‘Interview with the Vampire’: Damnation Has Never Looked This Beautiful

The vampire film, by 1994, had exhausted most of its possibilities. It had been gothic, campy, erotic, comedic, and post-modern. What it had rarely been was genuinely philosophical. Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire — adapted by Anne Rice from her own 1976 novel — arrives as something stranger and more ambitious than the genre usually permits: a two-hour meditation on guilt, predation, and the unbearable weight of immortality, dressed in the most lavish period costumes that money could buy.

The premise is deceptively simple. Louis de Pointe du Lac — a Louisiana plantation owner ruined by grief — is turned into a vampire in 1791 by the magnetic and remorseless Lestat de Lioncourt. Two centuries later, Louis sits in a San Francisco apartment and tells his story to a tape-recorder-wielding journalist. The frame device, borrowed directly from Rice, is the film’s master stroke: it grants the narrative a confessional intimacy that keeps the supernatural grounded in something recognisably human — the need to be witnessed, to be understood, perhaps to be forgiven.

Brad Pitt’s Louis was derided on release by critics who found him passive and mournful to the point of tedium. They were not entirely wrong, and yet they missed the point. Louis’s paralysis — his inability to kill without anguish, his centuries of self-recrimination — is the film’s subject, not its flaw. Pitt plays inertia with enormous care, and the performance improves considerably on reflection. Beside him, Tom Cruise’s Lestat is an act of controlled flamboyance: cruel, witty, possessive, and strangely compelling. Cruise, not a natural choice on paper, understood that Lestat is above all a performance — a creature who has made an aesthetic project of his own monstrousness — and commits to that reading completely.

The film’s most daring element is Claudia, the child vampire played by a then eleven-year-old Kirsten Dunst in a performance of disquieting maturity. Turned at the moment of childhood and forever denied the body of a woman, Claudia embodies the film’s darkest theme: that immortality is not a gift but a sentence, and that some sentences are crueller than others. Dunst is extraordinary — watchful, furious, and heartbreaking in equal measure — and the scenes between her and Pitt carry a genuine emotional charge that the more operatic sequences between Cruise and Pitt sometimes lack.

Jordan and cinematographer Philippe Rousselot render three centuries and two continents — Louisiana, Paris, San Francisco — with equal beauty and equal menace. The film is visually ravishing without ever becoming merely decorative; the candlelit interiors and fog-soaked streets feel less like sets than like the physical manifestation of Louis’s guilt-sodden interiority. Elliot Goldenthal’s score, by turns operatic and eerily delicate, is among the finest of its decade.

The film loses some momentum in its Paris sequences, where the introduction of Antonio Banderas’s Armand — a vampire of far greater antiquity — promises depths it never quite plumbs. The novel’s more expansive exploration of vampire society is necessarily compressed, and the compression shows. There is also a sense, in the final act, that the film is not entirely sure how to end — that it has built something too large and too melancholy for a tidy resolution. But these are the problems of ambition, which are always preferable to the problems of mediocrity.

What endures, thirty years on, is the film’s refusal of easy horror. Jordan is not interested in the vampire as monster. He is interested in the vampire as a mirror — a figure who forces us to ask what we would become if consequence were removed, if time were endless, if the body no longer set a limit on the damage we might do or suffer. The answer Interview with the Vampire arrives at is not reassuring. But then, the best horror never is.