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With millions of tweens, teens, and otherwise emotionally stunted women drooling over a glittery vampire with too much gel in their hair, it makes me wonder: What about your mother’s vampire fantasies?
Twilight was long from the first vampire book that got women all hot and bothered. Camilla, Dracula, etc, were all very sexual books for the time, but the sex was all in the imagination. Problem is, most of the vampire movies/stories of the 50′s, 60′s, and 70′s, well, let’s say what sex there was was far from the female fantasy.
Now don’t get me wrong, during that timeframe, there was some good stuff, but there is one particular standout that really appealed to the women to the point that it needed Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, and Antonio Banderas to be in the movie.
Written in 1973 partially as a way to deal with death of her daughter (more on that later) Interview With The Vampire gave us the vampire that got the last generation of necrophiliac women all hot and bothered, Lestat.
Published in 1976, Interview With The Vampire tells the story of Louis, a Creole prince and owner of an indigo plantation out side of New Orleans. Following the death of his brother, Louis, depressed, is set upon by a cruel, angry adolescent of a vampire only interested in Louis wealth and power.
Lestat is petulant. Lestat is cruel. Lestat is a effectively a child in a extremely powerful body. With no moral compass, Lestat just does what he wants when he wants. He kills indiscriminately, playing with his food, using fear and lust and pain as seasoning.
But Louis still feels as a human. Lestat, over and over, tries to get Louis to embrace his new life. Like a cat trying to teach a kitten, Lestat brings Louis gifts, glamored humans, prey, toys he uses to try and unlock the predator that he believes all vampires should be.
Louis continues to resist Lestat, and in that classic mistake of relationships everywhere, Lestat decides to have a child with Louis, giving birth to one of the most monstrous creations to walk across the page or screen: Claudia.
Anne Rice‘s daughter, Michelle, died of leukemia before she reached the age of eight. The death of a child is always hard on the parent, and, in a way, Claudia was a way for Rice to deal with her death.
Drained almost to death by Louis and transformed by Lestat, Claudia embodies an innocent evil, a child with extreme power and lacking in the moral compass that a normal human upbringing would provide.
Needless to say, she is Lestat’s pride and joy. She is just a cruel and unforgiving as Lestat himself, but without the memory of a mortal life that tempers Louis. She lacks the understanding that her food is people.
And that’s what makes her an great character: And instantly sympathetic character that takes a total turn into a monster. In effect, Lestat made Claudia into what he wanted Louis to be.
And this is why Interview With The Vampire is better than Twilight: the vampires, as beautiful as they are, are still monsters.
Strangely enough, it’s also why it’s better than most of Rice’s other Vampire Chronicles. The subsequent books are told from Lestat’s point of view. No one see themselves as a monster. No, it takes others to point that out, and Louis sees that in Lestat and his existence. All the other Lestat books celebrate Lestat and the, uh, nice things about vampires, but Interview really shows us the monster that he is under it all.
Next time, we live the surreal life of movie vampires with the help of a Corey or two.
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