Interview with the Vampire (1994)

31/10/2024, Glasgow Film Theatre

I saw this with my friend Billie in a packed Halloween night screening, as the second half of a double bill. It was a great atmosphere, with lots of giggling and cackling from the audience, and a fun ride. I giggled too. Tom Cruise is at the height of his dead-eyed, lurid powers. I could never decide whether he was hamming it up on purpose to take the piss, or the only one on set with the self-seriousness to buy in. Every moment of his oddball energy was glorious, and he makes mopey Brad Pitt look half-asleep by comparison. I know Lestat is a beloved character from Anne Rice’s source novel, and his zany portrayal here by Cruise shows why. He has a Nicholas Cage appeal.
A lot of the humour derives from Lestat and Louis’ (Pitt) relationship, complete with surrogate vampire daughter Claudia played by ~11 year old Kirsten Dunst. I knew this movie acted as something of a trojan horse to bring some gay representation into the mainstream of 1990s Hollywood, as vampire stories often have in their respective periods. However I wasn’t expecting it to be so blatant. Lestat and Louis are written as a couple, they say what a couple would say, stopping short only of explicitly referring to each other as romantic partners or actually committing any kind of sex act. Do vampires fuck? My companion Billie observed that in place of direct fornication Lestat and Louis often share female victims, sometimes literally undressed sex workers, using a woman’s body as the conduit for their homosexual union. But I do naturally wish we could have seen them take it all the way there. Claudia also neatly fills the ‘adoptive daughter of a gay couple’ role in their dynamic, and the trio’s family arguments are hilarious in how everyone is so in on the joke while never blinking, as the film continues to take itself seriously. Through this lens, it’s an enjoyably camp romp, which must have titillated straight, Bible-reading Rice to write and adapt for the screen.
The film suffers under any scrutiny however. You can really feel Rice slashing down a much longer novel to fit into a two hour screenplay, and as a result almost every theme, character and relationship of the film feel drastically underserved. Armand and his coven finally arrive as a huge nothing. As fun as Claudia is, her inner life or ‘parental’ relationships never really parsed. It took her almost a century to ask Louis some critical questions about their situation you have to imagine would have occurred to her after a few years at most. I guess vampires struggle with parental conversations too.
The greatest victim of Rice’s editing process is her invocation of Louisianan slavery, which comes right at the opening of the film. I have no idea how it’s depicted in the novel, but coming at the start it heavily inflected my experience of this, making clear that it’s is a solipsistic story from a coloniser’s perspective that treats everything as somehow value neutral. For context, I have just finished reading Nosferasta: The Book, a companion text to a film by Ojibway filmmaker Adam Khalil in which he adapts the personal vampire lore of New York-based Rastafarian and musician Oba. In Nosferasta, Oba was a West African via Jamaican slave made a thrall of vampire overlord Christopher Columbus, who assisted his master in their colonial project until finally breaking free of his spell after smoking weed in the late 20th century. Oba and Khalil’s film is all about being the vampire, being complicit in colonialism, but now using your dark powers to break that world and forge a new legacy. The book was a great read, exploring the vampire through a Black and indigenous reading as a figure that includes colonisation, the bourgeoisie, anti-Semitism (as in Marx), queerness, homophobia, HIV, and that trojan effect I mentioned earlier. This multiplicity fascinates me about vampires.
In this film, the first thing we learn about Louis is that he is a slave owner. As in Nosferasta with Columbus, this is a great foundation for a vampire story - in many ways the slave owner is one of the ultimate vampiric figures of history. But in the context of the film it doesn’t feel as thought this is ever really supposed to inflect our impression of Louis. He’s always so sad, and he has so much ‘respect’ for human life, or at least he suddenly does now he’s destroyed his plantation. His slaves are depicted as whooping around a campfire, and Thandiwe Newton as his house slave Yvette is probably the textually slightest named character in the entire piece. She has no agency, little screen time, Louis suddenly kills her and after a moment of pouting seems to forget this ‘first’ victim of his bloodlust ever existed. The comparison with Nosferasta is unfavourable. Where Oba and Khalil stare into the well of colonialism and enact an approach of refusal, complication and détournement, Rice and Jordan include this legacy in their film without weight or consequence in Louis or the story at large. It’s ugly, and I think can slip under the radar of audiences who just want to guffaw at the film’s homoeroticism. Rice heavily sets her story up with a sociopolitical commentary she never even tries to do due diligence toward, and I could never take Louis or the film seriously after this opening act. It’s mere fluff at best, and damaging fluff at worst.
It’s also very lazy in its shooting. We have sumptuous costume and set design, but we see it mostly in this limp and idly wandering close-ups and medium shots, edited too fast to shine at all. There is no craft to these visuals, it’s all pretty workmanlike 90s Hollywood fare. It is sad to see the passing of an era where a non-franchise Hollywood movie like this had access to these kind of resources, and received this kind of success. It’s also typical for its era in the way it’s totally cack-handed with its content, in a way that ranges from hugely entertaining to carelessly feeding into damaging tropes; legacies of evil and misrepresentation. The mess of it all has piqued my curiosity about what can be in this goddamn novel, but I can’t really imagine ever reading it. Watch Pura Sangre instead - that’s my kind of vampire story.