Anne Rice, the Queen of the Damned
Before I start the review of the show proper, I figure a bit of a primer on Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles might come in handy. For one, she could very well be credited for taking a genre populated by men and often not moving away from differing perspectives, to something that is now proudly claimed by women and queer people all around the world. Rice saw the vampire as the “most human of monsters” and expanded on this throughout her 13 books, written mostly through the eyes of her (and many, many others’) extremely beloved protagonist, Lestat de Lioncourt, though other vampires do have a book appearing every now and then. Through the lens of the vampire, Rice was a daring author who ventured far and beyond into the territories of human nature, in all of its ravishing beauty and its shocking ugliness, persisting questions of morality, depravity, horror, solitude, madness, depression and so much more. Her vampires became – and still remain – a vehicle, almost the ultimate vehicle, for such ventures, and furthermore, she was not afraid to question, trample upon and rewrite and re-vision her own vampire lore, character arcs and more aspects which most writers may consider sacred cows.
Hence, what we are moving into is a world that was probably the most daring of worlds to exist, especially during the times they were written in, and especially when written by a woman. If you are the sort of reader who has those “taboo” or “unspeakable” questions when reading, I dare say that you can rest assured that Rice likely had them – and answered them plain for you. The balance, at times shocking, between spine chilling horror, occasional camp horror, existential horror, romance, comedy and adventure, later mixed in with a splash of good old science fiction, is one that is hard to match up to.
As with all of my reviews, this too, contains spoilers for all episodes of AMC’s Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire and occasional spoilers to all 13 books of the Chronicles.
“Subtext is Now Text”: Adaptation Journey and the (Fucked Up) Queer Vampire Gothic Romance
With that in mind, I now move onwards to AMC’s Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. Now, the Chronicles have been adapted onto screen before, twice, in Neil Jordan’s 1994 Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt starrer, Interview with the Vampire and Michael Rymer’s 2002 nu-metal extravaganza, The Queen of the Damned, which starred Stuart Townsend as Lestat and Aaliyah as Akasha, the titular Queen of the Damned. While the former still remains a beloved fan favourite, and in my own words, extremely quotable, the latter is best known for, well, it’s nu-metal soundtrack composed and written by Jonathan Davis of Korn, and with guest singers including other nu-metal icons such as Chester Bennington, Wayne Static, David Dramain, Jay Gordon, Marilyn Manson, Deftones and so many more. Beyond the soundtrack, however, the movie covered maybe 10% of the books at the very most and is, in all senses of the word, a disappointment.
So, why did I bring the movies up? Simple. The show had been coming. The potential adaptation of The Vampire Lestat, my still favourite of the series, in all its rockstar heart shattering glory, had been dangled out in front of fans for years, and the most damning of hope to appear was when Christopher Rice revealed a sneak peek into the script he was working on, with the pilot episode bearing the name, “Wolfkiller”, which refers to Lestat’s mortal life prior to his turning in the beloved The Vampire Lestat. In a way then, the Chronicles fans have been teased mercilessly for such a long time, that when further drama happened with the adaptation and Christopher revealed that he is no longer working on a script and that Anne was no longer directly involved with anything, our hearts dropped once more. Only to be picked up once again when somewhere along the way, Bryan Fuller of Hannibal fame was announced as a showrunner, and then dropped once more as Hulu picked it up, only to drop again before, finally, AMC announced that they will be taking on the challenge. I figure that most of us at this point were not daring to bring any more hope into ourselves, genuinely surprised to see casting being announced (more on that in the next section), and then the teaser being dropped.
With the casting announced, with Jacob Anderson of Game of Thrones as Louis de Pointe du Lac and Sam Reid (then, an unknown to me ) as Lestat de Lioncourt, there were naturally questions raised over the need and the complexities of the race change applied to Louis, and how this might potentially add even more tension and unbalanced power dynamics to the already unbalanced and messy relationship that is Lestat and Louis (more on this complication later). Furthermore the show was beginning to be consistently promoted as a “fucked up gothic romance” and “explicitly queer” presenting “text where there had only been subtext”, in reference to the 1994 adaptation. Naturally, fans found this contestable because Anne’s books have been anything but subtext, and there were conversations springing about in the fandom if sexual intercourse between the two men needs to be presented on screen in order for viewers to determine that these are, in fact, two men in a romantic relationship. Ricean vampires do not engage in penetrative intercourse because her lore establishes that sex to humans is blood drinking to vampires. The romantically involved vampires in the books exchange their own blood in an act of extreme intimacy, and blood exchange is viewed as akin to sex for the vampires (though things did happen in the final trilogy involving a certain doctor and his experiments, but I digress).
Naturally, fans were concerned that this seemed to propagate a strange message to viewers: that it is difficult to establish characters are in love, unless they have sex on screen. While some welcomed it, after all, it is not always that we get queer characters depicted in messy and complex relationships, while being explicit in their relationship with each other, others wondered if it would just be gratuitous scenes on screen for selling points rather than narrative value, given that we are living in a post Game of Thrones era where ‘sexposition’ has entered popular media’s vocabulary, all of which was made even more pertinent by the fact that Louis is no longer a plantation owner but instead, a Creole brothel owner in Storyville. Were the bodies of actors playing female sex workers about to be exploited just to fulfil the criteria of sensational visual media?
Lestat and Louis are an established couple in the books, after all, alongside several other vampire pairings. Rice has repeatedly established that in her interviews and her Facebook page. She also specifically answered questions about a Loustat wedding, which is why I never really got the ‘we are making subtext text’ push for the show, but I digress.
Nevertheless, as further promotion for the show continued at comic con panels, where Rolin Jones and the actors, Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid, persisted again and again that the story, while looking different and in spite of the established character and period differences, will remain utterly true to the essence of the Chronicles and the spirit of Anne Rice. It was advertised further that the portrayal of Lestat de Lioncourt, in particular, has been written with consideration of the character’s growth and development through the series and his establishment as the protagonist, in order to depict him in a more sympathetic light in Interview where the story is told from the point of view of Louis de Pointe Du Lac and famously depicts Lestat negatively, a far cry from the way he is shown in his own books afterwards. It was also around this period that Sam Reid firmly established himself that he is, like many of us, a fairly long term fan of the books and Lestat in particular, assuring that we were indeed in good hands.
And so, once more, we decided to give it a go. This “fucked up Gothic romance” was now good and ripe for the picking, and excitement was brewing.
Now, before I go further, I would like to firmly establish here that I do, in fact, love the show very much. I enjoyed it immensely in spite of the changes and my criticisms at some of them, and I am, like many others, eagerly awaiting updates on the next season as I write this review cum opinion piece.
Character Changes I: Age, Ethnicity
By changing the race of the characters Louis and Claudia, and the age of Daniel Molloy, and embarking on the track of completely retelling the story set in an entirely different time period with an entirely different set of circumstances, the writers faced the challenge of ensuring the meaningful handling of difficult and sensitive topics. Let us delve further into the character dynamics established in the show.
Louis de Pointe Du Lac is a thirty-three year old Creole man, who runs brothels. His brother, Paul, is a religious Catholic man, who is not happy with his older brother’s pursuits and sometimes preaches outside his brothels in Storyville, New Orleans.
Lestat de Lioncourt is born in 1760, the birth year maintained from the books, and is a white, French man, already a vampire for more than a hundred years when he meets Louis in the show. To book readers, this raised a few questions because of the notion that it was, in fact, Lestat’s youth – both as a human and a vampire – that contributed to much of his utter recklessness that resulted in the disastrous events of the book, Interview with the Vampire.
Claudia in the show has been aged up to 14 years at the time of her turning, and instead of the eternal child, she is the eternal young teenager. She too, is black and played by actress Bailey Bass. This brought in questions of her set against the immortal teenager in the books, the vampire Armand, and if Claudia being a teenager would have any impact on Armand’s casting afterwards in the seasons, and how the relationship between Louis and Claudia would be established given that she is now a teenager and Louis is a pimp who runs brothels, profiting off women selling their bodies. In the book, there was a level of love that shuffled between platonic, familial and romantic between the two and readers were wondering if this would be made explicit in the show.
Daniel Molloy is an ageing and Parkinsons stricken Pulitzer award winning journalist who had covered important events in American history such as the AIDS/HIV epidemic of the 1980s, and the subsequent catastrophic effect on the queer community. He has conducted the interview once before, in the 1970s, where he met Louis in a gay bar, but was taken in by too much drugs and alcohol that he does not remember the details. In this in-show universe, so far, the book, Interview with the Vampire, has not been published. He is called to Louis’ new penthouse apartment in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in 2022 for an updated interview. Here, Daniel meets Louis’ mysterious butler and servant, who goes by the name Rashid.
Now, any reader would know that the relationship between Lestat and Louis is an extremely tumultuous and messy one, much like a see saw – except that the see saw is on fire, the ground is one fire, it is running hailstones and glass, and there is a siren going off somewhere. It is, for lack of another descriptor, an absolute trainwreck. Of course, they reconcile, break up again, reconcile, break up and at the end, do grow individually as characters and as a couple and are in a far more healthier and nourishing space than the beginning of Interview. Keeping that in mind, the shifting and drastically different power dynamics between the two men are definitely affected by the ethnicity change. The writers did not shy away from the complexities and systemic discrimination, both direct and indirect, that Louis faces from the white people around him, in spite of being a businessman himself.
When Lestat, a visibly white French man is brought into the picture, already a vampire of over a hundred years, of course, this power imbalance is shifted even further. The first meeting occurs in the club, where Lestat is speaking in French to a prostitute named Miss Lily (later revealed to be a friend of Louis’), and almost instantly speaks to him in his mind, and later on, shows off his vampiric powers where he seemingly stops time in an amusing exchange of words and cards at a poker game.
The show establishes the conflict between the characters almost instantly, where present day Louis, black-clad in his pristine Dubai apartment, states to Daniel that he felt like slitting Lestat’s throat the very first time he sees him. Of course, I was a little surprised by this because Louis, at least when we met him first in Interview, never came across as a violent person, especially when he was a human. What stunned me even more was Lestat’s first sighting of Louis involving Louis pulling his cane sword on his brother, Paul’s throat (I’ll bleed you like a cochon bruh). Hence, we already know – Louis is different, almost entirely so from the Louis that book readers and those who watched the movie know so far.
The way the show continues to tackle racism is quite poignant in the later episodes, and viewers get good quality payback when new fledgling Louis starts hunting down racist white men, culminating in several arc beats for Louis’ character growth. We are also shown Lestat engaging in micro-aggression for some strange reason in the first episode, which did not quite sit with me, but again, this is Lestat and he is quite prone to running his mouth at times, just to see how things turn out after doing so (we see quite a bit of this aspect of Lestat later in the episodes, which delighted book fans and created some rift between show-only fans and long time Chronicles fans).
Thankfully, Lestat moves away from this odd behaviour surrounding Louis’ race once he gets to know him more, but his lack of clarity and awareness of Louis’ state of being as a black man in New Orleans does waver every now and then. It certainly made some things look slightly sore on screen, from a readers’ perspective, but nevertheless, the fact that race was introduced in a way it is crucial to the plot and the characters, rather than randomised ‘colour-blind’ casting was a wonderful decision. However, one cannot help but continue to wonder if perhaps, the writing could have been pressed a little more on that, particularly towards the latter part of the Loustat relationship (post episode 3), where it seems that the racial tensions introduced have simmered away, somehow. I read this as the narrative moving inwards towards the relationship between the two characters, the way a story takes an inward more introspective turn as characters move from engaging with the outside world and towards themselves. Perhaps that could have been the direction the story has taken, but once again, I digress slightly.
Character Changes II: Character Motivations, Philosophies, Quirks
Beyond ethnicity and age changes, the characters have also undergone some motivation changes. For starters, Louis is not the monetarily privileged one in this version of the story. He has wealth, of course, but his Blackness stops him from reaching for all the fruits of his society. His meeting and later relationship with Lestat seems to tilt towards Louis managing to make use of Lestat’s whiteness as a step ladder in navigating white spaces that may have been previously harder for him to reach. This differs from the book’s version of events because Louis there informs the reader that Lestat was probably only hanging around him because of his house and his plantation. In the show, we are presented with a Louis who has a drive towards putting himself ahead in his challenging society, a determined and intelligent businessman who knows his way around. Where we meet him, he seems to have a fairly warm family life, though of course, hiding his homosexuality does take quite a toll on him.
Whereas in the book we had Louis who was blatantly suicidal and the vampire Lestat presented a way out of this, in the show, Louis’ suffering and ‘death’ is more internal – he is a man with struggles, externally as a Black man, and internally, as a gay man. His spirit is decaying and the vampire Lestat here, offers an escape into a life where Louis is – to put in Lestat’s own words – loved and wanted as he is.
Pauls’s death in both the book and the show is the pivoting point for Louis, and it drives him further into his spiral of darkness, from which he is, ironically, pulled out from by a vampire, who introduces him to a different darkness. The depiction of Louis’ turning is interpreted in a setting and direction extremely reminiscent of Gothic imagery (think Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Phantom of the Opera, The Picture of Dorian Gray) – set in a church, after Lestat has violently killed two priests, and then proceeds to confess his love to a very visibly drunk and utterly distraught and horrified Louis, before giving him the Blood, the shot panning outwards to show the couple kissing while a large statue of the crucified Christ looms. There was a song that played automatically in my head (yes, that Hozier song). Et voilah! The promised fucked up Gothic romance has taken root, spreading all its spindly roots all through the viewers for the rest of the weeks to come.
Lestat’s reasons for being in New Orleans are, as in the movie and the first book, kept a mystery to the viewers, and by piecing things together based on cast and crew interviews, I would say it is safe to assume that we would be getting answers in later seasons and hence, I shall not expand too much on it here other than to state that I am extremely eager to know what Lestat had been doing for the entirety of the 19th century before deciding to drop by NOLA nicely during the Jazz Age. In the book and the movie, we are told that Lestat is only few years a vampire when he happens to meet Louis and a lot of Lestat’s behaviour can be attributed to his human age of 20 (not yet 21) and his vampire age of not yet a decade, which gives him a combined grand total of 30 odd years. Lestat in the show, however, is revealed to have been turned in his thirties, and by the time he meets Louis, he is well into more than at least a whole century of vampiric existence. Lestat does pretty much the same things, if not more, in the show, and it did kind of raise questions in me, but we shall see.
“True to the Spirit of Anne Rice”: Establishing the Ricean Vampire Lore, Promises and Returns (or Lack Thereof and Easter Eggs)
Obviously, when the show had been promoted during comic con as the most faithful adaptation of the novels, and having Anne Rice’s name in the title, fans would naturally expect the lore drops to happen here and there. As with any adaptation, there lies the challenge of meeting the expectations of the book fans while also hooking in new fans who may later get interested in the primary material. Since season 1 was confirmed to cover just half of Interview, book fans were promised to look out for easter eggs and lore pertaining to the rest of the series.
And so, we begin, and here is the non-exhaustive list appearing based on the order in which they appear in my head at the moment of writing.
- Dead blood and vampires. Ricean, but later retconned as only making vampires sick, it does not actually kill them.
- But… vampires drink from bowls?
- Vampires and animal blood – survive not thrive, Ricean.
- Rashid – not the same character but shares the name with a minor character from Blood and Gold
- Enhanced vampire vision
- Savage garden
- Music box for ‘a young violinist’ – later revealed to be Nicholas de Lenfent, Lestat’s lover when he was back in France.
- Floating vampire lovemaking – a throwback to the floating turning scene in the 1994 movie – not really Ricean.
- Nearly Professor Charles Xavier levels of mind connection between vampires who are not sharing the fledgling/maker relationship. Not quite Ricean.
- Marius de Romanus
- The part in episode 4 where Daniel flips one of Claudia’s diaries and it is straight up a passage from The Vampire Lestat where he shoots his injured mare after killing the wolves – the writers claim it was a “mistake” but it is there, anyway.
- Dr Fareed Bhansali from Prince Lestat
- Magnus and Lestat’s turning story – slight changes but generally the same as The Vampire Lestat
- Lestat and mastiff – throwback to Letsat having mastiffs when he was a mortal boy back in Auvergne
- Lestat and the ventriloquism with the conductor’s head – a throwback to Lestat dancing with the corpse of Claudia’s mother in the 1994 movie
- Rashid speaking in Uzbek – Crimea?
- Daniel’s 70s flashback a throwback to the opening of the 1994 movie
- Twins at Mardis Gras – throwback to 1994 movie. In the book, they were two orphans, not twins.
- Those Who Must Be Kept. O.O
- “You irritate me, your very presence irritates me”.
- And quite a few more moments where Anne’s books were directly quoted by the characters that made me feel like a student doing a Literature exam and picking out the quotes
Questions that the show had me thinking about vampire lore is the revelation that relatively older vampires, who are in the range of around 500 or so years old, can in fact, walk around in the sun for a bit without any repercussions. It is not entirely nitpicky, but also makes me wonder – does this then mean that the risk of exposing Those Who Must Be Kept is higher for younger and less sun-resistant vampires than the older ones? It was kind of similar in the book but by elder vampires, it danced more on the 1000-2000 year old vampires mark, with the added factor of vampires who have drunk from Akasha, being stronger than other ones. Furthermore, I also expected the show to stick to the dead blood conundrum for a while longer without just mentioning it and not bringing it up again to serve other purposes in the later episodes, which brings me to my point: there were several promises made, but I do not think all of them had been delivered adequately.
Once again, I do feel that a lot of the criticism around the show is not that the show in itself is inherently bad, it is in fact, quite good and I did genuinely enjoy it and will be here to watch all of the seasons for as long as it carries on. Instead, it is hanging on to the fact that the showrunners did, in fact, promote the show as being close to the source material if not directly in terms of story plot points, but ultimately in essence, and staying true to the spirit of Anne Rice. I am not sure if it is just the current trend in popular media given that it has become a confounding time of superhero narratives of spectacle combined with Game of Thrones level of nudity and sexual content, and the recent upwards trend in the consumption of true crime media and other, for lack of a better word, ‘fucked up’stories, both in real life and within fiction. This seems to serve as a particular space for the festering of opinions and ideas being exchanged and hauled without much consideration for the weight and importance of conversations to be had around certain writing decisions and adaptation choices, taking into consideration the thoughts and opinions of all types of fans who are involved in this. I shall expand more on this in the next section on episode 5.
Horror fiction, and gothic horror in particular, seemed to have made a comeback recently, alongside monumental IP adaptation projects being announced. More and more books are being developed into fully fledged television show seasons, rather than movie series and given the sheer amount of new content being put out there, I do sometimes sympathise with the networks and streaming services opting to pull out a beloved classic IP to adapt, instead of coming up with something entirely new and fresh out of the bucket, which carries along the risk of not finding the target audience and fizzling away into oblivion in these times. Knowing that there is already a steady and established fanbase that has persisted through the years, and knowing that there has not been any recent and fundamental problems raised within the community or surrounding the author of the works (yes, looking at you, that specific author of that specific fantasy series revolving around a schoolboy and a dark lord), it is a somewhat wise decision to make. However, that decision does come with a responsibility – these are indeed long-term fans of a series that had withstood the test of time and trial, and people have stayed with the world and the characters for such a long period of time and would have had formed their own communities centered around the celebration of the lore and the characters. There are several bands named after Lestat, there is a restaurant/cafe chain named after Lestat, there had been a short-lived Broadway musical on Lestat and of course, the official Vampire Chronicles fan club is called Anne Rice’s Vampire Lestat Fan Club (ARVLFC), which organises a vampire ball every year in New Orleans, around Halloween weekend. It is near impossible to ignore the fact that the Chronicles, Anne Rice and Lestat, in particular, are very much engraved into the popular consciousness and hence, it was very certainly a huge responsibility that AMC – and Rolin Jones – were taking on when they made the decision to adapt the series to screen, and this came along with both the good – and the not very good – which nicely moves this piece on to…
The Godzilla in the Room: Episode 5 “A Vile Hunger for your Hammering Heart”
I sincerely think that I cannot be fully satisfied with whatever review I write about the show without addressing episode 5. Yes, that episode that started fires and wars and ravished entire communities before Twitter started its downfall and in the current climate of reactionary moralistic views younger viewers tended to pose upon everyone else reacting to changes in characterisation, it was not a good time. Sure, with episode 6 and 7 having aired some weeks ago has softened part of the blow, but the week spent waiting for episode 6 after episode 5 aired is going to go down in fandom history books. A disclaimer before moving forward: the episode was good as an episode, it had excellent moments of tension building up like a volcano, the actors were utterly terrific and the pacing was quite well-done, as was the direction and cinematography. What ruffled my feathers is altogether a different matter.
First, as I mentioned in my previous sections, the show runners promised that in spite of the changes made to the story, the show will be, by and large, following the characterisation and plot beats as we see in Rice’s novels. The nature of the relationship shared between the characters, Louis, Lestat and Claudia, in particular, in spite of the age and ethnicity change of two of these characters, has been purported to remain, and yes, we have seen this coming into form in the first four episodes. And then, episode 5 dropped.
Oh my.
The episode started with what we expect; the Loustat relationship has been taking on a rocky and shaky turn ever since Lestat’s harsh reprimanding of Claudia for accidentally killing her human boyfriend in the previous episode. It felt akin to seeing a train crash happening live, just as the dynamics shifted around in the book and the movie. True, it is sad but that is how the story progresses. Claudia starts developing a taste for being a serial killer, leaving bodies in her wake (she buries them, but this is New Orleans and no one buries bodies unless they wish for upcoming hurricanes to expose it), and of course, sooner more than later, a hurricane does arrive and the over fifty people Claudia has killed are discovered. Furthermore, it is revealed that Claudia does not only kill people, but takes a body part home as a souvenir before recording her victims’ last words in her diaries. Here, as we return to modern day, yet another example of quite unnecessary quipping by the writers occurs, when Daniel comments that Claudia’s diaries read like “Anne Frank meets Stephen King”, which I – and quite a few other watchers – did think was unnecessarily inappropriate given that (1) the show is probably going to touch on the WW2 era and (2) the current rise of Antisemitism once again in the USA and beyond.
Coming back to the show, the discovery of the dead bodies, who also happen to be the neighbours of our murder family, prompts the police to conduct an investigation into their townhouse, putting the very existence of Louis, Lestat and Claudia at risk. The police search around their house, and comment on the drunkenness of Claudia (from a drunk man she had taken blood from), the presence of illegal liquor in their house, and in classic twentieth century homophobic fashion, make a snide remark about “crimes against nature” before leaving. This, of course, makes Lestat and Louis go into hiding, pretty much, knowing now that a target has been placed on their backs. During this time, Claudia leaves for university to look for more information on vampires around the world, while Lestat’s and Louis’ relationship deteriorates further.
And then, the final few minutes dropped. Claudia returns from her sojourn and announces that she will be leaving for Europe with Louis, and all hell almost literally breaks loose. In the minutes to follow that left way too many jaws on the ground and hearts probably too far gone to catch, viewers are left utterly horrified as Lestat loses his cool, pinning Claudia to a wall and when Louis tries to stop them, starts violently attacking Louis, punching him, and later, in a further horrific scene that is to scar our minds forever, drag his bloodied form outside and as an utterly terrified Claudia watches, fly up to the sky, with Louis, and then proceeds to drop Louis down from at least a few hundred feet up in the air. You can bet that Claudia was not the only horrified one left after this.
It was shocking, completely, utterly shocking to say the very least, and so many of us were left gasping for air, wondering if we should continue or just pretend that nothing happened. Fandom wars, character wars, ship wars and all else started in full gear after the episode, and it was not a good time for people like me, who had been Lestat fans for quite a significant amount of years. Book fans – like me – were quick to point out that that scene seems to be, almost moment by moment, transcribed from encounters between Lestat and Armand in the books (where Lestat punches Armand after the latter forcibly drinks his blood after making his believe he was still human through his Spell Gift, triggering Lestat’s memories of his traumatic encounter with Magnus, and later on, where Armand pushes an already weakened Lestat down several hundred feet from a tower, forcing him into a catatonic sleep to heal), superimposed upon one of the cutest of Loustat scenes occurring at the end of Queen of the Damned (where Lestat takes Louis out flying after he has been taught how to by Akasha, in a sweet, sweet, sweet, romantic moment). I mean when Louis and Lestat were in the sky THIS is what I wanted to see…
My greatest gripe, however, was not truly with only the writing decisions for the episode. Sure, it was shocking, but again, yes, this is just the first part of Interview, and there are clues here and there that may point to events in the episode being too exaggerated beyond what actually happened, though I am not expecting a complete retcon of events. Sure, episode 6 came by and both Claudia’s and Louis’ reactions were slightly odd – given that they were concerned with Lestat’s cheating and hiding the fact that he did have the Cloud Gift, rather than the things that shocked us all because well, you see, they are vampires and vampires are concerned with things and unconcerned about some others as opposed to say, the human viewers. All right, it is all the writers’ decisions after all, and fandom dramas always exist, anyway.
My gripe was, however, with the lack of trigger warning for domestic violence (which appeared in episodes 6 and 7, afterwards), and the fact that we had to be subjected to watching a black queer man get violently beaten up by his white romantic partner. Why was the scene necessary to present in such graphic detail? Even if things do get retconned, or explained differently, or even if all of it did happen and as the writers would have it, vampires do not care too much about its implications, the scene does physically exist, once again, in a time when violence against black bodies is becoming increasingly and alarmingly frequent. Why was there a need for this flavour of scene? There are so many ways that the culmination of the inevitable deterioration of the Loustat relationship could have been depicted on screen instead of visually representing a Black getting beat up, only to have all of the implications being virtually shrugged off in the next episode as vampire dramatics and shenanigans and just a sign of a toxic relationship but reaching the crescendo of vampire. The episode, though shot brilliantly, to this day leaves me with a bad aftertaste in my mouth because on top of all of these problems, it reads a simplistic approach of a character who is desperately holding onto a decaying relationship, by resorting to domestic violence, which was not at all a thing in the books, at least between Louis and Lestat and at least, never to this extent of near-death.
And another question – was it truly necessary for the credits to roll… with a Charles Mason song playing? And not to mention that implied rape scene involving Claudia an a newly introduced American vampire (who is probably supposed to be the character, Killer, from Queen of the Damned). Again, he was not like that in the books. Once more, sure this is writers’ choice and the show is a different creature from the books and character motivations and trajectories are obviously supposed to differ, but at the same time, promoting the show using the books and including Anne Rice’s name in the title of the show does carry some level of weight, and even if you do completely divorce the books from the show, these two decisions made by Rolin Jones – and the team – falls sadly into the recent trend we are seeing in media, where rape and sexual assault is used as a plot device to ‘strengthen’ female characters, and violence on coloured bodies continues to feature on screen, and negative traits of relationships are reduced to just being depicted through physical violence. It almost feels as if the audience is being infantlised and spoon fed into recognising that Lestat is, in fact, not at his best state as a person, and is in fact, not entirely the healthiest person to be in a relationship with at this stage in time and in my opinion, removed quite a bit of the shock factor in his later death in the finale. By shock, I mean feeling the emotion of shock at decision taken by Claudia to orchestrate Lestat’s murder, not shock at the fact that he does in fact, get murdered, because I have read the book, watched the film and know what is coming. It is supposed to be a moment for the readers to come to a point where the murder of Lestat is split into and read in two ways, one, this being a pivotal turning point for his development as a character later in the series and two, on the scale of the plot itself, questioning if premeditated murder is, in fact, a reasonable consequence of the things that Lestat had been doing to Louis and Claudia prior to this. True, we make memes about Lestat frying and becoming The Swamp Thing #2 all the time, but it is a meme. We do still feel sad that he has to die, and feel shock that somehow, Claudia had come to this conclusion, which is supposed to prove to the audience that Claudia is, in fact, as ruthless as Lestat can be. There was no need to display in bold Marvel-ised shiny colours that scream “hey look, here is a evil romantic partner, fucked up Gothic romance, remember? Hahaha”. It kind of came across as condescending, and Rolin’s later comments about things that led to his decision for making Louis Black just… contributes further and further to this mess, and lets say, I am glad that he is not the sole person in charge of the show.
Lestat as a character is extremely crucial to the Chronicles. His immense growth from Interview with the Vampire, through his story, The Vampire Lestat, and all the way to the final book, Blood Communion is probably one of the most fascinating and extremely well-fleshed out character arcs that I have seen in fiction, and especially in vampire fiction. I hesitate to use the word ‘redemption’ arc, but rather, I prefer using the word ‘growth’ arc, because of course, while Lestat does do and say a great many questionable things, so do all the other vampires in the series to varying degrees. To the patient, I strongly believe that Lestat’s beginning and his destination at the end of Blood Communion is in fact, a story that is very well-worth reading through for, through the thick and thin of his life, through the great, great many terrible decisions he makes. It is worth it and there is a reason why he remains to this day, such a compelling literary character that is beyond just ‘he is a hot vampire’. The decision made by the show to depict the degradation of the relationship through this, comes across to me, as a result of the current trends and perceptions of popular media, where there seems to be a lack of critical understanding of character nuance, and the depiction of grey characters – or antiheroes – on screen. The very notion that Lestat needs a ‘redemption arc’ is a little odd to me. I do not think that there needs to be a redemption, in the way say, a character like Marvel’s Loki or Star Wars’ Darth Vader were given. Lestat is not a direct antagonist in the way that these two (and others) are. He is a protagonist who happens to be an antihero. He is a man embedded so deeply in his struggles and imbued with his flaws that drive him towards drastic consequences as a result of his impulsiveness and lack of nuanced planning or understanding of how things in the world function. His entire arc is a growth arc through the centuries, where Lesat grows within himself and in the world around him, in his relationships to others, old and new, and embraces who he is, truly, as a result of all of the deliberate steps he takes in order to achieve this at the end of Blood Communion. I am still at the crossroads, wondering if perhaps this time and age is not entirely fit for quite highly nuanced media such as the Chronicles.
The Armand Reveal: Speculations and Implications
And now we arrive at the cliffhanger of the season: the revelation that Rashid the butler and assistant is, in fact, the vampire Armand – and the love of Louis’s life. There were clues scattered around, of course, and quite a few fans have picked up on it and were going full steam ahead with their theories. Uzbek? Crimea? Daniel of all people picking it up? The faces Rashid gives Daniel every now and then? What was going on?
Of course, as expected, at the end of the finale, past the grand banquet (The Red Banquet, as some of the fandom has taken to calling it), and Lestat’s murder, and then Louis’ consequent breakdown and decision to leave Lestat out for the dumpster trucks to take him locked safely in a trunk, leaving him in a rubbish dump to live off the rats and other creatures that wander around, a final bomb was dropped upon the audience. Rashid removes his contacts, and his black gloves, levitates and picks out a file, floats back down and hands it to a visibly stunned Daniel, who flips it open to reveal that he is looking at an old playbill for the Théâtre des Vampires.
Louis, who had just been having a panic attack, is now calm and grips onto Rashid’s hand, revealing that he is, in fact, the vampire Armand – the love of his life.
The internet went utterly bonkers. The book fans who know Armand went even more mad. What was going on? What era of the books are we in? Has Queen of the Damned happened? Has Akasha yet to return? Has Armand been meddling with the interview that we – and poor Daniel – had just spent all these hours through? Has the entire season 1, for use of fandom lingo, been Armand-coded? Linda Codega has gone into detail on this theory, explaining how the nuance to some of the things that occurred from episode 1 through 7, particularly around episodes 5 (yes, that one) and episode 6, could possibly point toward Armand having done something with the telling of the story, or perhaps the way Louis is remembering it – which you can (and should) read here.
Picture Break for all the heaviness
Anyway, I think I occupied a lot of space for my gripes and questions, so I shall add in quite a bit about the lushness of the show. The costumes? The setting? The lighting? It is splendid and I do wish for you to experience it all on your own by watching the show, but here are some of my top favourite shots from the show:
To my fellow readers, you know that final Loustat moment from Blood Communion? Yes – that one. That one. We can forget that this episode is called “The Thing Lay Still” hah.
That being said, and leaving other spoilers for the watching, the finale packed one heck of a punch. Watch it.
Ending Thoughts and Season 2 Theories
Before moving on to my speculations about the rest of season 2 and beyond, here is some official news that have been confirmed through post-finale interviews and podcasts:
- Season 2 will be set in Europe, including locations like Romania and Paris. This means that our guess that the second part of Interview, where Louis and Claudia look for fellow vampires in Europe after their ‘successful’ dispatch of Lestat, is correct.
- Assad Zaman, the brilliant actor behind Rashid/Armand, has promised us that we will see The Theatre of the Vampires, and more of Armand in the second season, including some romance. Arsise Loumand and Devil’s Minion shippers – time to unleash everything we have been holding close.
- The cast and the crew are very aware of the past shared between Daniel and Armand, so hopefully we get more of it in season 2.
- Lestat has been confirmed to appear in season 2, though we have been informed that The Vampire Lestat will be getting its full run in season 3. My guess is that we might be getting a little bit of what Lestat had been up to in the years leading to his meeting with Louis in 1917, New Orleans, since that period is not book canon. Or perhaps him making his way to Paris to look for Louis and Claudia? (le gasp: tower?!)
- We have been told that The Vampire Lestat has been confirmed for season 3, and Gabrielle de Lioncourt, mother of Lestat and his first fledgling, has been confirmed to make an appearance.
- We have also been told that they do have plans for The Tale of the Body Thief. Fascinating.
Now for my guesses:
- Since Armand is of great interest now, does it mean that season 2 would be interspersed with moments from Armand’s past from The Vampire Armand, since I do recall that it was listed as recommended reading for season 1?
- Since he has already been name dropped, does this mean we see Marius making his entrance in season 2?
- Same with the name dropping – how about Those Who Must Be Kept?
With that – thank you for coming to the end of this rather long and quite rambly review cum opinion piece on perhaps one of my all time favourite series. Please leave a comment on anything, but do be respectful and understand that all of us are welcome to hold our own opinions on things.
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