The Inspiration for 'True Blood' Season 5: Michele Bachmann?

Lest it start some kind of panic, I will avoid making jokes about Dick Cheney being a vampire, but let it be known it's taking a lot of effort.

"True Blood" creator Alan Ball has infused some very interesting ideas into his hit HBO show over its four-season run (soon to be five). Vampires were a bit of a metaphor for the LGBT community at the start of the series, and we saw both political and religious figures trying to repress them.

Things are a bit more complicated now, and there are political and religious machinations on both sides. So where did all of this come from? According to Ball, it all comes down to Michele Bachmann.

"My first instinct about going into religion and politics was from watching Michele Bachmann, who thinks she has a direct line to God," explained Ball in an interview. "Some of the things being said by some people during the Republican primary were so horrifying to me that I thought, 'What if vampires wanted a theocracy? What would that look like?' "

Whenever anybody thinks they know what God wants and wants to apply that to government, whether Americans or the Taliban, it's kind of a terrifying thing," Ball noted. Fun with vampires and an important political message? It could only be HBO.