Vampires never die. Not even sunlight and garlic can quash the enduring appeal of one of the most famous supernatural creatures in our mythological lore, especially when it comes to pop culture. For as long as cinema has existed, vampire movies have swarmed the screen, each offering a different representation of the mythic bloodsucker. The malleability of their mythos has allowed them a kind of thematic flexibility not afforded to, say, zombies (sorry, The Walking Dead). Vampires represent anything and everything, often absorbing the ideas and ills of their given era. Just when it seems as though the cultural backlash may be forming against vampires, they become relevant once again.
The 2020s have seen a real resurgence in vampiric storytelling: comedies like Renfield, gonzo horrors such as Abigail, the melancholic coming-of-age tale Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, and too many sexy romantasy novels to mention. The most prominent example is AMC’s long-awaited adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire, bringing to life in stunning detail the iconic novel that birthed generations of vampiric fans. Few vampire novels have had the cultural impact that Rice’s debut inspired. Aside from Dracula himself, there may be no vampire more influential and iconic than the brat prince Lestat de Lioncourt, who reinvented the image of the creature into a loquacious and oft-tormented lover who playfully toyed with ideas of power, gender, and desire. He did not merely inspire on the page. Three decades ago, he dominated the big screen too, and changed how the vampire was seen for a whole new generation.
By all rights, Neil Jordan’s 1994 adaptation of Interview With The Vampire shouldn’t have worked. It’s an achingly earnest queer romantic drama released in the midst of Gen-X cool and at the tail end of the AIDS epidemic. Aside from Coppola’s take on Bram Stoker’s Dracula three years prior, the vampire genre hadn’t exactly flourished at this time. Every role was miscast, most notoriously that of Lestat himself, who was played by Tom Cruise. That decision was so controversial that Rice spent months letting the world know she disapproved of it, famously saying that Cruise was "no more my vampire Lestat than Edward G. Robinson is Rhett Butler." (He was far too short!) And yet the film is delightful: a delicious melodrama of queer angst and the fight to understand what makes us human.
With a screenplay by Rice herself, Jordan’s adaptation made the savvy decision to play its material as seriously as it is on the page. It would have been all too easy to add some sardonic eyerolls to this emotionally heightened story, where everyone talks in monologues like they’re a cross between a poet and a priest. One can imagine an extremely '90s take on Interview With The Vampire that feels the need to break the fourth wall constantly to let the audience know how silly this all is, or to needlessly update it for the times (actually, we know what that would have looked like because we got it with the only other film adaptation of Rice’s work, Queen Of The Damned, in all its nu-metal glory.) The reason these books have stood the test of time, even as the series got progressively more bananas (think witches, period blood, and aliens), is because they envelop readers in a world that feels real. If you don’t buy that being a vampire is both a gift and a curse, a weight to carry with you for eternity as you kill night after night to survive, then you simply wouldn’t care. Jordan’s commitment to the source ensures that we do, making everything surrounding the vampires as overwhelming and baroque as they are. Fittingly for such an aesthetically grand book, the film is astonishing to look at and listen to, thanks to the Oscar-nominated art direction and score by Elliot Goldenthal.
So many of the elements that shouldn’t work are what make Interview With The Vampire sing. Is Tom Cruise all wrong for Lestat? Yes, and yet he is Lestat. He’s a peacocking libertine who mocks poor sad Louis (Brad Pitt) for being miserable with immortality, but he’s also overwhelmed by his own pain. He cracks jokes, soliloquies about Hell, and dances with corpses, all of which evoke the petulant magnetism of Rice’s beloved prince. Even Rice was eventually won over by his performance, and issued a full-page apology in the trades.
But not even Tom Cruise as Lestat could keep from being overshadowed by the true star of the film: Kirsten Dunst as Claudia, the perennial child vampire. While in the book, Claudia is only five when she is turned (this heavily inspired by Rice’s own daughter, who died of leukemia), she was slightly aged up for the film. This diluted none of the potency of her aching story, to forever be trapped in the body of a prepubescent girl even as her mind ages. Dunst gives one of the all-time great child performances, her eerie maturity perfect for this unique character. Interview With The Vampire downplays some of the sensuality surrounding her in the novel, which makes for some of the most uncomfortable scenes on the page, but none of her tragedy is lost.
Norm MacDonald famously declared in his Saturday Night Live Weekend Update of the movie that it was “not gay enough.” He’s not wrong. The first book in the series is undoubtedly a love story between two men, even if the narrator doth protest too much about his feelings for his messy ex. Jordan’s film was criticized at the time for downplaying that intense sensuality. A few longing glances between hot movie stars don’t quite fill the gap, although it would be a mistake to claim that anything in this movie is heterosexual (unlike Queen Of The Damned, which fully straight-washed Lestat for no damn reason). Still, it is striking that two of the most beloved heartthrobs of their time headlined a major Hollywood release in 1994 and were even allowed to keep some of the queerness intact on the screen.
While Interview With The Vampire was a big hit, it didn’t spawn any real sequels and we never got to see Tom Cruise as rock star Lestat. The film, however, has maintained a mighty legacy. It’s one of the greatest vampire movies ever made, its fingerprints seen on everything from the lush gothic dressings of Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak, to the overwhelming romantic commitment of the Twilight series, to Neil Jordan’s other vampire film, the criminally underrated Byzantium, about a parent-child pairing trying to survive in a modern world as their dynamic irrevocably shifts. Even the AMC series, so radically different from the book and movie in many ways, was built upon the foundations laid by the film. If you’ve read any vampire book of the past 30 years, it is either directly influenced by Jordan and Rice’s collaboration or is working to subvert it.
If vampire fiction’s longevity is tied to how it can remold itself to represent anything, Interview With The Vampire endures because it captures something so universally human: our fears that we may lose ourselves and no longer know who we are. If life is change, then we cannot avoid this fact, even if we’re doomed to live forever. For all of its grandeur, Interview With The Vampire is ultimately a primal work. It understands that we’ll never stop wanting more and we’ll never stop worrying that such desires could destroy us, even if we not-so-secretly like them. Rice always understood that being a monster was the most human thing of all.
