Interview with the Vampire season 1 review: he drags me away at the end of the night… 🧛

Deserted street. Last cigarette. Nothing moves anymore. Just a brothel lighting up the sidewalk with a prostitute in red. This is how Louis enters the scene, a Creole pimp from a small town in New Orleans in 1910, who tries to make his business prosper while fighting against his own sexual inclinations. This is where Lestat intervenes, a businessman who has just arrived from France, who intends to make the young man his companion of immortality. In 2020, in Dubai, journalist Daniel Molloy will resume what he had abandoned years earlier, his interview with a vampire. Title placement, curtain.

This outline of a story, apart from a few details, necessarily tells you something. This is the biggest success of the novelist Anne Rice, released in 1978, who herself wrote the screenplay for the eponymous film in 1994 with a great Hollywood lineup: Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Antonio Banderas, Christian Slater and the very young Kirsten Dunst. Excuse me a little. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards and won the prestigious Worst Couple award for Pitt and Cruise at the 1995 Razzie Awards.

Since 2020, it is the AMC studios – the same ones that produce 36 The Walking Dead series per year – which have recovered the rights to adapt Rice's works and immediately announced that Interview with the Vampire would come back to life in the form of a series. And as season 2 prepares to arrive in the United States, the French public can finally discover the premiere on Paramount+. So a gift from the angels or the work of a Devil dressing in Prada?

You will have understood from reading the pitch (the thing at the very beginning of this article), the show intends to take up Rice's main lines while changing the punctuation in order to emphasize different details. Before crying about conspiracy, infamy and witch hunting, it should be noted that the author herself had a say in this adaptation (before her death) and that if this Interview with the Vampire had done exactly the same thing as the other two Interview with the Vampire, then it would have been less of an interview and more of a transcription.

Especially since we cannot accuse the series of trashing the words of its models (book and film) as, on the contrary, it made use of its greater freedom of space – seven episodes of around 45 minutes each – and past and present societal issues to reestablish and then flesh out the truth.

Money is chic and vampires are queer

First of all, the series allows us to put images and words on what the film refused to do. Yes, the vampire myth at Rice is completely associated with homosexual culture and more broadly LGBTQIA+. We're talking about creatures that enter your mind and suck your blood. As for those who would like to become immortal, you will have to suck too.

And if Neil Jordan's film was as homosexually charged as a volleyball game in Top Gun, there was no need to rush the general public and just make very heavy innuendoes. We can even say that the footage sweats the parts of the teeth in the air so much that it becomes ridiculous not to show them.

A problem that the series washes away as quickly as bath water and the baby with it. Louis is searching for himself and his transformation will allow him to reveal his true nature to those close to him, convinced Catholics, who no longer accept him. The show then plays on its two different temporalities. In 1910, we talked about demons, in 2020, the word coming out is no longer a taboo. The man is openly gay and his relationship with Lestat is displayed on camera.

No more unsaid, no more secrets, the vampire is nothing other than a slave to his own desires and they are finally assumed. Here again, nothing to cry scandal about since everything was there from the beginning and that it finally shows up on the screen is only a logical, natural outcome of the thing. This Interview with the Vampire is the same as in 1976, but without the prohibitions. The series makes fun of it by referencing a previous interview from the 70s which would not have really been “honest”.

Interview with a Vampire ?

Where the show falls short is when it comes to staging its point. If the vampire side of the interview is present, it is barely felt in front of the camera as it seems to fail to iconize this status. The fantastic dimension has no added value on screen to the point where we sometimes have the impression that the supernatural part interests the screenwriters much more than the various directors.

The camera films actors saying things, doing things, but without adding the slightest added value. It is just an austere tool. At times, she gives us the impression of not knowing which way to turn, showing violence and frontal eroticism before retreating towards a surprising shyness. And the first to be sacrificed on the altar of visual puritanism without energy are the actors who, from one scene to the next, have that little animal thing in their eyes. Except that very often, the animal is dead.

We all have red blood

Not enough to spoil too much a show which addresses many subjects, including the racial question. Where Pitt's vampire was a white owner, Creole identity is an integral part of this Louis played by Jacob Anderson and of the plot. A change of perspective which allows us to accentuate what is the central theme of the story, namely the acceptance of who we are and the rejection of differences.

Louis seeks himself as a Creole homosexual vampire, which reinforces his torments, his desires and sometimes his hatred of mortals. He is more than a victim of a toxic relationship with his father, mentor and lover (played by Sam Reid as a fake Pitt for the joke), he is the slave of this relationship, of his new condition, and he does not wishes to undo his chains. The great strength of the series is there, giving depth to each symbol.