|
Interview
with the vampire
|
Movie
| Book
| Author
| Director
& cast
|
Book: Interview with
the Vampire/ The Vampire Chronicles (1976)
Movie: Interview with the Vampire (1994)
Premise
movie:
"The film begins and ends in present-day San Francisco, with Louis (Brad Pitt), a two-century old vampire, telling his story to a fascinated interviewer (Christian Slater). His tale opens in 1791 Louisiana, just south of New Orleans, where Louis falls victim to the vampire Lestat (Tom Cruise). Given a choice between death and eternal life as one of the undead, Louis chooses the latter, a decision he will forever regret.
Louis cannot kill with the impunity of Lestat, but, to sate his hunger, he must feed, and the blood of animals is not enough. Eventually, he pierces the neck of a grief-stricken young girl named Claudia (Kirsten Dunst), whom Lestat then curses with his unholy form of resurrection so that she can be a surrogate daughter to both himself and Louis. For a while, they are one "big, happy family." But all things end, and Claudia's growing resentment of Lestat fuels a bloody confrontation.
When Interview with the Vampire works, it's as compelling and engrossing a piece of entertainment as is available on film today. When it falters, the weaknesses seem magnified. Fortunately, under the care of director Neil Jordan (The Crying Game), instances of the former are more frequent that those of the latter, although the film noticeably stumbles during two key sequences (a needlessly drawn-out exploration of life as a vampire in Paris and the illogical, dumb conclusion). Despite the ups and downs of the second half, however, the first hour is classic horror at its most grotesque. In the best tradition of the Grand Guignol, Interview with the Vampire revels in its graphic and horrifying bloodiness."
from:
http://movie-reviews.colossus.net/movies/i/interview.html
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Premise
book:
"The time is now. We are in a small room with the vampire, face to face, as he speaks--as he pours out the hypnotic, shocking, moving, and erotically charged confessions of his first two hundred years as one of the living dead. . . He speaks quietly, plainly, even gently . . . carrying us back to the night when he departed human existence as heir--young, romantic, cultivated--to a great Louisiana plantation, and was inducted by the radiant and sinister Lestat into the other, the "endless," life . . . learning first to sustain himself on the blood of cocks and rats caught in the raffish streets of New Orleans, then on the blood of human beings . . . to the years when, moving away from his final human ties under the tutelage of the hated yet necessary Lestat, he gradually embraces the habits, hungers, feelings of vampirism: the detachment, the hardened will, the "superior" sensual pleasures. He carries us back to the crucial moment in a dark New Orleans street when he finds the exquisite lost young child Claudia, wanting not to hurt but to comfort her, struggling against the last residue of human feeling within him . . . We see how Claudia in turn is made a vampire--all her passion and intelligence trapped forever in the body of a small child--and how they arrive at their passionate and dangerous alliance, their French Quarter life of opulence: delicate Grecian statues, Chinese vases, crystal chandeliers, a butler, a maid, a stone nymph in the hidden garden court . . . night curving into night with their vampire senses heightened to the beauty of the world, thirsting for the beauty of death--a constant stream of vulnerable strangers awaiting them below . . . We see them joined against the envious, dangerous Lestat, embarking on a perilous search across Europe for others like themselves, desperate to discover the world they belong to, the ways of survival, to know what they are and why, where they came from, what their future can be . . . We follow them across Austria and Transylvania, encountering their kind in forms beyond their wildest imagining . . . to Paris, where footsteps behind them, in exact rhythm with their own, steer them to the doors of the Théâtre des Vampires--the beautiful, lewd, and febrile mime theatre whose posters of penny-dreadful vampires at once mask and reveal the horror within . . to their meeting with the eerily magnetic Armand, who brings them, at last, into intimacy with a whole brilliant and decadent society of vampires, an intimacy that becomes sudden terror when they are compelled to confront what they have feared and fled . . . In its unceasing flow of spellbinding storytelling, of danger and flight, of loyalty and treachery, Interview with the Vampire bears witness of a literary imagination of the first order."
from:
http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/
display.pperl?394-49821-6
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Author:
"Anne Rice was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. She holds a Master of Arts Degree in creative writing from San Francisco State University and is the author of twenty-one novels. Her first novel, Interview with the Vampire, was published in 1976 and has gone on to become one of the bestselling novels of all time. It was in Interview with the Vampire that Rice first introduced her vampire, the Vampire Lestat, to the world. Rice continued her vampire saga in The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned, The Tale of the Body Thief and Memnoch the Devil. These novels, collectively known as "The Vampire Chronicles," have great mainstream and cult followings and are widely assigned in high school and collegiate English and philosophy classes. Her latest novel, Vittorio The Vampire, follows Pandora and The Vampire Armand, continuing Rice's new series of vampire tales. Rice is also the author of The Witching Hour, the first book in a trilogy about a clan of witches (the other novels in this series are Lasher and Taltos). Her other works of fiction include The Feast of All Saints, Cry to Heaven and The Mummy; the contemporary erotic novels Exit to Eden and Belinda (written under the name Anne Rampling); and stylized, pornographic novels known as "The Beauty Books," which include The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty's Punishment and Beauty's Release (written under the name A.N. Roquelaure). Her books have sold over 100,000,000 copies worldwide. Rice wrote the screenplay for Interview with the Vampire and has also written a screenplay for The Witching
Hour. Rice lives in New Orleans with her husband, poet and painter Stan Rice, and son Christopher."
from:
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/annerice/
author.html
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Director:
Neil Jordan
Cast:
Tom Cruise (Lestat de Lioncourt), Brad Pitt ( Loouis de Pointe du Lac), Kirsten Dunst (Claudia), Stephen Rea (Santiago), Antonio Banderas (Armand), Christian Slater (Daniel Malloy) and others.
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