Summary
- Interview with the Vampire set up a sequel with Lestat's survival, leading to a unique continuation.
- Queen of the Damned didn't meet fan expectations, mixing elements from The Vampire Lestat and failing as a standalone.
- The TV series Interview with the Vampire offers a second chance, expanding on the movie's limitations and including novel elements.
Interview with the Vampire set up a sequel after Lestat (Tom Cruise) was revealed to still be alive, and though it didn’t get a direct sequel, it got a continuation that wasn’t what viewers expected. In 1994, Anne Rice’s 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire was adapted to the big screen. Directed by Neil Jordan, Interview with the Vampire starred Brad Pitt as Louis de Pointe du Lac, a young man who, after the death of his wife and unborn child, was targeted by vampire Lestat (Tom Cruise) to turn him into a vampire and his companion.
Struggling to adapt to immortality and having to kill to feed, Louis fed on a little girl named Claudia (Kirsten Dunst), whose mother died of the plague. To entice him to stay with him, Lestat turned Claudia into a vampire, becoming Louis’ companion and developing a strong bond with him. Despite the positive reviews it received and its great box office performance, Interview with the Vampire never got a proper sequel, leaving the audience wondering what happened to Louis, Lestat, and interviewer Daniel Molloy (Christian Slater), but it got a strange continuation that became forgettable.
Interview With The Vampire: The Movie's Biggest Changes To The Book
Interview With The Vampire, a 1994 gothic horror movie, took some liberties with its source material, the novel of the same name by Anne Rice.
Interview with the Vampire Got A Standalone Sequel In Queen of the Damned
Queen of the Damned Isn’t The Sequel Fans Were Hoping For
It was expected that Interview with the Vampire would be followed by an adaptation of The Vampire Lestat, more so as it set up a continuation.
Interview with the Vampire is the first entry in Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles, and by the time the movie was released, three more books had been published: The Vampire Lestat in 1985, The Queen of the Damned in 1988, and The Tale of the Body Thief in 1992. It was expected, then, that Interview with the Vampire would be followed by an adaptation of The Vampire Lestat, more so as it set up a continuation. In Interview with the Vampire, as years ed and Claudia matured psychologically but physically remained a little girl, she and Louis parted ways with Lestat.
Some time later, Claudia and Louis met vampire Armand (Antonio Banderas) and his group, who persuaded him to stay with him while Claudia asked Louis to turn a woman into a vampire to be her new companion and protector. Unfortunately, suspecting they murdered Lestat, Armand’s vampires captured Louis, Claudia, and her new companion and killed the latter two by exposing them to sunlight, while they imprisoned Louis in an iron coffin. Armand rescued Louis, who rejected his offer to stay and continued traveling the world while mourning the loss of Claudia.
In the present, Daniel, whom Louis had told his life story, asked him to make him his new companion. Frustrated at how he didn’t understand his tale of suffering, Louis scared Daniel away, and while the latter drove through the Golden Gate Bridge, Lestat appeared and attacked him, leaving him with the choice of whether or not to become a vampire. This ending left the door open for a sequel adapting The Vampire Lestat, and though Neil Jordan started working on it after the success of Interview with the Vampire, the project didn’t materialize.
Queen of the Damned mixed elements from The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned, but none of the actors from Interview with the Vampire returned.
Instead, Queen of the Damned, directed by Michael Rymer, was made. Queen of the Damned mixed elements from The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned, but none of the actors from Interview with the Vampire returned, and so many characters and plotlines were changed and omitted. Rice was very open about her frustration over Queen of the Damned and, ultimately, the movie failed as a standalone sequel to Interview with the Vampire and as its own thing.
Interview With The Vampire: What Happened To Lestat After The Movie
Lestat made a big impression in Interview with the Vampire, but what happened to him after the movie? Here's what the books have revealed.
Why Queen of the Damned Failed As A Sequel & An Adaptation Of The Vampire Lestat
Queen of the Damned Wasn’t What Fans Expected
Queen of the Damned was a critical and commercial failure, with critics finding it “goofy”, “campy”, “boring”, and “damned.”
Despite being hopeful about Queen of the Damned at some point, Anne Rice changed her mind after the film was released and dismissed it. Rice later urged her fans to forget about Queen of the Dmaned, and said it hurt to see her work “mutilated”. Queen of the Damned was a critical and commercial failure, with critics finding it “goofy”, “campy”, “boring”, and “damned”, with no substance, a messy plot, and tedious pacing. The combination of elements from two novels led Queen of the Damned to be a bizarre mixture of underdeveloped characters and storylines that went nowhere.
The Interview with the Vampire TV Show Has Done Justice To The Movie & Books
Interview With The Vampire Got A Second Chance With A TV Show
Interview with the Vampire didn’t get the sequel it deserved and Queen of the Damned failed as a continuation to it, but Rice’s book got a second chance now as a TV show. In 2022, the TV series Interview with the Vampire premiered on AMC, and it follows the plot and characters from Rice’s novel, with Jacob Anderson as Louis, Sam Reid as Lestat, and Bailey Bass as Claudia. The success of Interview with the Vampire led to its renewal for a second season, which will cover parts of The Vampire Lestat.
If the series is renewed for future seasons, it’s expected to continue covering the events of The Vampire Lestat and the rest of the novels. The TV series Interview with the Vampire not only has the chance to expand the story in ways the movie never could, but it has also included elements from the novel the movie left out, mostly the romantic relationship between Lestat and Louis.
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Interview with the Vampire
- Release Date
- November 11, 1994
Based on Anne Rice's 1976 novel, Interview with the Vampire tells the story of two vampires, Lestat and Louis, and their complicated relationship after Lestat turns Louis in 1791. Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt star as Lestat and Louis respectively, with a cast that includes Kirsten Dunst as Claudia, the two men's young charge who Lestat also turns in an attempt to keep a disillusioned Louis from leaving. Christian Slayter rounds out the cast as Daniel Molloy, a reporter to who Louis tells his story in the mid-1990s.
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Interview with the Vampire
- Release Date
- October 2, 2022
Based on Anne Rice's novel series that began in 1976, Interview with the Vampire is a gothic horror fantasy series that explores the life of Louis de Pointe du Lac through an interview with a journalist. Told through flashbacks of Louis' life during the interview, the series examines Louis' relationship with the vampire that turned him, Lestat de Lioncourt, and a teenage girl named Claudia, whom he turns. The series is the first of Anne Rice's Immortal Universe media franchise.
