New trailer for AMC’s Interview With The Vampire addresses toxic relationships
The new adaptation of the iconic Anne Rice novel premieres in October
Aux News Interview with the Vampire
Despite the fact that it’s based on a pretty famous book that was previously adapted into a pretty famous movie, the San Diego Comic-Con trailer for AMC’s new Interview With The Vampire series seemed to present two of its biggest plot points as spoilers: For one thing, there wasn’t a ton of explicit vampire stuff, or at least there wasn’t much of Sam Reid’s Lestat, and the reveal of the actual interview framing device (and interviewer Daniel, played by Eric Bogosian this time around) didn’t come in until a post-credits stinger of sorts.
This new teaser jumps right to the vampires, the interviews, and the romantic, tortured existence that Anne Rice’s vampires (particularly Jacob Anderson’s Louis) know so well. It’s a short promo, but there’s also a good bit of Lestat and a lot more of Bogosian, who fully does not buy Louis’ insistence that being a vampire who must constantly cater to the whims of the charismatic Lestat is actually good and sexy. Louis says that he and Lestat were “equals” in “the quiet dark,” but Bogosian’s Daniel notes that it was still an “abused/abuser relationship.”
The series also stars Bailey Bass (as Claudia), Assad Zaman, Kalyne Coleman, and Maura Grace Athari. It will premiere on AMC and its AMC+ streaming platform on October 2. Before Anne Rice’s death in 2021, AMC also announced that it was moving forward with an adaptation of her Mayfair Witches series, saying at the time that it was just “the second series in an expanding Anne Rice universe.” That means AMC might even want to go deeper into the vampire stuff post-Interview, thought that will probably depend on how this show does.
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I felt like every single commercial break from the finale tonight was a “Please! Don’t stop watching! There’s a bunch of new stuff coming!”, lol.
I know! AMC is begging us all, “Oh please don’t go away!”
They looked up and begged and I said… no.
AMC execs should be chaining Gould and Gilligan in the studio basement and making them write more BB universe stuff.
I hope this show includes the scene with the zombie-like Eastern European vampires, which — as far as I know — are never brought up again or explained in the rest of her novels. (I ran for my life after Memnoch the Devil.)
They’re probably just an artifact of this book originally just being her working out her feelings about her daughter’s death and not the start of a franchise that’s kept Rice in Garden Quarter houses ever since.
Still, it’s the weird bits that make Rice’s work worth reading.
If I remember correctly, Louis theorised that it was just an “ordinary” vampire who had gone hopelessly insane from being buried alive.
AMC’s Interview With The Vampire | Official Teaser 5 | ‘Quiet Dark’ I have no idea why people watch this sort of television series it looks repulsive the image of the street scene (is this supposed to be New Orleans? like the movie?) at 0:03 has ‘Belle Star’ written vertically on the illuminated hotel or gambling club sign on the left side of the image she is the prostitute in the movie The Long Riders her name appears in other movies she’s associated with San Francisco in the gold rush era the street vendor’s stand on the right side of the image is the cliche New York Christmas movie street vendor’s stand this one is the one in the movie Serendipity with Kate Beckinsale by implication the movie with Winona Ryder this means the image is a map of the United States of America San Francisco the Yukon on the left New York on the right the street is in New York because the illuminated sign in the center of the image on the building on the right says Fairplay which is Boss Tweed Tammany Hall era speechifying sloganeering so this Cameron Diaz Gangs of New York the street is Fifth Avenue in New York so this is one of those Doris Day fifties rom coms the one where she gets her lunch in that automated vendor restaurant cafeteria place I think which means this image is a New York street scene experienced by a girl having a psychotic break which makes the image at 0:01 the blonde girl who talks about the little green worm in her head in the Clint Eastwood movie think schizophrenia violent psychosis the nighttime visuals of the movie Blade with vampires walking through the valley transposed over a daytime scene on Fifth Avenue in New York
It had to do with how they were made. Armand tells Clauda that care wasn’t taken when they were turned. Vampires were given The Dark Gift and it took over a week to turn them. The vampire would slowly drain the human over that time until they die from bloodloss to keep their spirit and mind intact. Near the end, the vampire starts to slowly feed the human their blood. The Revenants (the Eastern European vamps) were basically assembly line produced. They were drained in one shot and turned, basically, brain damaged. Also, vampires need living blood to survive and never drain their victim to death. Which can also add to the Revenant’s brain damage, they keep feeding til the victim dies, or past death.
Is that from a novel, subsequent insight from Rice, or fan created? I only vaguely remember that part of the story but assumed it was because they were basically feral humans to start with, while Louis, Lestat and their crowd originated from class, wealth and education.
It’s from the first novel.
Was that before or after Anne Rice’s weird Christian phase? I quit reading after The Queen of the Damned.
It was in the last quarter of Interview with the Vampire, before she had her hyper-Catholicism freakout, around the time of Witching Hour, which features an incredibly lurid sequence early on with aborted fetuses being used for research by, as I recall, the protagonist’s hospital.
Apart from the final “Prince Lestat” trilogy, all the vampire books were written before her Christian phase.
Despite some rather obvious changes, this looks like it might be a faithful adaptation in that Lestat is a real monster as he was in the first book. By the time the movie was made he had already retconned into the franchise hero, and the movie was muddled as a result.
That Louis’s self-pitying version of events was very one-sided was the whole charm of the subsequent books. I don’t know why “retcon” has become a synonym for simply writing.
I haven’t re-read The Vampire Lestat since around the time Queen of the Damned came out, so all this is IIRC, but the reason we considered it a retcon at the time, is because the gymnastics required to turn Lestat from a villain into an anti-hero were absurd, way beyond the first story being told from Louis’s self-pitying perspective. Rice basically rewrote the first book so that every one of Lestat and Louis’s victims was secretly a human monster, and so Lestat and the unknowing Louis were actually performing a social service by feeding on them. And it’s not really explained why Lestat wouldn’t let the reluctant Louis know that they were feeding on vicious thieves and murderers, other than the convenience of making a more dynamic character the protagonist of the books going forward.Not to mention, Lestat was a more interesting character in Louis’s telling than in his own.
That Louis’s self-pitying version of events was very one-sided was the whole charm of the subsequent books. I don’t know why “retcon” has become a synonym for simply writing.There were some huge retcons both to the characters and the very nature and abilities of the vampires that were handwaved with “Louis was ignorant”. Of course all the stories are told in first person format, so you can just as well read all the subsequent books as being told through Lestat’s narcissistic lens, and portraying himself in a much better light than any third party would ever have.
I don’t know, why don’t you ask someone who uses the word that way? I meant it in the primary sense:In any case, the film was primarily based on the first book, which was told from Louis’ point of view. They could have been faithful to that or switched to Lester’s point of view, but they didn’t commit to either, resulting in a muddle.
I think it would be interesting to do a Rashomon-style adaptation with the same events seen first from Louis’s and then from Lestat’s point of view, leaving it up to the audience to decide which (if either) is reliable.
Wouldn’t it be kewl if instead of remaking Interview with the Vampire, they did a series based on the books that she wrote under the pseudonym “A. N. Roquelaire”?
I’d love to see how they pull off the honey and ants scene.
I would much rather spend the next few years from goths telling me the show is getting vampires wrong than hearing lectures about how Hollywood always gets kink and BDSM wrong.
I love Sam Reid. They should have just cast Anna Torv as Claudia and just pretended she was a child by dressing her in a ton of frills and lace and, I don’t know, using cinema sorcery. Because they need to work together more.
Okay, we’re going to play this fast and loose, aren’t we. Lestat was adamant about never spilling a drop of blood and feeding cleanly as to not draw attention to the vampires.
Is it too late to petition AMC to get Harvey Guillen to play Armand?
Bogosian’s abused/abuser commentary is pretty heavy-handed, but IIRC Lestat was manipulative as hell and Louis didn’t help his situation by being such a mope.
Bogosian…Bogosian-ing (“Well. Isn’t that neat and tidy?”) all over this trailer might be a significant impediment to me watching this show.
This looks… bad.
I don’t remember how this shook out in the book, but I remember Christian Slater begging Brad Pitt to turn him into a vampire at the end of the movie, and I can’t see Eric Bogosian doing that with anyone.