Interview With The Vampire
My awakening to vampires didn't happen until 2001. Of course I knew about vampires, I just didn't seek them out. It took Buffy and William the Bloody for that to happen. But prior to that I wasn't in the dark. I knew who Anne Rice was because of an art class acquaintance who was obsessed with her books. I think she was actually the only Goth at my high school which makes me sad. There should have been more. And then you could not be alive in the nineties without knowing about the Tom Cruise Lestat casting controversy. But again, it was background noise. I didn't even see the Interview with the Vampire movie until it was on basic cable. Then I saw it. A lot. Randomly. It's one of those movies you just kind of watch some of and get drawn inexorably in. Eventually, as in only about ten years ago, I thought it was time for me to finally read Interview with the Vampire and I really didn't like it. Gave the book away didn't like it. What's odd is the only thing I actually remember about the book, other than hating it, is Claudia's death scene. That's very vivid in my mind. Also I kind of what to re-read it to see if it's really as bad as I thought it was, so it just goes to show I should hold on to all my books for ever and ever. Which makes it oddly strange that I was so excited for AMC's new Interview with the Vampire. But I was. And it was magical. It transformed the book into something more. The book became a starting off point and from their it grew to be about sexual identity, racism, family, justice, relationships, trauma, abuse, truth, as Louis says at one point to Daniel, now older, wiser, grumpier, and played perfectly by Eric Bogosian, we are on an odyssey of memory. And memory changes, becomes warped, distorted by love and hate. This adaptation is very insular, an almost claustrophobic little world, where thought and language and words are king. Daylight is never seen, everything happens in these opulent little rooms in New Orleans that look and feel like jewel boxes. You actually feel the suffocation that Louis feels while around Lestat. The words swirl around and around in your head so that after an episode you feel lightheaded, as if somehow they snuck into your house and drained you of blood while you watched. Every change is so much for the better that I can not praise the writers of this series enough. But the biggest improvement is when Louis refuses to talk about Claudia's rape at the hands of another vampire. He says that he will not exploit her pain. And that's when I realized the showrunners really knew what they were doing. Claudia's exploitation almost to the point of child pornography in the book is what alienated me from it and they knew they had to point blank say that this adaptation was going beyond the book, making it more modern, more thoughtful, and yes, even a bit more Grey Gardens. And if this entire adaptation just existed to give me Lestat and Louis as Big and Little Edie, then I say it was a job well done.
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