Naked and covered in nothing but blood Anna Paquin, Stephen Moyer and Alexander Skarsgard have encapsulated what is all the rage at the moment- hot and heavy vampire sex.
Posing for the September cover of the magazine Paquin stands sandwiched between a brooding Moyer and Skarsgard with a strategically placed thigh and hand to cover any cheeky bits.
In stark contrast to the forbidden love story of Twilight, True Blood creator Alan Ball, says the idea of celibate vampires is ridiculous: "To me, vampires are sex."
"I don't get a vampire story about abstinence. I'm 53. I don't care about high school students. I find them irritating and uninformed."
Well while you won't find any angsty students on True Blood, you will find plenty of horny hedonists.
The sex scene tally continues to rise with Ball using every available orifice for intercourse: gay, straight, between humans and supernatural beings, and supernatural being on supernatural being, whether he be werewolf, dog or an enormous Minotaur-looking being called a maenad.
Though, as Rolling Stone author Vanessa Grigoriadis' writes: "None of the sex is quite as good as vampire sex, which can happen at the astonishing rhythm of 120 bpm while simultaneously devouring one's neck and making your eyes roll back into your head."
Stephen Moyer - who plays Bill Compton, the undead Southern Civil War Veteran - has his own erotic intepretation of vampire lovin'.
"If we go from a base level, vampires create a hole in the neck where there wasn't one before. It's a de-virginisation - breaking the hymen, creating blood and then drinking the virginal blood. And there's something sharp, the fang, which is probing and penetrating and moving into it. So that's pretty sexy. I think that makes vampires attractive."
He laughs, adding: "Plus, Robert Pattinson is just hot, right?"
