Parisian Phoenix Publishing

So the new series on AMC that brings the Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles to life does an amazing job of blending the old classic stories and the modern age together in a way that does not defile or cheapen the concepts/characters as fans know and love them.

The diversity in the production and the eroticism bring to life many ideas that felt like they were always lurking in the original text, maybe more “allowable” now than they were 50 years ago. I’m the first person to have a tantrum when modern retellings destroy the original work, so I’m a tad surprised that this pleased me as much as it did.

After watching it with my 22-year-old daughter, I suggested trying the movie from my college days, that I saw in an old classic movie theater that has been torn down to make way for an apartment building (that includes a popcorn machine, the original projection equipment and a row of the original theater seats in their “movie theater” amenity). It’s the same theater where I took my daughter to see her first movie, in the summer of 2008: Wall*E. It was released four days after her fourth birthday.

• To read more about the original theater, click here.
• Learn more about the apartment complex here.

So anyway, back to the 1994 film. I loved this film back in the day and found Lestat both horrible and laughable. And having not read the book in at least a decade, the film felt disjointed and looked much older than 30-ish years. I was bored for much of it.

I also saw how the AMC-version has changed the original novel, especially when it comes to stories of Claudia. While the erotic gay sex and brown skin is so much more permissible and acceptable today, the child vampire is not. The reason Claudia exemplifies the horror of Lestat is specifically because she is a child. (And, yes, I know why we can’t have small children doing adult things in film. This is merely an observation and not a judgment. Writing has more freedom for such things. I suppose the only way to get around such issues would be to have Claudia’s adult behavior occur off-screen.)

Come back tomorrow to read about Interview with a Vampire on William Prystauk‘s Countdown List: Top 5 Horror Films Based on Novels.