Interview with the Vampire is everything an adaptation should be
a look at vampirism as the other in interview with the vampire
Why are we not like them?
Anne Rice’s 1976 novel Interview With the Vampire is acutely concerned with the inner lives of vampires, and what sets them apart from humans. Interview is exactly what it sounds like on the cover—a vampire, Louis, gives an interview to a journalist, young Daniel. Louis’s reported life story overflows with melodrama and inner conflict as the audience is drawn into his mind and relationships with the vampires Lestat, Armand, and Claudia.
The book went on to launch a sprawling series of (apparently) varying levels of quality, known collectively as The Vampire Chronicles. the turn of the 21st century ushered two film adaptations—Interview with the Vampire (1994) starring Tom Cruise as Lestat and Brad Pitt as Louis, and Queen of the Damned (2002), starring Stuart Townsend as Lestat. In 2021, AMC announced plans for a television series, executive produced by Anne Rice’s son Christopher Rice; the first season premiered in September 2022, with a second season in May 2024. Together, these first two seasons will cover the events of the first book in The Vampire Chronicles.
When I read Interview, it was as part of an undergraduate course on popular fictions. I was immediately struck by the representations of monstrosity, with homosexual attraction tied directly with Louis’s religious guilt and moralism even as a vampire. Early on, Louis watches as his brother makes claims to priesthood and then dies; Louis emerges as a lapsed Catholic. As a vampire, Louis is naturally distanced from human society; he has very inhuman needs, and cannot go out into the day. In fact, he goes as far as to ask “Am I damned? Am I from the devil? Is my very nature that of a devil? Trying to turn away from violence, Louis feeds off of rats as well as humans. Even so, he remains enraptured by two vampires who delight in the kill—first Lestat de Lioncourt, his vampire creator, and then the Parisian vampire Armand.
In the previous century, Sheridan le Fenu’s 1872 gothic novella Carmilla and Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula had enshrined in text the image of the vampire as a predatory threat. Notably, both characters have their vampire menace tied to an identity of being Other: Carmilla makes advances towards the female Laura, whilst Dracula embodies colonial fears of an Eastern European spectre come to invade England. Rice, though, humanises her vampires in a manner that would go on to inform the portrayal of vampires in popular media, imbued with nuance beyond being simple demons. In fact, literary scholar Ken Gelder suggests that Rice was “the first writer to narrate her stories in the first person from the vampire’s point of view”. While Louis tells his story, Daniel the interviewer is positioned as an audience surrogate, listening enraptured. Rice humanises her protagonists, encouraging audiences to relate to—or at least empathise with—these monsters and their struggles.
The line I always stay with is from young Claudia, turned into a vampire by Lestat when she was just a child and remaining trapped in an ageless body. Eventually, she asks:
What are we? Why are we not like them?
It’s a question that has been returned to continually in not just vampire media, but any story that seeks to empathise with a monstrous character. I always regard Interview with the Vampire as a blueprint for such themes. Certainly, it’s a good starting point for exploring the creature of the night that has so captured the cultural imagination across the centuries.
An odyssey of memory
The thing about AMC’s adaptation is that it is incredible. It’s so good. From the outset, the show builds upon the original novel. Whilst the book is good, AMC’s Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire is not only radically different from the source text, but also fantastic media in its own right. At a time when many adaptations and reboots seem to be direct page/stage-to-screen translations with little consideration for the adaptive potential (see: Ballads of Songbirds and Snakes), this excites me.
From the outset, the show builds upon the original novel. The framing premise: Louis de Point de Lac (Jacob Anderson) and Daniel Molly (Eric Bogosian) are revisiting the original interview decades later in the bustling newness of post-lockdown in Dubai; Daniel is now older and more cynical, and Louis wants to update his story as a more narrator. This is a clever, meta-textual setup, and the consideration extends to other changes. Rather than a plantation owner in Louisiana, Louis here is a Creole man with business in the red-light district in New Orleans, and the historical setting has been updated from the 18th century to the early 20th century with all of its times a-changing.
Claudia (Bailey Bass) is also presented as a young Black girl, whilst Lestat (Sam Reid) remains positioned as the mercurial white vampire around whom Louis and Claudia revolve. When season 1, episode 4, “The Restless Pursuit of Blood with All a Child’s Demanding”, takes Claudia’s teenage diaries as a central storytelling vehicle, the show introduces a new voice to its narrative and adds a rich interior life to an already fascinating vampire character; the result is a compelling hour of contemporary television. Race affects every part of how these Louis, Claudia, and Lestat move through the deep South in the 20th century. These changes seem fitting for television in the 2020s, responding at last to audience demands for stories that reflect intersectional experiences of race, gender, and sexuality—all whilst weaving a gothic, melodramatic tale of creatures who seem just like humans, but aren’t.
For another perspective on the racial dynamics in the television show, I spoke with my good friend Sen. Whilst we watched season 1 of Interview with the Vampire together in 2023, Sen has not read the novel. I did try to embed the audio directly, but no matter how many times I upload it, it won’t embed—so, you can listen here.
As well as folding race into the story, this new Interview is very gay. It doesn’t take much interpretation to read homosexuality in the text of Rice’s Interview, and Louis’s tumultuous relationships with Lestat and Armand. The 1994 film preserved a definite layer of homoeroticism (hard to lose this when you have a man biting another man’s neck) whilst also generating the iconic reaction image, “Here’s my review: not gay enough”. In 2022, in season 1 of AMC’s Interview, Louis and Lestat are physically sexual, psychologically manipulative, and obsessed with one another. They also sleep in separate coffins, a neat nod to mid-century Hays-code-era gay couples maintaining plausible deniability with separate bedrooms. Show creator and writer Rolind Jones specifically stated his intention to create “a gothic romance. ... I wanted to write a very excitable, aggressive, toxic, beautiful love story,” and it seems that he succeeded. Every character in this show has flawed morals and flawed personality, not just in being killer vampires. Nevertheless, they remain alluring, and that’s the point—maybe one day it will be a standard to have queer characters on screen given the room to be complex and messy, but for now it still feels refreshing.1 This show pushes the boundaries of the now-familiar narrative of the vampire Other into exciting new territory.
Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire began to reinvigorate how vampire books could be written. AMC’s television show maintains the compelling character writing that made Rice’s chronicles a success, whilst incorporating nuanced, considered storytelling that extends to a genuine engagement with its source text. The show is tightly scripted and visually stunning, rich with layered explorations of race, sexuality, love, storytelling, memory, immortality, and, of course, vampirism.
Interview With the Vampire Season 1 is available in Australia on ABC iview and AMC+. Season 2 releases weekly on AMC+. Quotations from the digital edition of the book.
Buffy did this in the late 90s/early 2000s with Willow Rosenberg, but that’s for another article.