Vampires have it good. Not only do they never die, they never go out of style either. Bram Stoker did not invent the vampire in the way that Mary Shelley invented the Frankenstein monster, but ever since the Irish author published Dracula in 1897, our thirst for vampire fiction can no more be quenched than can a vampire’s thirst for blood, judging by the number of vampire movies, books, plays, TV shows, video games, and even vampire-themed rock music albums and pinball machines.
Although our cultural fascination with undead bloodsuckers began with a book, we became even more smitten with them once we were able to see them on screen. The visual medium is not favorable to all horror genres. The ghost story, for example, is still best delivered in written — or, even better, oral — form. But vampires seem to be made for film and TV in the way that few other creepy creatures have ever been. There is something inherently cinematic about vampires. With their white fangs and bloodstained lips, their plush coffin beds, the way they live in the dark, and their need to flee to the shadows, they are a cinematographer’s dream. And with the theatrical license to ham it up given to those who get to play them, they can be an actor’s guilty pleasure.
Two of the most successful actors of our era got their chance to play movies’ most successful monsters 28 years ago when Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt were cast in the leading roles of Neil Jordan’s stylish adaptation of Anne Rice’s bestselling 1970s-’80s novel series Interview with the Vampire. The story’s basic conceit is that we are listening in to a journalist’s interview of a real-life vampire living in modern San Francisco. As he recounts his life story to the awe-struck reporter, we get to learn what life as a vampire is really like. Not that apocryphal garlic cloves/crucifixes/and being-nailed-in-the-heart-with-a-cross baloney Bram Stoker concocted, says the vampire, but the real gritty and grimy details of what it’s like to have to live on blood; what it’s like to never be able to see a sunrise; what it’s like to have to plan for coffin transportation every time you travel; and, worst of all, what it’s like to need to kill night after night in order to survive. Maybe vampires don’t really have it as good as we might think.
AMC’s adaptation of Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, which is also available to stream on Amazon Prime through its AMC+ add-on, updates the story for the age of COVID and makes several other subtle but significant changes to the narrative as well. Instead of setting the story in 1990s San Francisco, writer Rolin Jones sets the story in the city that is today’s most wondrous metropolis in some eyes — Dubai. Instead of the baggy jeans and backward baseball hats of the 1990s, the 2022 TV series features characters wearing black face masks and autoimmune-compromised seniors having concerned discussions about subvariants. And instead of setting the two principal characters’ backstories in 1790s New Orleans, as the film had done, the TV series sets their backstory in 1910s New Orleans — after slavery has been abolished, but before the South was desegregated. The most significant change, and this should not be taken as a spoiler, as its revelation happens in the very first episode, is that the two vampire leads are gay. This will probably not come as a surprise to anyone who’s seen the ’94 movie, wherein the homoeroticism between Cruise and Pitt is an undercurrent that runs throughout the film and wherein their vampire characters never seem particularly interested in women. AMC merely took what had been a subcurrent and made it into a main current. In other words, it’s a choice that implies that vampires stand to benefit from today’s more accepting social climate too; vampires in the 1990s still had to live in the closet, but today’s vampires can live as openly gay men.
How open these archetypal outsiders can in fact be about their lives, and how integrated they are able to be within their societies, is an important theme in AMC’s Interview with the Vampire, more salient than it is in Jordan’s film by virtue of the double challenge that faces the vampires in 1910s New Orleans. Jacob Anderson, who plays the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac, faces a triple challenge. Not only is he a vampire, and not only is he a gay vampire, but he is a black gay vampire in the Jim Crow South. Talk about having the deck stacked against you. At least the show didn’t make him Jewish. Louis’s Catholicism is just about the only thing he shares with the mainstream Louisianans of his time.
Louis is game for the challenge, however — as game as Anderson is for the role of Louis. The risk of producing an Interview with the Vampire without the star power of major Hollywood luminaries like Pitt and Cruise is that it compels the source material to be the star and the mostly unknown actors to carry a multiepisode show. Sam Reid, who plays the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt, almost dooms the series with his overly mannered portrayal of the older undead monster who takes fledgling vampire Louis under his wing. Reid’s Lestat pales in comparison to Cruise’s, which is suffused with an enjoyable melange of impishness, charisma, and just a touch of camp. Reid comes across as an Abercrombie & Fitch model who’s been pulled onto the set and asked to imitate an actor. But Lestat’s vacuity, thankfully, is redeemed by Louis’s soulfulness. In the ’94 film, it was Pitt’s empty, lifeless Louis that was the weak link of the film. The character Louis is meant to be unique in vampire lore in that he is a vampire with a conscience. A vampire is a creature that appears to be human but is not. Louis, however, is that one-in-a-million vampire who has not lost his human soul. Pitt’s Louis takes this attribute to one disappointing logical end, playing the character as a ruminative, withdrawn, and muted monster. Anderson’s Louis takes this attribute to its other end, playing the reluctant vampire with moving pathos and a mastery over the emotional dynamics of inhabiting a character who is struggling to gain mastery over his newfound sunless destiny.
AMC’s Interview with the Vampire is not a perfect series. In addition to its affected Lestat, extending what had been a film that felt long even at two hours into a seven-hour-plus series inevitably makes for occasional pacing frustrations. But in its intriguing updating of Rice’s Vampire Chronicles for our times, and with a Louis that has finally been unleashed, it is a series that will satisfy our deathless hunger for vampire stories this Halloween season.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
