Interview with the Vampire

or, the wonders of adaptability

I’m e rathke, the author of a number of books. Many of you are here because of Howl so today’s post is perfect for you. Learn more about what you signed up for here. Go here to manage your email notifications.

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Adaptations are interesting, conceptually. I talked a bit about this before. And then wrote even more about it shortly after. But it’s Halloween and I may as well write a bit about vampires as a way to celebrate.

My son is, after all, dressing as a vampire right now and has been wearing those vampire teeth just about every chance he gets.

This new adaptation of Interview with the Vampire is everything anyone could ever want. It’s lush and gorgeous and sinister and vicious and haughty. It is, in the eyes of a purist, a terrible adaptation.

But, if you understand the real purpose of an adaptation, it’s one of our best.

The original adaptation, starring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, was, in many ways, more faithful. All the events happen more or less the same and with the same movements and emotions. We get the whole story from beginning to end in Louie’s sadboy monologue about the perils and disillusionment of eternity.

Surprisingly, it’s Tom Cruise’s Lestat who brings the movie to life. I say this was a surprise because no one expected Cruise to bring the camp, to lean into the extravagant opulence of the performance demanded by Lestat.

The movie was a huge success and did all right critically, but no one returned for the potential sequels. It caused the expected kind of satanic panic, but it’s largely been forgotten and most seem to think it is, at best, watchable.

I like it. I like it a whole lot.

I watched it when I was far too young to see such a thing and, in some ways, it changed my life. But I’ll need more time to talk about that. So let’s keep to the matter at hand.

Several years ago, I read Interview with the Vampire and I don’t know exactly what I expected but I was floored by what I got.

I assumed it was sort of a shlocky horror novel. I don’t read horror, which is why I spent twenty years not reading the book that was the source of one of my earliest transformative cinematic experiences. But when finally picked it up, I was transported.

It was dazzling.

Dark and vicious but also sumptuous, delectable, delightful, and, perhaps, the best evocation of depression I’ve ever encountered in any form of media.

And now, thirty years later, we have a new adaptation, which is critically acclaimed and loved by audiences and is making people consider signing up for yet another streaming service.

And it is great. It’s so good, babies.

Just go watch it.

The adaptation carries the story a century forward, beginning in 1910 New Orleans rather than the late 18th Century. Our Louie is also a wealthy light skinned black man who is seduced by Lestat, a redheaded white man.

This adaptation is much more explicit about the relationship between Louie and Lestat, and this is a strength. This was always a love story. A terrible, broken, vicious love story, yes, about obsession and confinement and mutually assured destruction. But there was always enough ambiguity to keep people uncomfortable with homosexuality from getting bent out of shape. But, now, here, it’s about as explicitly gay as it can be without becoming pornography.

But this is something that’s only possible now in 2020. Despite what some people may believe or desire, homosexuality is about as mainstreamed as can be possible. And it’s something that the adaptation changes from the source material in order to better tell its story.

Because that’s the trick of adaptation. If you’re doing a direct, beat for beat, word for word translation, you’re likely missing the point. For one thing, you can’t do a word for word adaptation.

Adaptation is a work of translation. Just as one language cannot and does not fit directly into another, neither does one media map onto another without breaking or bending completely out of shape.

And so the best adaptations understand the source material and the limitations and advantages of the source media and the new media.

Interview with the Vampire is linguistically dense and atmospheric, evocatively dark and dangerous and sexual.

While you can’t replace the language, you can capture the rest, and the people behind this adaptation have pushed atmosphere, darkness, and sexuality right to the front of the line.

These are sexy vampires.

But they’re also monsters.

The series also balloons the action. The first season brings us only to the middle of the novel, but the ways they’ve expanded the plot take nothing from the story. Rather, it enriches what was already beautifully rich.

Which is quite a feat!

The plot is not identical. The world of Louie and Lestat is not identical, but we end up with something that is somehow more Interview with the Vampire than Interview with the Vampire was. Which is to say that Rolin Jones, the creator, understands these characters and so additions fill out rather than detract from them.

Getting more Louie makes us love him more. Getting more Lestat makes him more terrifying, more intoxicating.

Even the way the relationship has changed between Louie and his interviewer—in this case a fully established and lived in character—add more power and depth to the story.

Even Claudia adds whole new strengths.

She is, in some ways, very different than he novel counterpart. She, too, is black, but she’s also about ten years older than the Claudia from the novel, which makes her, in some ways, more interesting.

Though we do lose the fascinating tragedy of a woman who has lived for decades being trapped in the body of a literal child. But, in turning this into a TV show, some things must be changed.

Child labor laws and, well, you know. No one wants to see an eight year old put into scenes with an adult where there’s any whiff of sexual tension.

Again, this is a strength to the adaptation. It’s one thing to read about a century-old child with desire but it’s very different watching a literal child put in these positions.

Call it prudishness or whatever you want, but this is the right call for Claudia.

On top of everything, the show is able to tackle topics the book did not. We get to feel the racism of the early 20th Century and how that simmered and popped and broiled throughout Louie’s century of life before the present day of the narrative. We can explore homophobia and racism and even class in a way the novel never bothered to.

And this was a strength of the novel, by the way. It’s so tightly focused on Louie and Lestat and Claudia because it is a love story.

Let the world burn and rot.

I have my family of the damned.

But because of the extra space afforded by TV, we get both. We can fan out to explore social issues through Louie because he is a gay black man in the early 20th Century South, but it also remains spotlighted on this family of vampires.

A good adaptation is not a direct recreation.

It’s poetry.

It’s capturing the spirit of the original and imbuing that into the new work. Yes, sometimes that means the action is quite different. Maybe, even, the plots have little to do with one another.

But so long as the soul of the original lives in the adaptation, it is a success. And we see that with all the best adaptations, and we see the opposite with all the worst ones.

Interview with the Vampire is a triumph both as adaptation and as a work unto itself.

Go watch it on this spookiest of days.

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My novels:

• Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster

• Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure

• Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera

• The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.

• Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.

• Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers