Fangs for Nothing, Folks!

[NOTE: OUTDOOR SCREENING: Please check out Cinescare's outdoor screening of Werner Herzog's 1979 masterpiece, "Nosferatu," tonight at The Video Underground in Jamaica Plain. The screening starts at 7.30pm with Attila Szasz's expertly photographed short, "Now You See Me, Now You Don't." And then it's a mini-lecture on German nationalist cinema and Herzog's vampire, followed by the feature. The event is sponsored by UFO beer. See you tonight!]

Okay, on to our look at recent horror media. 

Plenty of room for interpretation when it comes to just what HBO's renewal of True Blood for a second season — two episodes into season one — means. 

But first, all the usual suspects are frothing over Hollywood Reporter's news that Carrie Fisher is negotiating with Summit Entertainment for a role in the company's remake of "The House on Sorority Row," a 1983 slasher about the titular sisters succumbing to a serial killer after they accidentally off one of their own during a prank. 

Perhaps the sheer proximity of the Star Wars star to a genre project simply proved too much for ShockTillYouDrop and Mania, as they both run accurate stories but completely false headlines. 

The former tells us: "Carrie Fisher is the House Mother on Sorority Row," while its lead is "Carrie Fisher is in negotiations ..." Mania gets in the mix with its equally exuberant inaccuracy: "Carrie Fisher Joining Modern Sorority Row" (the distinction in time, presumably in case readers imagined Fisher might be stepping into the cast of the 1983 film). As The House of the Devil has asked before, so it asks again: Does anyone edit these things?

And now, the dirty business. True Blood's second season means somebody at HBO is taking the vampires-meets-Alien-Nation storyline seriously, but THOD has to question the voraciousness with which your favorite online horror sources slurped up channel programming president Micahel Lombardo's press release gushings. 

Here are the facts, fanged as they are: The top 10 cable programs from the week of Sept. 8, according to Nielsen, ranged from 12.5 million viewers at the top (Vikings vs. Packers game) to 5.02 million viewers in the 10th place spot (Monk). With that kind of data, let's look at the vampire show. 

Bloody-Digusting had the sense to include actual True Blood viewer numbers from Sept. 7 and Sept. 14 (1.4 million and 1.8 million). Compared to 10th-place Monk, True Blood is still in its coffin ... barely out of the ground. 

But Lombardo's release is all about the positive. As well it should be, HBO supports the program. By his measure, the show saw a 24 percent jump from 1.4 million to 1.8 million. Even that math is weird. Isn't the difference between 1.4 and 1.8 actually 28 percent? (Nobody has accused THOD of being a math wizard, however. Ever.)

No matter, the long and short of it is that the percent change has to be presented within the context of the actual numbers. For example, a 24 percent increase in Monk's viewership in one week would mean more than 1.2 million new viewers jumped on board. But in True Blood's corner, 24 percent more equals 400,000 new viewers. 

That's quite a difference of proportion. 

No one tells you this, however, out there in horror-media land. And then there's the way the percent change is characterized, or not characterized. 

Bloody-Disgusting is the most mild-tempered: "The show's aud grew significantly." Fangoria doesn't try to characterize the increase (good for them, actually) but completely fails to tell readers what size audience to which the 24 percent rise applies. Could be anything, really. ShockTillYouDrop pulls the same punch: here's the percent change, but no viewership numbers. 

And then there's Mania. Oh, Mania. 

Jarrod Sarafin apparently drank the Kool-Aid with a little too much gusto. He provides Lombardo's percent data in a rush of celebration, and conflates viewership over time with viewership at air time. 

Sarafin writes: "The Sept. 7 debut episode is proving to be a hit with HBO audiences, attracting more than four million viewers to date, while the debut of the second episode on Sept. 14 posted an unprecedented 24% gain in viewers over the first week's debut."

With that kind of smooshing together of the facts, one could draw the false conclusion that 960,000 new people started watching True Blood (that is, that the 24 percent increase is what got the viewership to 4 million, not to 1.8 million). 

And how Sarafin concocts that a 24 percent increase is "unprecedented" is a mystery. Television programs over the past several months logged increases such as 76 percent (Mad Men's season two premiere), 22 percent (2008 DNC coverage, opening night to night two), even the magical 24 percent (2008 RNC coverage debut). 

All this boils down to some basic reporting skills. When grappling with numbers and percent change, one can't just trust the press release and fork the numbers onto the reader without some kind of context. I don't suppose that genre reporting is coming from J-school grads, mind you, but does it ever seem like maybe our genre news sources tend to play four-square on the basketball court?

We'll let Lombardo have the last word, quoted from the same press release in the Hollywood Reporter (via Reuters, here): "The show deserves a second year whatever the ratings." 

Exactly. Thanks, Michael. That puts it in perspective.