Interview with the Vampire
This is pure unbridled melodrama, with a very silly framing device to be set in the present, with a supporting character that is much cooler than the main boring one. It’s creepy as fuck, Kirsten Dunst was not actually 100 years old, she was just a child.
The framing device is the same that was cut from The Prestige: an interview with an actual vampire. How does that work, what magazine does the journalist work for, is this a freelance spook story? Is he a fiction writer? Make up your damn mind, you can’t handle the truth. He dies at the end anyway (or is it?).
The protagonist is some cajun from The Big Easy in the late eighteen century. Hell, America existed just a few decades ago. He was the plantation owner, but after his wife and child died of an unspecified illness, he loses the joie de vivre. He retreats into the night, to gambling and philandering, until Lestat snatches him and drinks his blood.
He lets him see the sunrise one last time before actually making him “born into darkness”, as they say. This was before blood banks, so they have to prowl lupanars and other places of ill repute to search for fresh prostitutes to defile their flesh.
Yes, the metaphor for potentially deadly exchange of fluids is pretty thin here, every victim (and they are basically all female) moans with pleasure before being sucked dry.
Lestat is sophisticated as hell, so he has a penchant for prawling high society for asshole victims. Even old grandmothers are game. Our protagonist Louis seems to be an emo vampire, because he keeps nagging Lestat about killing people, why not drink from animals instead. His emo phase goes on and on for a while, he complains about it, goes back to sucking on rats, but doesn’t abandon his father.
As his emo-ness reaches a climax, he goes to a plagued neighbourhood and find a little orphan clinging to her dead mother’s corpse. As mercy, he kills her and sucks his blood, but it makes him emo anyway. Lestat turns her instead, so the coven has grown now.
The three just have a lot of fun, a nuclear gay family with an adopted child. Said child belong to the Addams Family, she keeps biting and sucking dry her piano teacher, the garment maker, her naïveté and cruelty knows no bounds. After about 100 years of fun, she spies a creole maiden bathing, and her loins flare for that ample bosom and strong thighs. She lusts for such adult body, and as a spoiled brat, she doesn’t take no for an answer, killing her and storing her corpse at home.
This leads to such a fight in the household, the little lady plots with our protagonist to escape Lestat’s control. She tricks him into drinking from dead kids, and they dump him in the swamp. Like the ghost of Christmas past, he comes back, so they burn him, the house, and a big chunk of New Orleans before escaping to Europe.
After searching and finding only legends, they do find an actual coven in Paris, vampires pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires. How avant-garde. Our protagonist would love companionship, but the kid wants him just for her. They apparently love each other very much (a fucking child!), so she is willing to go, if the protagonist turns an adult to be her guardian. The protagonist breaks his vows and does so, so she can get all the way of his back about it.
The coven’s leader wants to elevate our protagonist, but the rest just want to see the protagonist stuck in a coffin and walled in for eternity. After the kid and her new-found mother are killed by leaving them over day in a deep shaft exposed to the sun, our protagonist goes on a rampage and kills the coven.
Only the official leader remains, the mutiny eventually dies down and vampires live among us.
The final shift to the “present” day happens when the journalist just runs away, while Lestat catches up to him.
Everyone has some enviable long flowy hair-dos, with fancy dresses and all. Being fully set at night, there is still colour.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.