‘Interview with the Vampire’ at 30 – Review

Interview with the Vampire (1994)
Director: Neil Jordan
Screenwriter: Anne Rice
Starring: Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Stephen Rea, Antonio Banderas, Christian Slater, and Kristen Dunst

When considering the evolution of the vampire on screen, which began alongside the very birth of movies, it is difficult to overstate the impact of Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire (1994). Starring Tom Cruise as the beloved anti-hero Lestat de Lioncourt, and Brad Pitt as the tortured Louis de Pointe du Lac, his companion and protégé, Interview with the Vampire is based on the first novel in “The Vampire Chronicles” series by Anne Rice, and is a sweeping gothic horror film that largely contributed to the modern version of the vampire we continue to see today. A box office hit that earned $223million from a $36million budget, the film earned nominations for Best Art Direction and Best Score at the 67th Academy Awards and won two BAFTAs for Best Cinematography and Best Production Design. Wrestling with the very nature of good and evil, and the existential dread that comes with contemplating immortality, the complicated morality of Interview with the Vampire remains relevant today, 30 years on from its original release.

Interview with the Vampire begins in the then-present day, 1994, with sweeping shots of the San Francisco skyline at night, underscored by a haunting and melancholic choir composition by composer Elliot Goldenthal. Louis, dressed in a suit, his long hair pulled back into a low ponytail, meets with a young reporter, Daniel Molloy (Christian Slater), in a shabby apartment building, intent on telling him his life story as a 200-year-old vampire. Daniel doesn’t believe him at first, but is quickly convinced when Louis shows him his true nature, with his penetrating and otherworldly green eyes, porcelain skin, and long, elegant fingernails. As he begins his tale, we are transported back to Louisiana in 1791, when Louis is still human and 24 years old. A plantation owner, Louis has just lost his wife and young child, and he yearns for the sweet, blissful kiss of death. Little does he know that his prayers will be answered by a creature of the night, a vampire named Lestat, who turns Louis into an immortal and convinces him to be his companion. Louis is tortured by his nature and sickened by the idea of murdering humans and draining them of blood, but things between he and Lestat improve slightly when Claudia (Kristen Dunst), a young child who loses her mother to the plague, comes into their lives after being nearly killed by Louis and turned into a vampire by Lestat. As the tale unfolds, Lestat’s controlling nature threatens the delicate balance of this makeshift family, just as Claudia’s obsession with discovering the origins of all vampire life leads her and Louis to a vampire coven in Paris, led by the mysterious Armand (Antonio Banderas), that proves a threat to their very existence.

When Anne Rice published “Interview with the Vampire” in 1976, her characterization of vampires as romantic, artistic, and tortured antiheroes, who feel deeply and love passionately, proved to be a literary watershed moment for horror fans, according to J. Gordan Melton in “The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead.” This gothic and erotic version of the vampire was an intriguing contrast to the iconic yet tired onscreen depiction of Dracula in films like Universal’s Dracula (1931), starring Bela Lugosi, and Hammer’s Dracula (1958), starring Christopher Lee. Although there was nearly always a sexual undercurrent to the onscreen vampire, they were more often than not one-dimensional antagonists who represented the harmful stereotype of the foreign invader, intent on corruption and destruction. While films in the late 1970s and early 1980s featured vampires who were increasingly attractive and outwardly seductive, like those in The Hunger (1983) and The Lost Boys (1987), vampires did not fully graduate to romantic Hollywood leads until the 1990s, most prominently in 1992 with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola’s film included a reincarnation love story between Dracula (Gary Oldman) and Mina (Winona Ryder) that added a deeply romantic and poignant dimension to the character, breathing new life into it, and inspiring a whole slew of prestigious big-budget genre films.

Interview with the Vampire director Neil Jordan has acknowledged the impact of Bram Stoker’s Dracula on his film, noting how it gave him permission to make an expensive and theatrical epic. At the time, Interview with the Vampire served as the follow-up to Jordan’s Oscar-winning crime thriller The Crying Game (1992), but it is his directorial debut The Company of Wolves (1984) that is the true precursor to his work on Interview with the Vampire, as the film showcases Jordan’s instinct for atmosphere, surrealism, and camp. Already well-versed in the art of adaptation, Jordan’s strength lies in his ability to balance the rather sombre, melancholic tone of Interview with the Vampire with moments of absurdity and horror that reveal the despair inherent in immortality. There are some genuinely terrifying moments in the film, like when Claudia, distraught at the idea of never growing or changing, cuts all of her hair off just to watch it instantly grow back. Jordan often shoots his actors through the gauze of sheer curtains; the soft gaze of his camera, coupled with cutting-edge special effects, give the vampires an otherworldly beauty, the color of their eyes striking and unnerving, blue veins visible underneath their smooth, white skin. The sheer decadence of Interview with the Vampire is revealed through massive detailed sets that showcase the opulence of France in the 1870s and the warm, mist-filled swamps of colonial Louisiana. The film’s production design, by Dante Ferretti, whose grand and indulgent style is a staple of many Martin Scorsese films including period pieces The Age of Innocence (1993) and The Aviator (2004), clearly served as an inspiration for other vampire media set in the South, including the Television shows ‘True Blood’ and ‘The Vampire Diaries.’

Unlike Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and many other films, the vampires in Interview with the Vampire are decidedly secular. In the beginning of the film, Louis dispels the assumption that vampires are repelled by crucifixes and garlic or are unable to enter the church. Although the film lacks the book’s subtly when it comes to questioning the nature of good and evil, it does pose a frightening question about faith and the belief in Heaven and Hell: what if none of it exists? This existential dread hovers over the whole film, and the characters deal with not knowing the answer in various ways: Lestat rejects the very notion of religious piety, Claudia becomes obsessed with finding out where vampires came from in an attempt to justify her existence, and Louis… well, he broods. A lot. He is tortured by his very nature, unable to come to terms with what he is, believing he is damned. While many actors have successfully pulled off this kind of characterization, like Robert Pattinson in Twilight and David Boreanaz in ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and ‘Angel’, Brad Pitt’s performance is generally one note. He struggles to convey the depths of his despair, or his passion and love for Claudia, Lestat, and Armand, which makes much of the emotional core of the film fall flat. At the time, Pitt was still a few months removed from receiving critical praise for this role in Legends of the Fall and was only starting to become known as a sex symbol, thanks to his small role in Thelma and Louise (1991). Still, Pitt’s performance as Louis is stilted and lacks the sexual magnetism that Cruise brings to his role. Pitt is also let down by a script that doesn’t seem interested in giving Louis much to do other than sit and sulk.

Tom Cruise and Kirsten Dunst act circles around Pitt. Dunst is particularly exceptional; her ability to convey decades of pain and life at just ten years old is quite frankly unbelievable. A truly memorable breakout role, Dunst’s performance remains one of the best by a child in film history. Cruise, for his part, is nearly unrecognizable as Lestat, with his long, blond waves and menacing, sardonic demeanor. Cruise, who was then known for more boyish, conventionally masculine roles in films like Risky Business (1983) and Top Gun (1986), fully commits to Lestat’s androgyny and flamboyance. His presence is so powerful that Interview with the Vampire loses something when Cruise disappears for the last half of the film. In this way, it is a shame that the film doesn’t adhere more closely to the novel, if only to give Cruise more screentime and scenery to chew.

With its homoerotic undertones, Interview with the Vampire serves as an important milestone in Hollywood’s depiction of the LGBTQ+ community onscreen, while also revealing the limitations of queer representation in an era still reeling from the AIDS crisis; it generally struggles with how explicit to make its queer allegory. This was by no means the first film to make the connection between vampirism and queerness – Dracula’s Daughter (1936), for instance, which served as an inspiration for Rice, has clear homoerotic undertones, and the feeling of otherness is something that has always been relatable to marginalized communities (although the film’s non-existent relationship with race and class is worth noting). Though Interview with the Vampire does not come right out and put a label on Louis and Lestat’s relationship, the film’s imagery is quite clear, with Lestat’s initial orgasmic vampire bite an obvious metaphor for sex. Even so, it would be understandable if modern audiences found the sexuality in Interview with the Vampire tame, especially considering the recent television adaptation of “The Vampire Chronicles”, which is far more implicitly queer than both the film and the novels.

Nevertheless, Interview with the Vampire remains a milestone in queer cinema and marks a significant shift in the portrayal of the vampire on the silver screen. Although it lacks the depth of its source material, and suffers from pacing issues and a tepid performance from Brad Pitt, the film makes up for its failings with grand and luscious production design. Its musings on faith, loss, and intimacy continue to be explored by movie vampires everywhere.

Score: 17/24

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