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“So, Mr. du Lac … how long have you been dead?”
It is the question that gives liftoff to a newly reconstructed “Interview With the Vampire” series on AMC — all the while sinking its teeth (pun very much intended) into that world that goth queen Anne Rice first famously created. A beautiful resurrection: the bottom line.
Carnal and lyrical and wry and unambiguously queer: my review in a nutshell. Oh, and this too: sumptuously spun existential dread. Sign me up, baby!
Blessed by Rice (who died last year and whose combined Lestat novels have sold somewhere in the area of 150 million copies), this reimagining (several episodes in) strikes me as the best sort of reboot in that it takes the mould of her genre-defining tale but shapes it in intriguing ways. Starring Jacob Anderson as Louis de Pointe du Lac and Sam Reid as Lestat de Lioncourt, it has — for one — shifted the 1791 Louisiana timeline of the original book (and 1994 mega-movie with Tom Cruise/Brad Pitt) to the heyday of the storied (yet short-lived) Storyville red light district in New Orleans in the early 1900s.
A colourful time that coincides, incidentally, with the birth of jazz. A setting, incidentally, that also allows this version to put a lens on race, in part because New Orleans was one of the few places in the Jim Crow South where some Black people could toil as businessmen and rub elbows with the white elite. Louis straddles that in-between space (his own lineage evidently tracing back to “sugar plantation money”).
The series gets going with a modern-day pan to Daniel Molloy (played by Eric Bogosian), an investigative journo who’s at home during the coronavirus pandemic (metaphor alert!), during which time he receives a mysterious package. A set of tapes. Not just any tapes; ones he made when he originally interviewed Louis in the ’70s. An invitation is granted to reinterview Louis — this time, in Dubai, where he is living now. Daniel accepts. And off we are to the races, as Louis rewinds us back to the story of his possession.
Most significantly, this series deftly nails the emotional fluency of the Anne Rice books, in that as much as her world is, of course, about bloodsuckers, it really is about the burden of existence … and longing … and, well, a howling loneliness.
As someone who does not go much for fantasy or sci-fi (confession: I am never going to be a “House of the Dragon” kind of guy), I have always been down with vampires. Well, the Anne Rice version of vampires, anyways. Something about the baroqueness of them, but also the humanity. And the way she made New Orleans come gloriously to life. This latest adaptation — which is obviously made to appeal to both Rice-heads and a new generation that may not have heard of her — seems to innately recognize that.
Fortuitously, I only had the vaguest idea that an updated “Interview With the Vampire” was even coming when I made a pilgrimage to Rice’s old house when in New Orleans earlier this year. “She used to dream of living in the Garden District,” the guide told me about the Queen of Goth Lit who was more responsible than anyone in recent times for harnessing the mystique of that Louisiana town. Though she grew up poor nearby, with a kind of rough upbringing, after the success of her books — which spooled a whole cultural phenomenon (her sexed-up vampires resonating strongly during the rise of the AIDS epidemic) — Rice started buying any number of properties in this la-di-da hood.
Including the storied home she settled in and I found myself looking up at. Pink-hued, three-storied and Italianate. A beauty. With a giant mossy tree that looms in front and winds toward an upper window. It stopped me in my tracks. There was something moving about seeing the tree that Rice herself looked out at for years, standing firm, as she wrote and wrote.
Not that she would dig all that earnestness. This is the same authoress, after all, who once arrived at a book signing a few streets over in a coffin carried by a horse-drawn hearse! I also stopped by said bookstore when I was in the area.
What makes this TV reboot markedly distinct? How it sews its queer allegory onto the socio-political dynamics of the time, as a writer in Vox put into context neatly in a piece last week: “As a human, Louis is queer (closeted) and Black, which makes him a second-class citizen. This is despite living in Storyville, a sordid neighborhood (sic) in New Orleans that’s more tolerant than other places …”
When Lestat, the bratty prince, shows up, however, “all fancy and charming and gay, his offer of vampiric immortality is much more than an eternal life of queer companionship. It’s also a power fantasy. Vampires aren’t beholden to the rules of man, and becoming a vampire allows Louis to bypass Storyville’s structural and legislative racism, rules of segregation, and second-class citizenship created by men.”
One of the MVPs behind the scenes, in terms of getting the undercurrents just right? There is a Canadian connection, actually. Acclaimed playwright Hannah Moscovitch — who won a Governor General’s Award last year — is a writer on “Interview With the Vampire.” And show creator Rolin Jones gave her an express shout-out when speaking on a panel recently: “There’s a writer on our staff named Hannah Moscovitch and she is known as the dark princess of Canadian theatre. And generally speaking out of the 10 darkest things you’re going to see from Season 1 came right from her.”
The playwright (she also has a world premiere next month at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre with her latest play, “Post-Democracy”) says she was moved to do this TV project as soon as she read the pilot script for it. “It’s what I did during the darkest months of the pandemic and I love these high-brow vampires so much,” she tweeted.
But in the end, it always came down to the insistent, ambient voice of the woman who created Lestat et al nearly 50 years ago. Says Jones, “We always wanted Anne Rice in the room.”
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