Interview With the Vampire

[School of Movies 2021]

One of the most expensive, vampire films ever made. This first adaptation of Anne Rice's Chronicles ran on star power, lavish costume and set design and a potent strain of existential crisis. It's the tale of Louis, a mourning, bereaved widower who in his despairing malaise meets a sleazy, charismatic, sociopathic vampire named Lestat. For reasons we will go into, Louis decides eternal life would be a splendid idea at this point. 

Neil Jordan directs the hell out of this intense Gothic melodrama, which was very important to Sharon as a teenager, and over time has become an excellent example of the kind of bloodsucker movie where we focus on the vampires themselves and they look both inward and outward at humanity. It clearly proved massively influential on Vampire: The Masquerade, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Vampire Diaries, The Twilight Saga, Only Lovers Left Alive and even What We Do in the Shadows. It also spawned a wretched (not-actually-a) sequel in Queen of the Damned (2002), which we will be covering on Patreon.