'Interview With the Vampire' Makes Immortality Super Lame
These vampires have nothing better to do than mope around all day
Though I’m an avid fan of the genre, I’m not what you’d call ‘pro-vampire.’
I’m of the old school. Stake ‘em, burn ‘em, strike their head off. With the notable exclusion of Count Chocula, the only good vampire is a dead one.1 Many attempts have been made to make vampires into creatures deserving our empathy if not sympathy, but their humanity is only a mask to lure in the sheep. Seduction is part of the game, but you’re not the vampire’s lover. You’re not even a pet. You’re a blood-filled Twinkie.
For me, the allure of vampire stories is the battle between the embodiment of ancient evil and mere mortals, distracted and disbelieving, with nothing less than their souls hanging in the balance. In my favorite vampire stories—Salem’s Lot, The Historian, and, of course, Dracula—the protagonists are both hunter and hunted. Stories in which the most terrifying thing is dusk, when all the light slowly drains from the world, ripping away whatever faint hope the heroes clung to. When all of man’s technological progress and assuredness gives way to nameless terror.
There’s a reason Unsolved Mysteries aired at night. It’s easy to laugh off stories about skunk apes during the afternoon. Less so when it’s dark and you can’t see the skunk ape lurking outside your window. During commercial breaks, I’d walk around the house and make sure all the doors were locked. Sometimes I’d even check the windows. I haven’t watched Unsolved Mysteries in 30 years but I still check the locks every night.2
Humans instinctively fear the dark. It’s hardwired into us. That fear arises again anytime we have to go into a dark place. Afterwards, safely sheltered by light, we quietly laugh at the silliness of our reaction. If we think on our fear at all, we consider it a vestige of childhood, nothing more.
Vampires give teeth back to the night. They reclaim it as a domain of evil, a witching hour when mortals hunker behind doors and try to ignore the strange noises coming from outside. Good vampire stories do that.
Interview With the Vampire is not that kind of story.
It's tailor-made to make vampires sympathetic, but only succeeds in outing them as insufferable bores. Vampires are the protagonists and also the antagonists. It’s a vampire soap opera. Vampires on vampires, in all senses of the meaning.
They still kill lots of innocent people. But! Louis (Brad Pitt, bored or out of his depth) is super bummed about like, life and stuff. He thought accepting Lestat’s (Tom Cruise, having a blast) dark gift would make all his problems go away. But becoming a vampire just denies an end to his suffering, and also piles on guilt about having to feed on people. Louis is crippled by so much anxiety and self-doubt, the movie should’ve been titled My So-Called Unlife. We don’t sympathize with Louis so much as we want to give him a puppy or something.
Immortality has always been part of the vampire deal, right up there with fang teeth and a sexual undercurrent thick as blood. That’s the perk of going vampire, maybe the only selling point unless you’re a fan of dusty mausoleums—never having to taste death’s kiss.
Humans have long sought to escape death. In ancient days, pharaohs constructed elaborate, trap-riddled tombs to preserve their wealth and earthly remains for the next life. Billionaires today infuse themselves with blood from young people in an attempt to deny aging and, maybe, if they spend enough money, death itself.3
Both ancient and modern attempts of throwing money at death seem pretty futile from where I’m sitting. But it speaks to a universal desire to not die. And from that perspective, and that alone, vampirism makes sense. Not that I’d do it. I can barely stomach the sight of my own blood, and then only in very limited quantities. But I can understand why one would consider it.
The real dilemma is: Immortality, at what cost? In the film, Louis grapples with the devil’s bargain he entered into. He rails at the idea of killing people (even though he understood what a vampire was before he agreed to become one). But while he dances around the periphery of the problem, he never truly engages with it. He morosely subsists on rats like Capri Sun juice pouches, clinging to the shadow of his humanity. In a moment of hunger, or perhaps mercy, he bites Claudia (Kirsten Dunst, blowing everyone else out of the water), a young girl orphaned by plague. From that moment forward, his conscious is clean. Humans are food. The conflict—the steep price of eternal life—isn’t resolved so much as it’s quietly closeted.
If Interview With the Vampire is about anything, it’s the tedium of immortality. But it’s not even intentionally about that. Not in a way that’s interesting. We get the sense that the vampires are hella bored, but they make no attempt to rectify the situation. Maybe there’s something to that. Perhaps creativity and imagination are inherently human traits, things lost during the transition. That would make sense, but it doesn’t hold up.
Claudia is a talented artist and learns to play the piano. We later meet a clutch of Parisian theater vamps. So vampires clearly can appreciate and partake in the arts. Frankly, that’s great news. If by-chance I’m seduced by a vampire while taking out the trash, I’ll have plenty of time to devote to all the novels I want to write. I’ll probably have to bite my Dungeons & Dragons friends so we can continue playing forever, but I doubt they’ll complain. The hardest part of playing D&D is finding the time to play. Problem solved.
That’s exactly what these vampires need—a few good hobbies. Having innumerable decades and doing nothing with them is more horrific than anything that happens in this film. At least from my time-poor situation. Maybe a retiree out there is more disgusted by Christian Slater basically playing himself.
The most interesting thing about Interview With the Vampire springs directly from the immortality conundrum, but unfortunately never rises above a footnote. The flip side of the whole ageless immortal deal is being locked in stasis, frozen at the time of vampirification. Claudia physically remains a little girl even though decades pass.
But while vampires are forever young, the world continues to change. It’s an inverse of the Wooderson corollary. Progress is inexorable. In the blink of undying eyes, the world becomes foreign, unknowable. Like anyone else, vampires are products of their time. And their time was long, long ago.
They stand on society’s shadowy periphery, terrified of the new artificial sights and sounds. For all the bragging about their accrued centuries, they really don’t like feeling the weight of all those years. Who does? This actually makes the vampires a bit sympathetic. (As much as you can sympathize with such creatures.) Time’s capricious hand made them irrelevant. They no longer recognize the society they dine up.
I was reminded how I felt when I stopped keeping up with new music and hot trends. Once you get off that train, you don’t get back on. And if you try, you quickly discover you aren’t in Kansas anymore.
A month ago, google served up an article about a pop star who had a dead body in his car. The artist’s name was D4vd. How do you even pronounce that? D-four-vd? Davd? It honestly looks like a gaming account name.4 It was just another reminder, like Gen Z lingo or the Stanley bottle craze, that I have been left behind by popular culture. I’m fine with it. In fact, I’m relieved not to have to care.
Aging is both a privilege and a curse. We want to go on living, we hate getting old. There’s a hint of this truth at the heart of Interview With the Vampire. But the movie is too depressed to notice. The lasting takeaway is likewise unintentional: Immorality sucks.
I am also a fan of Dracula by way Emperor Palpatine and Hugh Hefner.
I used to have a recurring nightmare about people trying to get into my house through the back door, which didn’t lock reliably. The dreams continued even after I fixed the lock, even after we moved to a different house. I blame Unsolved Mysteries.
This whole thing is very vampiric, when you think about it. The only real question is how many billionaires would go full vampire if it actually meant immorality. (Answer: all of them.)
You want a number in your name? Fine. Just have it make sense. 2Pac. You can read that. Tech N9ne. Makes sense, right? D4vd is trying too hard.
The TV adaptation of “Interview With the Vampire” is far superior to the movie. Rolin Jones, the show’s creator, has a lot more room to delve further into Rice’s original themes of toxic, lustful love. He also replaces Louis with a gay Black man in the 1910s New Orleans, not a white plantation owner in the 18th century. This dramatically alters the relationship between the main characters. It’s arguably one of the best shows on TV. Film Daze just released a terrific article about why the show is so good.
"There’s a reason Unsolved Mysteries aired at night. It’s easy to laugh off stories about skunk apes during the afternoon. Less so when it’s dark and you can’t see the skunk ape lurking outside your window. During commercial breaks, I’d walk around the house and make sure all the doors were locked. Sometimes I’d even check the windows. I haven’t watched Unsolved Mysteries in 30 years but I still check the locks every night.²"
It didn't help that Robert Stack, Mr. No-Nonsense himself, was the host of the show. The way he talked about the weird things on the show made you more likely to think they were legitimately threatening concerns.