As any goth high schooler worth their salt can tell you, Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles are a hell of a ride. They start small and focused, get big and mythic, take weird left and right turns into stories of possession and communion with the Devil Himself, cross over with her Mayfair Witches saga…it gets complicated. And that’s before Rice converted to and then de-converted from Christianity, which is a whole other kettle of Jesus fish.
But I still remember those books fondly, and not just because my essay on Memnoch the Devil got me into college. I admire Rice’s work for its unapologetic decadence and sexuality, its queerness, its gothic sense of heightened emotion and romance without limits. I know, I know, this book was already adapted with a star-studded cast that included freaking Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Christian Slater, Antonio Banderas, and a very young Kirsten Dunst.
But once I heard they were taking it to the small screen, letting things play out over a longer running time and a broader canvas? With Eric Bogosian as the interviewer? I’m back on my vampire bullshit, baby!
Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire stars Jacob Anderson as Louis de Pointe du Lac, a handsome, refined, and very rich young man who lives in a palatial apartment in one of those extravagantly wealthy cities in the small kingdoms that do the Arabian Peninsula. To be fair, “young” is a…tricky term, in Louis’s case. To all the world he looks a youthful 33, but he’s actually nearly 150; he is the titular “the Vampire,” of course.
Arrayed against him is the interviewer, Daniel Molloy, played in grandly gruff style by the great Eric Bogosian. Seemingly based a bit on reformed bad-boy newspapermen like David Carr, Molloy is suffering from a career impasse (the industry has collapsed around him and he’s hawking online classes), pandemic-based ennui, and the fact that he secretly has Parkinson’s disease. So when he receives a letter from Louis offering a do-over of their abortive interview attempt some 49 years earlier — an attempt that went south because Molloy was high at the time, and which ended with Louis biting him — the reporter drops everything and heads to Louis’s residence tout suite, as Louis himself might say.
That’s when things get interesting. Turns out Louis wasn’t always the refined gentlemen sitting before Daniel in 2022. Back in 1910, the year he was turned, he was a more rough and tumble sort: a pimp, maintaining the fortune of his respectable family — which is late father had all but run into the ground — with the skin trade.
His family has…varying opinions about this matter. His mother, Florence (Rae Dawn Chong), is content to look the other way. His sister, Grace (Kalyne Coleman), seems willing to accept that he’s doing it for the good of the family. His baby brother Paul (Steven Norfleet), though, is a different story. Plagued by mental illness, he believes he can hear God talking to him through birds in his head, and God wants Louis to repent from his wicked ways.
Those ways get a bit wickeder when a man — well, a “man” — named Lestat de Lioncourt shows up in town. Played with dandified intensity by Sam Reid, Lestat is a striking figure: his hair and clothes are out of step with the times, his eyes are permanently dilated (an unnerving and effective bit of makeup), and his radiant confidence dazzles pretty much everyone he meets. This includes Louis, who finds himself ready to murder Lestat as they compete for the affections of the prostitute Louis employs to cover up his closeted homosexuality…but also finds himself enthralled by Lestat to the point of physical paralysis.
Things get weirder from there. Lestat, it turns out, can communicate telepathically, and somehow freeze time as well. (His other superpower is relentlessly eye-fucking the camera.) Louis, who soon becomes Lestat’s close companion, is willing to write these off as mere tricks of some kind without probing much deeper.
That changes when Lestat orchestrates a threesome with Lily, the prostitute — whom he proceeds to put to sleep so he and Louis can focus on each other. Their passionate kissing turns to something half-sinister, half-miraculous when Lestat bites Louis, the two of them hovering naked several feet off the floor as it happens. (Louis compares the sensation to the best heroin Molloy ever had, multiplied by orders of magnitude.)
Still uncomfortable with his sexuality, though — particularly because he recognizes that even in New Orleans’s red light district, a gay Black man is persona non grata — Louis ditches Lestat and moves on with his life. He and Paul reconcile and put on a dance routine at Grace’s wedding. Everything seems fine…until Paul walks right off the roof where he and Louis are watching the sun come up. “That was the last sunrise I ever saw,” he tells Molloy.
Seemingly sensing Louis distress, and taking advantage of his newfound isolation — his mother straight-up blames him for Paul’s suicide and subsequent damnation — Lestat reenters his life, causing a scene during the funeral procession. A drunken Louis staggers into his favorite cathouse only to discover that Lily has been found dead with all the blood drained out of her, an increasingly common phenomenon in New Orleans. He races to the church to confess all his sins, including his relationship with Lestat, whom he calls the Devil.
Well, you know what they say about speaking of the Devil.
Lestat arrives at the church, kills the priests, lights the place on fire. With the permission of Louis, who’s desperate for Lestat to ease his pain and sorrow as the vampire has promised he would, Lestat drains Louis to the brink of death before filling him up with blood from his own veins. The process, needless to say, is explicitly erotic — two beautiful men hungrily guzzling fluid from one another’s bodies. The next time Louis opens his eyes, his pupils are dilated too. “The end,” he tells Molloy; “the beginning,” he adds, before a tear of blood trickles from his eye.
All in all it’s a marvelously melodramatic production. The prose of creator Rolin Jones’s script is defiantly purple. The costumes and sets are lavish and decadent. Anderson and Reid are mesmerizingly attractive, a key component of Rice’s legendarium. Director and Game of Thrones vet Alan Taylor knows his way around torchlit period pieces, that’s for sure. Daniel Hart’s score is like something out of Old Hollywood. Hell, they even put ominous thunderclaps in the background during Lestat’s assault on the church and conversion of Louis into the undead.
Of course, you have to be willing to go with all that kind of stuff to get anything out of the show. Which, I think, is a price of admission worth asking for, if not paying. Any show that’s really intent on adapting the vibe of Anne Rice’s sublimely arch, hypersensual books — even if it’s changing the time frame and, rather crucially to the story, the race of one of the protagonists — has to be willing to go there, to leave taste behind and go over the top with, well, pretty much everything. You can either stomach that sort of thing or not.
I certainly can. I’m excited to see a vampire show made with such evident craft and care, instead of the umpteenth show about teenage vampires trying to make it through Vampire High or whatever. I’m excited to see a vampire show that presents vampires as both thoroughly awful — whatever else he is, Lestat is an egomaniacal dickhead murderer — and completely irresistible once they have you in their clutches. I’m even excited to have a horror show on TV that is more about vibes than raw terror or pitch-black bleakness, one more indebted to Bram Stoker’s Dracula than 28 Days Later or Under the Skin. And I’m excited to see any show this relentlessly, bombastically horny. These are notes worth playing, and based on this performance, I’m willing to listen.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.