My review of the Interview with the vampire TV series
I will start with the negative and work my way out to the more positive as best I can. I was not thrilled with it but there are aspects of it I did like. Please note I have only seen the first episode. I will likely see episode 2 some time today but this review is only for the first episode.
First let me preface by saying that there are considerable changes from the source material. Louis is no longer a plantation owner in 1791. Instead he is a brothel owner in 1910. There’s a big timeline change.
Jacob Anderson (Game of Thrones) plays Louis and Sam Reid plays Lestat. I have no qualms about Louis being played by a black man. There were some black plantation owners (though it is seldom talked about) but they decided to change his backstory considerably. I can understand why they decided to not have him as a plantation owner, it probably would have been viewed as tasteless and diminished the modern audience’s ability to sympathize with him (even though he frees his slaves in the original version of the story).
I have seen quite a few people dismissing any criticism of the new Interview with The Vampire series as being merely racism. I have been critical of the new show and it is not about the race of Louis’s actor. I think he’s an excellent actor and could play a book faithful-Louis easily.
Someone felt the need to tell me “Oh, you just don’t like that he doesn’t look like Brad Pitt anymore.” which I thought was a little weird because I didn’t even think Brad Pitt really matched the book’s physical description of Louis. Louis had black hair that cursed behind his ear. Brad Pitt played him with longer, brown, nearly straight hair. This is superficiality. I once said I wouldn’t care if Lestat was played by a purple haired Asian woman so long as she portrayed the personality right. And I stand firm on that belief. In fact one of my favorite Draculas is Wao Yoka, a Japanese woman.
My complaints about the Interview with The Vampire series should not be dismissed off-handedly as racism. It’s not a fair strawman argument when I have so fiercely defended the casting of Death, Lucienne, and Rose Walker for Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. All excellent black actresses. And I think this Louis is a fine actor too. I do not blame him for the things I find fault with in this show.
My complaints are about the writing. For example, Daniel Molloy (Malloy in the film adaptation and UK editions of the books) is now an older man with Parkinson’s Disease and they constantly bring up the pandemic. This feels like it is taking place in summer or autumn 2020 the way they keep talking about it. This is the first show I’ve seen to bring up Covid and honestly I was glad most shows pretended it didn’t happen. This made the show feel dated already.
Apparently in this universe Daniel is now a very successful reporter and he had met Louis back in the late 70s (like in the novel) but he had been high at the time. That’s… great Danny…
One of the first things that threw me off was Louis punching his own brother just keep up a tough guy persona. Can you really pretend he’d have done that in the novel? This version of Louis creates personas for others, keeping up appearances of the tough guy brothel owner and I can accept this change but then when he’s running scared to the priest his use of language becomes particularly jarring because you go from lines like “I can’t think nothin’ anymore” to shifting drastically to the wording of the novel as Lestat turns him. It’s such a different style of speech that it’s like Louis is suddenly speaking another language and even when he was putting on an act, his language shouldn’t shift like that. Also when with the priest he was terrified for his life, he should have been using his “natural voice.” That is to say the language that comes naturally for him. If he was hiding his articulation and eloquence that should have been front and center, not hidden under the pretense.
I do not like watching Lestat and Louis eat and drink when in the novel we’re told that they cannot consume human food. Their bodies can no longer process it. It would be like in What we do in the Shadows or Let the right one in, where the vampire starts to vomit. Hell, it’s even like that in Fred Saberhagen’s Dracula books.
I do not like that when Louis shoves his arm out in day light it doesn’t just start to burn, it starts to crumble into ash, bypassing the burning all together. This is excusable in a 1958 Hammer horror film, not a 2022 show with an effects budget.
I do not like that it appears Lestat can control time now. Moving faster than human eyes can see is one thing but he casually strolled up to a priest while the world went into slow motion and punched through his head.
There is literally a line in the novels where Lestat comments that vampires do not waste blood and splatter it all over their faces or even let it dribble down their chins. That’s a trope for movies. And yet that happens repeatedly in the show. Why? That’s literally the opposite of what’s in the novels.
Why change their powers and limitations?
I also did not like that we see Louis chomping on cigars and Lestat smoking cigarettes. They have no interest in such things in the novel. Even in Dracula this came up as “I do not sup.” and “I never drink wine.” had been followed with “I do not smoke.”
First impressions are important with visual media. I know people who never forgave the Frankenstein monster in Penny Dreadful for having killed Proteus in his first scene even though he was a very sympathetic character. So a first impression of Lestat sitting with a prostitute, puffing on a cigarette, and his very first line to Louis is racially motivated… Yeah… I’m not comfortable with that being the first impression for Lesat.
Ironically though I think the Lestat actor is the best thing about the show. Not because he physically looks the part but because he is a really good actor. There are some weird, questionable directorial decisions.
I feel like this version of Interview with the vampire was made by a cynic. I say this because just before Lestat makes Louis a vampire, Lestat was giving an excellent speech to Louis about how he does not have to conform to a role for him. He wants Louis to be able to be himself. He loves Louis for who he is and can see past the façade and pretense, the roles Louis plays for others. And it was a good speech. It reminded me a little bit of Jerry Dandridge’s speech to Ed in Fright Night (the original 1985 version). However the scene was spoilt by adding Louis’s narration over Lestat’s dialogue so you can only hear part of the speech, as if the rest is unimportant. As I said, it felt cynical.
There’s a graphic threesome sex scene in the first episode and again, I feel cynically, this was to grab a certain type of audience’s attention instead of letting the story carry the plot.
It’s strange, the TV adaptation of The Sandman is nearly word for word the graphic novels and actually downplayed the sex and nudity while being respectful to the source material while I felt we got the opposite here.
Now for some of the things I did like. I noticed there are some homages to other vampire fictions which I first viewed cynically and now have come to appreciate. For example Lestat has a music box with him that plays a song he composed for someone he loved. This is a nod to Barnabas’s music box for Josette in the original 1960s Dark Shadows only here it was for Nicolas, the violinist. There’s something else that I find fault with and I’m sorry to bring up here. Louis and Lestat are portrayed as gay or bi (in the novels everyone was bi / pan) but for some reason in the show Daniel is supposedly straight. Daniel was perhaps the gayest character in the books so this was a very weird choice.
Another nice homage is the repeated use of “Come to me” telepathically coming from Lestat to Louis, which I can’t help but think might be a subtle reference to the 1985 Fright Night starring Chris Sarandon.
I do love the effect of Louis’s eyes turning bright green when he is turned into a vampire. Ever since Midnight Texas (Yes, I watched that, at least the first season anyway) I have come to love bright, strangely colored eyes in POC vampires. They’re striking, unearthly, and beautiful and can show inhumanness. The vampire in Midnight Texas had beautiful, glowing-blue eyes.
I also like how Lestat’s psychic powers are portrayed. His telepathic powers are a lot more blatant here than they were in the 1994 film but at the same time it’s a double edged sword because it’s very unsubtle and it’s just talking without his mouth moving.
I do not think this is a great show, not by a long shot, nor do I think of it as a faithful adaptation of the book. After freshly watching Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman I have been spoilt by an actual faithful TV show adaptation of Gothic literary source material.
I probably will keep watching this to see how it goes but as it stands I still very much prefer the 1994 Interview with the vampire movie.
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