of Five)

Now this is how you do low-budget monster movies!

Let’s face it: SyFy’s Original Movies series of B monster movies has been hit-and-miss — sometimes really miss. Like, “my-kid-brother’s-home-movies-are-better-than-this” miss.

But this weekend’s entry, Mothman, is flat-out terrific: smart, funny, and sometimes genuinely scary.

The movie begins with the proverbial group of teens on a camping trip. The annoying little brother of one of the boys had tagged along, so the older teens decide to pull a prank involving Mothman, the legendary flying man of West Virginia. When the little boy is accidentally killed, they all agree together to cover up their roles in the death.

Flash forward ten years later, and the former teens are now all haunted by what happened all those years ago.

But in the world of this movie, Mothman doesn’t just exist, he also has an agenda: seeking revenge on those who pull pranks-gone-bad.

It helps that the movie has a terrific, engaging lead actress, Jewel Staite (who played Kaylee in Firefly).

Look, this isn’t Citizen Kane (or even The Exorcist). But as B monster movies go, it does practically everything right: it has well-acted characters who act (more or less) like characters really would, a mysterious old man who reveals the “plausible” explanation for the Mothman’s existence (and who also has a secret of his own). It even has a decent, well-conceived plot-twist or two.

As for the special effects, Mothman “exists” on mirrors and other reflective surfaces. The CGI was obviously done on the semi-cheap, but it looks terrific: campy, yes, but genuinely different and scary.

Like last year’s terrific Drag Me to Hell feature film, Mothman takes itself seriously, embracing its old-fashioned B-movie roots and ridiculous premise, not mocking them. Sure, it’s tongue-in-cheek, but only in the “meta” sense. It cares enough about its characters and story to avoid sinking into irony and self-parody,  as so many monster movies do these days.

It’s hard to care about the story and characters in those movies when even the writer and director clearly don’t care.

And Mothman really moves, moving from one fun, creepy sequence to the next.

This one is worth watching, folks. Seriously.

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With the unexpected success of Paranormal Activity, it’s not surprising that publicists for The Fourth Kind, which opens this weekend, are pushing the angle that “it really happened!” in their marketing campaign.

But this isn’t the first fantasy or sci-fi-themed project that’s acted as if its story was real.

The Blair Witch Project may be the most well-known, with its infamous (and wildly successful) pre-release viral campaign that had people wondering if maybe it really had all happened.

But there are plenty of other examples.

(And by the way, no, Cloverfield isn’t one of them. Like Blair Witch, it may have been filmed with hand-held cameras, but as far as I know, no one ever claimed or believed that a giant monster had destroyed New York City!)

The Saga of Darren Shan: Okay, so last month’s The Vampire’s Assistant turned out to be a complete bust, but it was based on the first three books in this teen series, written by Darren Shan. The main character in the books? Darren Shan, who claims the events that turned him into a vampire actually happened. By the end of the series, we learn exactly how he ended up human again: “Darren Shan,” the character, goes back in time to stop the younger version of himself from getting involved with vampires in the first place. His older “vampire” self then gives his “diaries” away (which are later published by his other self) and goes off to die.

Shadow of the Vampire: This 2000 movie has a clever premise: the star of the classic 1922 vampire film Nosferatu (an “unauthorized” adaptation of Dracula, and the source for the idea that vampires are killed by sunlight) was an actual, if disgruntled vampire. The cast and crew are told he’s a method actor who they will only ever see in full costume and make-up — and the vampire himself has only agreed to be in the film in exchange for the life of the leading lady, which the director has promised him if he finishes the movie. The film, which is only so-so, does such an amazing job matching certain scenes with the existing classic movie that you can’t help but wonder, “Hmmm.”

Almost Every Ghost or Exorcism Movie Ever Made: The Amityville Horror and Exorcist were both huge successes, and they both shouted at the top of their lungs that they were “based on a true story!” How true? How closely-based? Well, let’s not quibble over unimportant details, but rather point out that many, many ghost and/or exorcism stories since then have made the same claim: The Entity, A Haunting in Connecticut, Audrey Rose, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, An American Haunting, and on and on and on!

Communion: A True Story: Why would anyone possibly believe it when an established speculative fiction author writes a book like the 1987 novel memoir Communion: A True Story, in which the novelist author is the main character and he claims he was contacted by alien “visitors”? Uh, because they want to believe? To novelist author Whitney Strieber’s credit, he doesn’t claim they were “aliens” per se; he even allows they may have only existed in his mind. I guess that’s something.

The War of the Worlds: Two things made listeners believe that Orson Welles’ dramatic 1938 radio production of H.G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds was a real radio news broadcast: the fact that the hour-long production ran without commercial breaks, and that it was presented as a series of actual news bulletins. The widespread “panic” may have been overstated at the time by headline-hungry newspapers, but it’s undeniable that plenty of listeners were confused as to what they were really hearing. In any event, it made Welles a star.

Deadpool: Well, hey, this superhero’s catchphrase is “Breaking down the fourth wall brick by brick!” He’s definitely aware that he’s a character in comic book — aware of the yellow boxes of text, and even of things that happen in the “real” world outside of the comic book (or in other comic books), things that his character couldn’t possibly know about. Okay, so this doesn’t mean he’s “real” — it’s more that he might be insane — and it isn’t exactly what we’re talking about here. But it’s still really cool!

Gothic: How incredibly fantastic is it that the poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley and Shelley’s wife Mary were all friends? And how cool is it that in the rainy summer of 1816, forced to spend time indoors, they decided to entertain each other by telling ghost stories? The end result was the Mary Shelley classic Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus and The Vampyre, co-written by Byron and his doctor, John Polidori, considered the first actual work of “vampire” literature. The 1986 Ken Russell movie Gothic (again, just so-so) adds some visual panache to their stories, which is necessary (I suppose) for film. But the idea that Frankenstein and vampire stories were both born among the same people over the same few days? You can’t make that story any cooler than it already is!

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Does this fall’s new genre television programming sound a little … familiar?

It should, because, incredibly, the schedule is made up almost entirely of remakes.

There’s Eastwick, a remake of the movie The Witches of Eastwick. And there’s Alice, a remake of Alice in Wonderland (to go along with the feature film version they’re also currently filming).

Don’t forget about V, a remake of the 1980s miniseries. And while The CW is pretending that The Vampire Diaries isn’t a rip-off of Twilight because it’s based on a series of books from the 1990s, everyone knows they’re lying (and Twilight is, of course, itself a rip-off of Anne Rice and Buffy).

At least Flash Forward is something new — although the network seems to be pushing it as the next Lost.

Things are scarcely any better on movie screens. TheTorchOnline.com has written previously about the slate of movies in development based, ridiculously, on old 80s cartoons, and another group of movies that will be remakes of most of Universal’s horror classics such as Frankenstein and The Wolf Man.

And don’t get me started on our current superhero rut, where were get interchangeable superhero movie after superhero movie (followed by the inevitable, even lamer sequels).

Then when a superhero franchise has been reduced to complete ridiculousness, Hollywood waits a few years, and then relaunches the “brand” with a new “origin” story. Incredibly, we’re on the third Batman franchise and the fifth Superman one in my lifetime.

Even more outrageously, sometimes if a superhero movie doesn’t do as well as expected, as with Ang Lee’s 2003 movie Hulk, Hollywood will simply pretend that the movie never existed, and just immediately remake it again.

Now that’s craven.

But this fall’s television season marks something of a milestone in Hollywood shamelessness.

That’s right: we’ve finally reached a point where Hollywood is making virtually only remakes of previous movies and TV shows, at least with its genre programming. At the gathering of the Television Critics Association in Pasadena last week, The CW president Dawn Ostroff openly crowed that that network is eagerly encouraging more such remakes.

Let me be clear: some of these TV shows and movies are pretty good. Talented writers and directors really have “reimagined” some of these stories in fresh new ways.

And there’s nothing inherently wrong about the retelling of stories. Almost all of William Shakespeare’s oeuvre was, of course, based on stories first told by others — and how many times have the Greek myths been rewritten, not to mention the stories of The Brothers Grimm?

But Hollywood isn’t remaking old properties because they include classic archetypes, or because they’re inspired by the timeless storytelling.

They’re doing it because they think it’ll make them money.

Publicizing any media property is enormously expensive, especially in an era of “media clutter,” where there’s so much information out there that it can be difficult to break through to create audience awareness.

Remakes supposedly have an advantage because most people have already heard of the story in question. “Oh, it’s the story of Little Red Riding Hood — but she’s got a red hoodie instead!”

Audience familiarity may be even more important for genre projects, because elaborate costumes and sets typically require higher budgets.

So are these remakes harmless? Not hardly.

It was bad enough that Hollywood has long insisted that every story have a “high-concept” — a simple, catchphrase-like storyline that the audience immediately understands. Now they’re saying that it literally has to be a storyline that the audience has heard before.

Every time Hollywood greenlights yet another tired vampire story, that means there’s one other, fresher story that won’t be seen. And if Hollywood continues to insist that every TV series have “built-in audience awareness,” that means audiences are never going to see anything truly new or different.

In short, we’re never going to write the next generation of classic stories — we’ll just keep repeating the old ones forever and ever.

Talk about the dumbing down of America. At least there’s HBO, Showtime, and AMC where, it seems, complicated, challenging drama is occasionally still welcome.

For decades, people have been written how Hollywood has become completely soul-less, no longer caring about creativity and inspiration at all, but rather caring solely about money.

But given this fall’s season of genre television, it’s worth writing one more time.

From the 1920s to the 1950s, Universal Studios had enormous success pumping out movies featuring such now-infamous monters as Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), and The Wolf Man (1941).

In the wake of the successful 1999 reboot of the Mummy franchise, many of these classic movie monsters are set to attack again.

First up is The Wolf Man, coming in November, directed by Joe Johnston (Jumanji, Jurassic Park 3) and starring Benicio del Toro (as the Wolf Man), Anthony Hopkins, and Emily Blunt.

“[It's] a man in make-up and not a CG werewolf running around,” says Rick Baker, who did make-up effects on the film.  “It’s pretty old school, and I think that’s what’s going to make this film cool actually…It’s a classic, gothic horror movie.”

Benicio del Toro in the upcoming The Wolf Man

Also in the works are Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro’s planned remakes of Frankenstein (tentatively slated for 2012) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (also for 2012).

And a third Mummy sequel, The Mummy 4: Rise of the Aztec, is coming in 2010.

All of these classic monsters have been re-adapted and “reimagined” many times since their original incarnations. But given the unexpected success of 1999’s The Mummy, why didn’t Universal capitalize on their monster catalog, often referred to as ”Universal Horror,” any earlier?

Blame Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 Frankenstein remake, a critical and commercial disappointment. Francis Ford Copolla’s much-mocked 1992 version of Dracula opened huge, but also ended up under-performing.

Meanwhile, Universal’s 2004 film Van Helsing (written, produced, and directed by The Mummy writer/director Stephen Sommers) was the story of a man who fights vampires, werewolves, and a Frankenstein monster. Based on the character from Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel, it was an open homage to Universal’s classic monster films.

But despite hopes that it would be the start of a major franchise,Van Helsing was also a collossal box office disaster.

2004’s Van Helsing

In short, the success of The Mummy seemed like a fluke. But two Mummy sequels later, each of which having grossed more than its predecessor, the success seems like much less of an accident.

In addition, Warner Brothers had extraordinary success with Batman Begins, its acclaimed 2005 reboot of the Batman franchise — despite the fact that the previous film series had just ended in 1997.

And The Incredible Hulk (2008) came a mere five years after 2003’s Hulk, the superhero’s first big budget on-screen incarnation, but still managed to drum up $150 million in U.S. box office.

“The project I have at Universal is trying to approach the mythology from a different point of view,” Del Toro told Scifi.com of his Frankenstein project. “So what you will see will be seeing the Frankenstein myth, but from a side, like an oblique way. If I told you exactly what it is, then it will be completely surpriseless by the time it is announced. But it won’t be the straight Frankenstein, I don’t think.”