interview with the vampire research paper

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• Published: 24 March 2015

The real vampires of New Orleans and Buffalo: a research note towards comparative ethnography

• John Edgar Browning 1  

Palgrave Communications volume  1 , Article number:  15006 ( 2015 ) Cite this article

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• Cultural and media studies

This research note is an elaboration of my ethnographic work of the last 5 years and is here presented to raise careful discussion of the little-explored identity and phenomenon of “real vampirism”. An auxiliary purpose of these preliminary findings is to draw attention specifically to a yet unexplored dimension of the real vampire identity: geographical specificity. This line of enquiry is informed by the intensive ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in 2009–2011 in the New Orleans metropolitan area, and by supplementary ethnographic work in 2011–2013 in Buffalo, New York. Also explored is what I term “defiant culture”, through which, I posit, vampire self-identification is able to achieve a measure of empowerment by resisting “normalcy” while critiquing and challenging the power structures that re/produce it.

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Introduction.

I offer the following research note, not as a complete report, but as an elaboration of my work over the last 5 years with the aim of raising careful discussion and consideration of what has come to be known, critically, as the “real vampire community”, which boasts of members in several countries, from the United States and England to Russia and South Africa. With this general thematic in mind, an auxiliary purpose of my preliminary findings is to draw attention specifically to a yet unexplored dimension of the real vampire identity: geographical specificity. This line of enquiry is informed by the intensive ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in 2009–2011 in the New Orleans metropolitan area, and by supplementary ethnographic work in 2011–2013 in Buffalo, New York. In the end, however, I generate what are seemingly more questions than answers, answers which I hope to remediate through further analysis with the help of current and future scholars engaged in this research.

I will begin first by outlining a brief history of the real vampire community and the literature treating it. Then, after addressing my study methodology, tools and documents, I will situate real vampirism in tandem with film, fiction and other categories in which popular culture traditionally situates monstrous figures and consider afterwards the various ways in which the figure of the vampire has been appropriated by and adapted to the real vampire community. I will then attempt to elucidate what insights vampire self-identification in particular sites like New Orleans and Buffalo yield about identity construction. Finally, after examining particular constructions like “subculture”, “deviance”, and my term, “defiant culture”, I will address whether the participants at these sites can aid in making visible normative ideological structures while creating for themselves new and complex opportunities for agency in a world in which they are routinely outcast.

Community history and literature

The umbrella term “real vampire community” is used to describe “modern vampires” or “real vampires”, Footnote 1 terms that refer interchangeably to people who consume human and/or animal blood (sanguinarian), absorb psychic energy (psychic vampire or psi-vamp) or both (hybrid), and do so out of a need that, according to my study participants, begins to manifest around puberty and derives from the lack of subtle energies their bodies produce. This self-described nature is a condition for which they claim to be given neither a choice nor the freedom to change. Moreover, should they refrain from feeding on blood or energy, they attest to feeling weak and experiencing an overall diminished health. What real vampirism is not , however, is the sole adoption of Gothic dress and prosthetic fangs for aesthetic purposes, as though real vampirism were merely a practice or fad that one might adopt one day and discard the next. Such a description denotes an entirely different class of people, which the real vampire community has termed “lifestylers”. To real vampires, Gothic or dark clothing and fangs are, as I will explain in more detail later, merely supplementary identificatory markers of, or hegemonic modes of group expression for, their inherent condition (much in the same way that same-sex desire, for example, is categorically distinct from, and in no way dependent on, the myriad cultural practices of the gay community).

So when did the real vampire community emerge and where did it come from? For some, the truth will undoubtedly be stranger than fiction. The terms “vampire community”, “real vampire community” or “modern vampire community”, as Browning (2014) lays out, did not see use until the late 1990s, and at that point they referred primarily to a network of online message boards, chat rooms and e-mail groups. Even still, a vastly disjointed network of people who self-identified as vampire had already existed for at least two decades. No one knows for sure just how many there were, but in the 1970s people who openly or secretively identified as vampire began regularly attending the same themed social gatherings and, in so doing, enabled to begin the process of networking with one another and identifying blood and energy donors. These social gatherings included Dark Shadows conventions and other vampire fiction and film fan organizations; bondage and S&M events, which were frequented by blood fetishists and others whom real vampires found to be willing blood donors; Goth clubs; as well as variously affiliated pagan groups. Also appearing at this time in limited print runs were self-printed newsletters (or zines), which were especially helpful towards merging into one interconnected community the individual and small independent pockets of real vampires that peppered the United States.

The first research organizations dedicated to the study of vampires emerged in the 1960s. Jeanne Keyes Youngson, for example, founded in 1965 the Count Dracula Fan Club (now The Vampire Empire), an organization originally dedicated to Dracula and vampire fiction and film. However, after Youngson began receiving letters from real vampires, the organization’s studies were extended, leading Youngson to publish a casebook of some of her more fascinating correspondence. The most notable early researcher, however, was Stephen Kaplan, who in 1972 formed the Vampire Research Center in Suffolk County, New York. There Kaplan supervised a “vampire hotline”, which received numerous phone calls (many of them hoaxes) from real vampires. On several occasions, Kaplan made actual house calls to meet with some of his phone responders. The book in which Kaplan reported his findings remains a canonical, albeit problematic text in the field. Before long, other important figures begin to emerge, like Martin V Riccardo who in 1977 founded the Vampire Studies Society and printed quarterly newsletter entitled, Journal of Vampirism . In 1978, the Vampire Information Exchange emerged and published through to the mid-2000s the Vampire Information Exchange Newsletter . Other pertinent studies in the field were to follow in the 1980s as well as the 1990s, from scholars like Riccardo, folklorists like Norine Dresser, researchers and paranormalists like Rosemary Ellen Guiley, journalists like Carol Page and academic criminologists like Katherine Ramsland. The 1990s also brought two historically significant events in the growth and expansion of the real vampire community. The first was Anne Rice conventions, which provided closeted and unaffiliated real vampires with a bounty of opportunities for socializing and networking. Of more profound importance during this period, however, was White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade , a publication that laid the ground rules for a vampire role-playing game and provided, if inadvertently, a social space within which real vampires could congregate and network openly. Vampire: The Masquerade introduced a lexicon, conventions, protocols and identifiers that the real vampire community adopted and adapted to its own needs. Thus emerged the predominant and somewhat unifying identity that persists today.

In the last decade, however, it is the Internet to which the real vampire community owes much of its prosperity. Whereas in the past real vampires existed in pockets or as isolated individuals and, to communicate, were therefore dependent on geographically close fan conventions and low-circulation newsletters, the Internet dissolved geographic limitations, made print correspondence almost entirely obsolete, and opened up vastly more efficient e-forums, chat rooms and e-communication. The 2000s have seen not only new scholarship treating real vampirism but works by actual members of the community itself, including Michelle Belanger, Corvis Nocturnum and Atlanta community leader Merticus of the Atlanta Vampire Alliance (AVA). The most important academic work of the last decade, however, as I will elaborate momentarily, has come at the hands of Joseph Laycock, followed by the shorter works of DJ Williams, John Morehead and myself.

Short popular writings on real vampirism have been so sparse that I am able to give here a near complete history. As more general works go, beneficial is Hoyt’s (1984) Lust For Blood: The Consuming Story of Vampires , which, although focused on the history of supernatural vampires from ancient mythological accounts to twentieth-century accounts in both America and Europe, provides a sampling of modern-day accounts about American vampire “practitioners” and surveys briefly the more famous cases of blood-drinking serial killings. Melton’s (1999) The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead is an invaluable first source, defining in minute detail major as well as minor terms that treat the various aspects of the vampire phenomena. Finally, Ramsland’s (2002) The Science of Vampires offers interviews with vampire “practitioners”, forensic experts and various specialists whose works and personal accounts explore the myths and modern-day realities of vampirism.

These next works are among the earliest to examine real vampirism more directly and served as the basis for much subsequent research. A canonical work in the field, Kaplan’s (1984) Vampires Are is a compilation of Kaplan’s findings on “real vampires” before a community existed. Also, Kaplan’s Vampire Research Center was the first of its kind and would provide a model for future research centres and institutions. Dresser’s (1989) American Vampires: Fans, Victims, and Practitioners examines various aspects of the vampire culture in America, from people who experience sexual gratification through blood-letting rituals and consumption, to lifestylers (or people who adopt the visual trappings of vampires), to fans merely obsessed with vampire media. Guiley’s (1991) Vampires Among Us uses a more personal approach to present stories about people who identify themselves as vampires, while also considering the folkloric history of vampires and its influence on the modern-day real vampire scene. Page’s (1993) Bloodlust: Conversations with Real Vampires , one of the first studies of its kind and now regarded as a seminal work in the field, offers interviews with and a detailed look at people who self-identify as vampire while discussing the various aspects of their day-to-day lives. Skal’s (1993) The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror explores in one of its chapters the conflation between blood contamination and vampirism during the Regan years and even provides an interview between the author and a modern-day real vampire. In Ramsland’s (1999) Piercing the Darkness: Undercover with Vampires in America Today , she uses the story of Susan Walsh, who disappeared while investigating vampire cults in 1996, to frame her own investigation into vampiric blood-letting, sexuality and body modification. And lastly, Youngson’s (1997) Private Files of a Vampirologist: Case Histories & Letters examines 11 case studies and 14 personal letters addressed to Youngson by people who self-identify as vampire.

Among the most recent studies (many by actual vampire writers) to begin exploring the vampire community as we understand it today is Guinn’s (1997) Something in the Blood: The Underground World of Today’s Vampires , which provides an introduction to the vampire subculture using interviews not only with people who identify themselves as vampires but people who have unwillingly fallen victim to so-called predatory vampires. Konstantinos’s (2003) Vampires: The Occult Truth explores the occult truths behind vampires using first-person accounts that treat of not only the vampires of folklore but also modern-day psychic and sanguinarian vampires. Nocturnum and Filipak’s (2009) Allure of the Vampire: Our Sexual Attraction to the Undead examines in detail culture’s attraction to vampires by tracing their history in folklore, books and film, from ancient mythology to the modern-day vampire community. Russo’s (2008) Vampire Nation dispels the centuries-old myths and rumours behind vampirism, provides accounts of actual vampirism and real-life narratives, and interviews modern-day vampires who reveal their feeding rituals and behavioural practices.

Works by Belanger, who self-identifies as a psychic vampire, have become some of the most important and respected in the field. Her The Psychic Vampire Codex: A Manual of Magick and Energy Work ( 2004 ) is now considered a canonical work in the field. It examines the history and everyday reality of the real vampire community, its cultural practices and esoteric language, from mere lifestylers to the difference between “psychic” and “sanguinarian” vampires, again the community’s two main divisions. Belanger’s (2005) Sacred Hunger compiles her major essays on the topics of vampirism, Bram Stoker, Dracula, modern-day psychic and sanguinarian vampires, and the history and development of the real vampire subculture. Finally, Belanger’s (2007) Vampires in Their Own Words: An Anthology of Vampire Voices , for which she serves as editor, compiles various essays and personal narratives predominantly by and concerning people who identify themselves as vampires, as well as, to a lesser degree, wiccans and various other lifestylers who write on vampirism and various facets of the vampire subculture and lifestyle. By far the most valuable study on the modern-day vampire community, Laycock’s (2009) Vampires Today: The Truth about Modern Vampirism explores representations of vampirism using extensive interviews predominantly with members of the AVA as well as a few other vampire communities throughout the United States. This work examines not only real vampires, who, as I have said, report feeling a natural attraction towards blood and energy consumption, but lifestylers as well who have adopted the Gothic aesthetic that has come to be associated with the vampires of media. Laycock’s book, which has proven to be indispensable in understanding the real vampire community, its infrastructure and its organizational history, now serves as a canonical study in the field. There is also a small body of (problematic) socio-religious writings on the real vampire identity that Laycock (2010) outlines in his more recent work. Finally, Williams (2008 , 2009 , 2013 ), and Browning (2010a ,  2010b , 2011 ), treat of the creative, therapeutic, self-liberating and antinormative nature of real vampirism.

Methodology and study documents

I have approached my New Orleans (2009–2011) and Buffalo (2011–2013) studies using multiple resources, tools and techniques. The texts outlined in the previous section are among the most valuable of these resources in providing the study with a conceptual framework with which to proceed. Two of these texts in particular provided valuable insight into current vampire research and terminology, thereby enabling me to assemble what has become perhaps this study’s most research valuable tool: the participant “Questionnaire”, which I shall examine in-depth momentarily. Other valuable tools included my satchel, clipboards, writing utensils and a digital voice recorder. Other, less crucial tools included latex gloves (in the event I was expected to examine a participant’s fangs, or witness the process of exsanguination—that is, the blood-letting ritual performed between a sanguinarian vampire and his or her donor) and a flashlight (in the event my study brings me to a dimly-lit field site). Lastly, among the techniques I utilized for these studies included field notes, as well as observations conducted at various locations throughout the French Quarter (New Orleans), including Gothic apparel shops, night clubs, sidewalks and alleyways.

“General Questionnaire A-2” provided this study’s most crucial data. Of the 15 (14 active) participants in the New Orleans study and 4 in the Buffalo study, approximately 13 have completed this questionnaire. It includes the prefatory statement, “Please briefly answer the following questions as specifically or generally as you feel comfortable with. Please do not answer any question you do not want to”, followed by 36 questions, the answers to which offer valuable insight into the lives and cultural practices of the participants. The questions were as follows:

Name, or alias?

Since high school, what jobs have you held?

Present occupation?

Do you live in New Orleans/Buffalo? If not, where then, and why are you presently living in your present location?

Sexual orientation?

Married? Children?

Are you a vampyre, or vampire, or any variation thereof?

How long have you been a vampyre?

Do you feel you were born a vampyre, or were you somehow initiated into it, or both?

Do you have fangs? Please describe them?

Do you consume human blood? Animal blood? Both?

Do you consume psychic energy?

Define psychic energy?

Describe your first blood-drinking, or psychic energy-absorbing, experience?

Does the site or taste of blood or psychic energy arouse you sexually?

When and how did you first know you were a vampyre?

Why do you consume blood or psychic energy, or both?

What does blood taste like, specifically?

How do you feel while you consume blood or psychic energy? After?

Do you prefer blood to be chilled or warm, or both? Mixed with another liquid? Other?

Do you store blood, and if so how?

Have you ever become sick after consuming blood?

How much blood or psychic energy do you consume at one time?

How often do you need to consume blood or psychic energy?

What, if anything happens if you don’t consume blood or psychic energy?

What effect do you think consuming blood or psychic energy has had on your life?

Where do you get the blood or psychic energy? If donors, describe them?

How do you extract the blood or psychic energy?

How did you learn to extract blood or psychic energy?

How do you feel if you don’t consume blood or psychic energy?

Has your health changed since you started consuming blood or psychic energy?

Has your appearance changed since you started consuming blood or psychic energy?

What type of bed do you sleep in?

What other foods do you eat? How much? How often?

What is the most convenient way for me to contact you again? Specify?

Fieldwork, field site(s) and “reel” vampirism

I should like to say a few words now on the specific habits and cultural identificatory markers predominant among real vampires. Doing so will help to dispel a few myths or misconceptions. Real vampires do not generally sleep in coffins (though certainly some have and do), and they do not claim to live forever. Indeed, real vampires diffuse beyond the realms of film and literature in which popular culture has traditionally situated them. Real vampires are living people, generally leading what may be deemed everyday lives, and who, according to what I and other scholars have been able to ascertain, appropriate the figure of the vampire and adapt it for self-identificatory purposes. This, however, they do only after —in many cases, years after—the compulsion to take blood or energy arises. Even still, this is not to say that some of the fictional vampire’s more obvious cultural and socio-historical dimensions in film and literature are not reflected in real vampires.

Aside from blood-drinking and feeding on energy, a sizeable number in the real vampire community prefers to don Gothic apparel (though certainly not all the time), and many will even don prosthetic fangs, a practice that, for the most, is purely aesthetic, though it can and does serve a cultural need, especially in New Orleans where fangs contribute to inter-communal identification. Scholars and curious observers interested in real vampire communities around the world have begun to probe this subculture with renewed vigour to ask why , partly in an attempt to gain new insight, but for some regrettably it is to disqualify, or suppress I think, this identity group. I suspect that latter does so mainly out of a host of misconceptions as the “real” and the “reel” continue to blur more and more seamlessly into one another in and outside of the vampire subculture. There has even transpired, upon closer scrutiny, a certain degree of cross-pollination between the two realms. That is to say, the more “Goth” or “Steampunk” variety of self-identifying human vampires—which, in fact, comprises only a portion of the vampire community—seems to be informing with increasing regularity the representations of vampires we see in film, television and literature (not just the other way around). The process has become recursive. Thus, to divorce completely this subculture from literary and filmic representations is to deny it its modernity.

Similar may be said for denying real vampires of their humanity. In my own dealings with the real vampire community in New Orleans and Buffalo, I found its members to be kind, accommodating and pleasant to be around. To my surprise, some were loving parents whose children accompanied them to vampire community meetings. Some could have passed for everyday “professionals” one might pass on the street, while others were only too eager to embrace the latest Gothic fashions. All of them, however, regardless of their choice of personal attire, showed what I can only describe as admirable strength and courage in the face of immense opposition to their identity. Equally important, they behave—and survive—as a community(s) .

Curiously, though perhaps not surprisingly, these communities are represented through an amalgam of identities and experiences. The real vampires I met and interviewed ranged in age from approximately 18–50; represented both sexes equally; practiced sanguinarian and/or psychic feeding; described themselves as atheistic, monotheistic or polytheistic; self-identified as heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual; some were parents; married and divorced; and were wearing or have worn fangs, or had, or have had, naturally long incisors. Unquestionably, I found the members of this community to be competent citizens, that they performed blood-letting and other similar rituals safely and did so only with willing donors, and participated regularly in medical checkups that scarcely (if ever) indicated complications as a result of their feeding practices.

The French Quarter, the central research site chosen for the New Orleans study, is particularly germane to this line of enquiry, as there are, I would imagine, few other research sites in which such a vastly diverse ethnic and cultural makeup may be observed to coexist in the open. It is also here, in the French Quarter, that I encountered all of my Louisiana participants. During the initial stages of this study, I was completely overcome with excitement and curiosity, and had very few expectations as to what, or whom, I would find. I must not omit to say, however, that I felt a certain amount of hope , which is something quite different from expectation , and it was hope that permitted a certain level of delusion to set in very early on. Early on, I think on a subconscious level I romanticized the research process. The longer it took me to locate my first participant, the more my delusion morphed and shaped how I imagined “my first time” (as I called it) would be. Finally, at Wicked New Orleans, a Gothic apparel shop, the opportunity arrived. The shop owner, with whom I was engaged in conversation, suddenly stopped me mid-sentence and advised me to go speak to a woman who had entered his shop, a woman he claimed was a “vampire”. I was completely unprepared for this; I never imagined “my first time” would be in a leather shop. Swallowing my pride, I walked over to the unsuspecting woman in her 40s–50s (whom I shall call “Jennifer”). I explained to Jennifer who I was and what I was doing in the French Quarter, to which she smiled and revealed her teeth (some of which had been filed down to a point). I made friendly conversation for a moment (and looking back, I cannot even remember what I said) then gave her my contact information, asking politely that she call or e-mail me at some point. Never, not for one second, did I think I would not see or hear from her again; but I did not. My first chance had come and gone, and I blew it.

As I began delving into some of the field’s early scholarship, particularly Kaplan’s work, I realized the difficulties I had been facing were nothing new to studies in real vampirism. Before going out into the field again, I poured over several scholarly and popular works, and eventually took a new initiative: Treat all future encounters with participants as though I would never see or hear from them again after the initial contact. To prepare, I compiled the “Questionnaire” and carried several copies with me, I brought along clipboards (for the participants to write on), latex gloves (in case of inspection involving blood or teeth), a flashlight (in case my research took me into dark places or homes) and a digital voice recorder (in case a participant refused to write his or her answers but agreed to verbalize them). Although my satchel grew heavier, my workload grew lighter, as the strategy would eventually pay off.

After Jennifer, almost another 2 months would pass before I could locate more participants for my study. A chance opportunity came one October night in 2009, however, when I frequented a club in the French Quarter called, “The Dungeon”. In the space of 2 h, I met there and documented five vampires. Among them were “Maven”, mid-30s, a “fangsmith” (designer and sculptor of made-to-order vampire fangs) of some repute I gathered and would later verify, and a local vampire elder 2 ; a vampire named “Max”, Maven’s sidekick, late-teens/early-20s, and a martial artist; a vampire named “Torch” (with whom I have now lost contact), mid-20s, quiet demeanour and elusive; a vampire I shall call “Victoria” (with whom I have now lost contact), Torch’s girlfriend, late-teens, excited by the prospect of participating in the study; and a vampire I shall call “James”, early-30s, who was initially hesitant to participate. The challenges, however, were far from over. All five participants left contact information in the “Questionnaire”, but only one phone number proved to be legitimate. This fact was rather an unfortunate one. However, after concluding my field observations at The Dungeon, something occurred to me after the fact: all the vampires who were present that night at the club arrived in separate, smaller groups: Maven and Max, Torch and Victoria, and James. Yet, all five participants knew each other by name, which suggested to me at the time at least a certain level of what one might call communiality. How, I remember thinking, would I ever be able to find this community if I could not even get one of its members to call me back or disclose an accurate e-mail address. It turned out I would only have to wait about a month.

Laycock (2009) aptly remarks that the public generally only hears about the real vampire community in the media following some “vampiric” serial murder, or during October as a means to exploit the season of death and monsters. Unfortunately, the New Orleans vampire community has not escaped Laycock’s assessment. An ABC 20/20 special on New Orleans’s real vampires broadcasted that October, one that, according to the community, sensationalized the whole ordeal by editing down their interviews and mixing and matching some of the questions and answers, incorporating into the programme the use of Gothicized music, images and other similar tropes, and in effect turning the whole account into a twisted fantasy. Another painfully negative outcome of the broadcast occurred in the Discussion/Comment Board that accompanied the video at ABC’s Website. As Browning (2010b) discusses at length, on it are statements from viewers who, to some degree, support the vampire community or one’s freedom of expression, but far more frequent were statements by unsupportive, misled or utterly irate viewers whose comments were unfounded and born out of assumptions, misconceptions and misinterpretations about the real vampire identity and community.

One of the vampires featured in the 20/20 broadcast was “Belfazaar (‘Zaar’) Ashantison”, a resident of New Orleans and a member of a community-wide council of vampire elders called the New Orleans Vampire Association (NOVA). It was through him, after meeting his expectations and gaining his trust through our initial interview, that I met over the next few weeks 10–12 additional members of the community, all of whom generously agreed to participate in my study. “Zaar” was in his early-40s, a local vampire elder, and a founding member of NOVA. I encountered the next eight participants at the initial NOVA meeting I attended: a vampire named “Corrien”, who looked to be in her late-30s; a vampire named “Reverend Boone”, in his late-30s/early-40s, who looked to be the most menacing of those in attendance to the meeting; a vampire I shall call “Meph” (short for “Mephistopheles”), a local vampire elder who suffers from a debilitating physical illness and therefore walked with a cane (a Barnabas Collins’s Dark Shadows replica); a vampire named “Jade”, a local vampire elder who looked to be in her mid-30s; a local vampire elder named “Reverend Jezabel de Luna” (or “Jez”), a larger than life female who looked to be in her mid-30s; a local vampire elder I shall call “Lorilee”, who looked to be in her mid-40s; a vampire I shall call “Tony”, who is a local tour guide, a local vampire elder and looked to be in his early-40s; and a vampire I shall call “Erin”, Tony’s girlfriend who looked to be in her late-30s. In time I would meet other vampires as well.

After I moved from New Orleans to Buffalo in Summer 2011, I was immediately interested in whether or not Buffalo had its own real vampire community and if it was similar to New Orleans’s. Perhaps “geography”, I thought, would offer another fruitful context within which to frame the fundamental relationship of the vampire identity to its cultural construction. Whether geographical specificity could yield insights into the more generalized umbrella of vampire self-identification became for me a new and fascinating avenue worth exploring. To carry out this new supplemental study, I planned to use the following research methods: contact leading members of the vampire community at large and through them obtain contact information for persons living in Buffalo who meet one of the categories given previously; frequent night clubs in the greater Buffalo area whose attendees either appropriate “Gothic”-style themes, or that are rumoured to be frequented by persons who meet one of the categories given previously, or both; post, in local newspapers and public e -forums, ads that describe my study and invite qualified persons to participate; frequent local stores that sell “Gothic”-themed goods, and there speak with the owner and workers, describe my study, ask about potentially qualified persons and leave at the store my contact information to be handed out accordingly.

Using information gathered over a period of several months from interviews and field observations, it was my intention for this supplementary study to provide behavioural and socio-cultural data geographically specific to study participants inhabiting the greater Buffalo area. Contrasting this study with the previous one would, I hope, allow me to perceive qualities of each field site that might otherwise appear to the average observer as “normal”, unrelated or universal. While conducting the study, I took along with me, just as I did in New Orleans, my trusty brown satchel containing IRB consent forms, pad and pen, flashlight, voice recorder and latex gloves. What I eventually found, through comparative analysis, was that my experiences with vampire self-identification in New Orleans yielded quite a lot about vampire identity construction in Buffalo, but it had less to do with similarities. Geography, it would seem, played a much greater part than perhaps any of us in the field had realized.

I began my study in Buffalo by first contacting through e-mail the people living there whose contact information I had received from leading members of the real vampire community. It was also my intention to frequent Gothic-styled night clubs or other places generally rumoured to be frequented by real vampires. However, neither was to be had, mainly because they simply did not exist as far as I could ascertain, though Club Diablo (now closed) was mentioned, albeit dubiously, as a potential site. Even still, my experiences in Buffalo were in some ways similar to New Orleans, though in many other ways they were quite different. For example, the term “ronin”, used by the vampire community at large to denote an individual vampire who is not affiliated with a particular house, coven and so on, was applicable to only a handful of vampires living in New Orleans. In Buffalo, however, the use of this term was universal, as the five vampires I encountered were not affiliated with any group, nor did any such group seem to exist within the city or outlying suburbs.

One of my study participants in Buffalo, whom I shall call simply “Christy” (early-30s), was a psychic vampire. Contact with Christy was confined to the Internet. We made several attempts to meet in-person, but conflicting schedules, illness and finances prevented this. There was also, with Christy, a strong issue of confidentiality. This was due in large part to an extenuating circumstance that made her situation quite different than any I encountered in New Orleans. Her partner with whom she lived at the time was not fully aware of the extent of her vampire self-identity, and what little he had been told he reacted negatively to. Additionally, Christy was engaged in the process of trying to gain custody of her daughter and felt (aptly so I think) that knowledge of her self-identity would impede that effort. The next two vampires in my study came as a pair: Serevus (male, 36) and Shyla (female, 19), who at the time were engaged to be married. Both were psychic vampires, and identified primarily as tantric feeder, which is to say they absorbed energy through sexual and erotic encounters. Shyla explained to me that this particular method is often misunderstood, that folks outside and even some within the real vampire community look at it as merely a craving for sex: “[S]ince I realized that I was a sexual vampire, I was really into the attraction—just the feelings. It’s not even just sex in itself, but the actual people flirting and things like that. It’s something I feel. And, you know alot of people don’t understand it”. I met with Serevus and Shyla together at a local Buffalo eatery on three occasions, and later I conducted interviews with each separately at a local prominent coffee shop. In both instances I found them to be very friendly and quite attuned not only to their self-identities but to the cultural practices of the vampire community at large. Although neither was affiliated with a vampire house, both were up-to-date on national and community-wide activities and practices; this contrasted greatly with my New Orleans participants, all of whom were members or leaders of a local vampire house but gave noticeably less attention to general, community-wide matters unless they were pertinent to New Orleans. Serevus and Shyla seemed adamant about starting their own household in Buffalo (a dream made all the more possible, they claimed, as a result of my study).

Contrasting these geographical studies through the use of interviews and field observations gathered from each field site has helped to accentuate place-specific behavioural and socio-cultural factors. On that note, it is worth mentioning as well that Halloween meant far less to the Buffalo identity than it did in New Orleans. For many in the vampire community, October in general, and Halloween in particular, can be a profitable time of year. Vampire organizations like the one I shadowed in New Orleans, fangsmiths (who construct prosthetic fangs for vampires), vampire event performers, and individual members and houses of the vampire community, all converge on large cities like New York, New Orleans and Atlanta, and in cities across the world, to participate in ceremonies and take part in celebration and fellowship. This is especially true for New Orleans, which plays host to some of the largest vampire events in the country. However, although the fruit of such gatherings is profit for the organizations and private parties who, in turn, feed that money back into their respective vampire communities and organizations, these profits are also vital to fuelling local charity events, such as those organized by Zaar and NOVA like feeding the homeless (at times, as many as 80–100 mouths) at Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving or aiding those in general need, and to perpetuating the organizations who pride themselves on giving back to their local communities. This speaks voluminously of the vampire identity, which, to the outside world, is often associated purely with excess, psychopathology and a general sense of disconnection from community involvement. The reality, as I have tried to show, is actually far different. Modern vampires, through reconciling these and other, similar antitheticals, effectively critique ideological systems that dictate how normalcy should be constructed. Indeed, their metaphysical understandings of themselves and what they regard as their innate condition serve to “challenge”, as one external reader of this article found, “the authority of contemporary power structures and normalizing discourses of both western religion and modern medicine and psychiatry”. Footnote 2 In short, normativity is of minimal practical use to real vampires and serves little more than to recall for them hurtful memories of a repressive and oppressive system that shuns more than it embraces.

Closing remarks

Often we think of culture and otherness as mutually exclusive entities, the former always preceding, and generally dictating, the latter. But must they always exist along such a narrow continuum, or can the two accommodate between themselves a level of reciprocity? Indeed, I have found that they can, but more pertinently, how is this achieved? How can otherness achieve a mutual and recursive dialogue with culture? One answer may lie within deviant subcultural formation or, to put another way, what I term defiant culture . In what ways are marginalized groups key to understanding some larger dynamic? And how can otherness become, indeed, part of a broader cultural analysis? This remains a large, interesting yet unresolved problem.

My use of the term “subculture” as an analytical tool to describe the real vampire community is informed predominantly by the work of Australian Literary and Cultural Studies professor Ken Gelder. According to Gelder (2007) , subcultures share a “common narrative” as nonconformist and, thereby, non-normative. At least six “prevailing cultural logics”, by Gelder’s account, exist for identifying subcultures (3–4):

Routinely, members of a subculture are judged or conceived by the outside in negative terms in relation to labour. They may be considered idle or lazy, even too leisurely, or they may partake of work related to their own subculture that is looked upon by the outside as parasitical, counter to “legitimate” work or even illegal.

A subculture’s relation to class is only vaguely understood. Some subcultures are even seen as digressing completely from their class, discarding any class affiliation or “ ‘transcending’ class as a result of the particular cultural adjustments they have made”.

Property ownership is seen as somehow antithetical to subcultural identity. For, subcultures tend to territorialize, rather than own, a geographical location or area, in this way creating new modes of expression and belonging that is based in part on place.

Typically, subcultures congregate outside the domestic sphere. For youth in particular, it is this “initial deviation from home and the subsequent adjustment into subcultural forms of homeliness and belonging” outside the domestic family unit that earmarks subcultural identity.

Public or “cultural logic”, as Gelder puts it, has a tendency to see subcultures as excessive or exaggerated. In this case, the “deviance” of subcultures is attributable, at least in part, to an excess of characteristic traits spanning behaviour, dress, sounds and so on, as well as, I would add, esoteric knowledge, all of which are contrasted with “normal” society’s conceptions of moderation and restraint.

Finally, the remaining cultural logic concerns a subculture’s inherent “opposition to the banalities of mass cultural forms”. By this is meant that subcultural identity embraces a nonconformist stance towards societal massification, that is, self-alienation.

Each of Gelder’s cultural logics is indicative both of the real vampire subculture and external perceptions of it. At a glance, the use of my term “defiant culture” would seem, then, to be synonymous with sub culture. Therefore, further explanation is needed. My term is an appropriation of the work of Christina Santos and Adriana Spahr on “defiant deviance”. Santos and Spahr (2006) examine the ways in which the supernatural persists as a recurring element in mass media and culture, despite its general obsoletion at the hands of the Enlightenment. The persistence of the supernatural—in art, literature, film and so on—is for Santos and Spahr a “defiant form of deviance”: “a state of opposition and a disposition to resist that deviates from the accepted norm” (1). Put another way, society’s free embrace of supernatural figures and the paranormal, in spite of prevailing technological and scientific knowledge, is intentionally defiant , that is, a deviation intended by design to defy. Although Santos and Spahr do apply their term to a single case study of alleged vampirism (“by association only”, the authors note) in the person of Countess Erzsébet Báthory (1560–1614) of Hungary, their work fails to account for actual self-identification with vampirism, of which, perhaps unbeknownst to them, there is an entire inter-connected, subcultural community populated with members who do just that. As for Gelder, his cultural logics, although productively inclusive, seem also hardly adequate to surmise a subculture considered by the outside to be so deviant and so aberrant that the very nature of its identity is by many altogether discounted. The real vampire community is, to be sure, a subculture like no other. It is what I term a “defiant culture”; this is to say, it manifests its own deviance through the act of defiance for its own sake, in this case, the conscious use of a negative identifier like “vampire”. Laycock (2010) is apt to note that “The idea that the real vampire community is formed by an inherent quality”, that is, biology, “rather than subcultural participation is reflected in the structure of the community, which is dialogical and acephalous” (8). Yet I contend that the appropriation of the word “vampire” and the vampire milieu is at least as important, producing as a result a community that is both “defiant” and iconoclastic.

Beyond mere physiology, however, what particularly strikes me are the ways in which the very being and nature of this community are subversive to how societies construct “normalcy”. It becomes important to ask, then, whether the history of real vampires can help to address the broader relation between culture and otherness. Real vampires comprise, as I have said, a subculture the outside considers so deviant and so aberrant that its very nature is altogether discounted. Yet, simultaneously, this distinction is crucial to the real vampire community’s status as a “defiant culture”: through manifesting its own deviance by means of defiance for its own sake, it achieves as it were a degree of self-empowerment. Heiner’s (2008) sentiment that “One of the more resounding principles in the sociology of deviance is that the defining quality of deviance resides in the audience and not in the person or behavior” (xi) is something I have tried to emphasize in my work on real vampires, in addition to whether identity construction among “alternative” subcultures in the United States in general and in New Orleans and Buffalo in particular can aid in redefining the dominative and corrective moral and behavioural imperatives societies use to construct “normalcy”. Ironically it is these same imperatives, borrowing loosely from the work of Eve Sedgwick, that make the modern vampire identity a strategic site for confronting, and challenging, ideological assumptions culturally and historically imbedded in the methods by which we as a society hierarchize the world around us ( Browning, 2012 ). Modern vampires are capable of making accessible the infinite potentials for exposing and, with any luck, unfixing the repressive and oppressive categories that precipitate marginalization. In short, modern vampirism offers a valuable lens through which to understand and, perhaps, dispel some of the ideological “baggage” each of us carries; through them, we see the dark side of ourselves. Yet the subject of modern vampires would not be nearly as interesting, or as “radical”, were it not perceived as being so “deviant”. Thus, the study of modern vampirism is, in a broader sense, the study of “deviance”. However, it is also the study of “defiance” and self-empowerment.

Additional Information

How to cite this article : John Edgar Browning (2015) The real vampires of New Orleans and Buffalo: a research note towards comparative ethnography. Palgrave Communications 1:15006 doi: 10.1057/palcomms.2015.6. Footnote 3

Geographical areas, individual houses and even individual members of the real vampire community will independently render the word “vampire” as “vampyre” as a means of distinguishing the community from the supernatural archetype of fiction and film. The rendering “vampi(y)re” is also sometimes used as a compromise to satisfy proponents of each spelling.

I am grateful to an external reader of this article for this succinct observation and phrasing.

Sanguinarius defines “elder” thusly: “A prominent member of the vampiric community who is honored and respected for his or her experience, knowledge, willingness to help others, accomplishments and devotion. Elders are often those individuals who have helped establish a community, organize groups, or help network the community” (13). See Sanguinarius (2010) and also Merticus (2014) .

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Acknowledgements

Much thanks is owed to SUNY-Buffalo professors Michael Frisch, Bruce Jackson and Sarah Elder, who provided helpful feedback on my research. Ethnographic materials and research underpinning this study such as field notes, digital audio recordings, transcripts, ephemera collected onsite and internal NOVA documents are deposited with the author under secure lock and key for the purpose of protecting the personal identities of the study participants. Copies of individual consent forms wherein full identification is not disclosed can be requested by outside parties. A more extensive elaboration of this research, including or in addition to the ethnographic materials listed above, is forthcoming in a book-length project currently in progress.

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Browning, J. The real vampires of New Orleans and Buffalo: a research note towards comparative ethnography. Palgrave Commun 1 , 15006 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2015.6

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Reading "Interview with the Vampire"

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Interview With the Vampire

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Armand is irresistibly attracted to Louis, because he is still curious and passionate, two of the best aspects of humanity. Once Claudia is killed, however, Louis no longer shows any interest in their relationship, and he is equally aloof with Lestat. Explain why he gives no signs that he hopes to regain any spark of vitality.

Louis is complicit in Claudia’s death and rebirth as a vampire, and he tells her as much. Why does Claudia blame Lestat more than Louis? She says that she hates Louis as much as she loves him, but why is she able to stay with Louis while Lestat drives her to attempt to kill him?

Louis has a disdain for Lestat that is almost instantaneous from their first meeting. Why does he stay with him for so long, given how distasteful he finds him?

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Through its time change, "Interview with the Vampire" examines how war poisons the blood

The tv adaptation returns with a visceral parable of the effect man's inhumanity does to our hearts, by melanie mcfarland.

What is time to an immortal? “ Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire ” cannot help but ask versions of that question as it applies to individual figures or encapsulates the species’ dilemma. 

In the TV adaptation’s second season, Louis de Pointe du Lac ( Jacob Anderson ) fixates on memories of his unnaturally long lifetime in human terms as a function of trying to recall the details with conciseness. Centuries-old vampires like his current lover Armand (Assad Zaman) or his maker Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) take a longer view: once all natural means of mortality are removed from the moral equation of living, day-to-day and year-to-year particulars cease to concern them.  

As long as there is blood, there is a means to endure.  

Decades, epochs and waves of cultural change wash over them. But Louis hasn’t been undead for that long. He’s still furiously treading the waters of his guilt to keep from drowning in it. That anchors him to his years and times more firmly than most.

The bulk of “Interview of the Vampire” stares into the past through the eyes of unreliable narrators, all of whom want to present themselves as more noble and heroic than they are, or at least to have the reader’s understanding if not their benediction.

If that were all this show offered, to paraphrase the crescendo of one of Anderson’s impassioned monologues in the second season premiere, maybe that would be enough.  Rice’s “Vampire Chronicles” are broadly known and loved, after all. Already there are fans on subreddits wondering when and whether characters from future novels will make an entrance.

But creator and showrunner Rolin Jones’ inspired changes keep us guessing, along with altering much of the plot’s subtext.  Casting Black actors to play Louis and Claudia (first played by Bailey Bass, portrayed this season by Delainey Hayles) opens “Interview with the Vampire” to explorations of race and class exploitation that were never present in Rice’s books. 

But the times more palpably sway the story in these new episodes. Ridding themselves of Lestat frees Louis and Claudia, but it also leaves them directionless. At the curious Claudia’s insistence, they journey to Eastern Europe in search of Old World vampires who can help them figure out who they are supposed to be. Since Jones sets the story in the early 20th century, that places them in World War II, a time of mass death and destruction. 

What sounds like the ideal vacation for a blood drinker is anything but, although a feral Claudia thrives. Preying on the weak suits her lack of concern for human morals although, to keep the audience on their side, we only see her eviscerate Nazi border guards and Soviet soldiers occupying the Romanian village where they eventually land. 

Since AMC’s drama follows the basic contours of the tortured relationship Louis, Lestat and Claudia share in Anne Rice’s 1976 novel, its readers have some sense of how this eight-episode second season progresses. 

The seduction of this new season is in the ambiguity of its characters’ true aim and the changeable nature of their desires. Louis and Claudia terminated the agonized trap in which Lestat caught them at the end of Season 1 but, unnaturally, this is not the end of their dealings with him. Neither does it simplify the love triangle they navigate, one fraught with distrust and worry and gorgeous in its sensual gothic splendor. 

Lestat haunts Louis, his figment traipsing beside him as he and Claudia roam the miserable dark, searching for clues about where they come from in an ancestral sense to compensate for what their maker denied them. The rift between him and Claudia is only wider and her resentment toward him for cursing her to be trapped in an adolescent body even more caustic. 

But some of that is an effect of the blood. 

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In “What Can the Damned Really Say to the Damned,” Louis and Claudia land in Romania at the end of the war, where a villager named Emilia (Stephanie Hayes) takes them in, trading vodka and cigarettes for shelter with the rest of her people. A British journalist named Morgan (Blake Ritson) is among them, caught between the Soviet occupiers, rogue German soldiers who don’t realize they’ve lost, and as Emilia grimly hints, maybe something else lurks in the forest.

Precisely what they’re looking for, but not what they’re expecting. As in Rice’s book, the vampires in this part of the world are sickly and barely sentient. Confronting one leads them to Daciana, one of the true ancients, a shriveled crone to whom Claudia offers hope and a few drops of her blood.

The elder rapturously likens the offering to cream from the top of a milk bucket. It is not enough. Before this, we see a small taste of life in this place where humans survive on soup and a few shreds of decency but cannot shake the specter of fear. “Interview with the Vampire” and stories like it are outsider tales; the monsters live among humans but function on society’s margins. 

For Louis and Claudia, that’s even more the case although Louis’ refusal to accept that is what draws us and his reluctant biographer Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) to him and seals him in his misery. Hence when Morgan assumes Louis is either a Communist or a deserter in trying to figure him out, his self-characterizations as “a magical vodka Negro having the first alright night in quite a while” is mildly droll and lamentable. But these are humans emerging from a long tunnel of hatred and deadly prejudice, only to replace them with other hatreds and prejudices. 

“The humans, there’s too much sadness,” Louis tells Daciana. “Too much pain.” Someone else puts it more plainly: “They don’t want life anymore.”

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter , Crash Course.

This reading of Louis and Claudia’s lineage allows writer Hannah Moscovitch to transform a station along the characters’ development track into an apologue about war and misery. Moscovitch posits that if the old vampire world is rotten, that is less an effect the organic obsolescence time causes than the necrosis imposed by rampant inhumanity. 

That makes it more of a relief to see Louis and Claudia abandon the sepia grimness of Eastern Europe for a Paris that is reawakening. One assumes the prey tastes better for the usual reasons. 

But the despair strangling Romania is not too distant from that place either regardless of how forward-looking it may be. It stalks the City of Lights like Lestat’s apparition stalks his lover, like time itself, although “Interview with the Vampire” makes us content to slow it down for a while.

"Interview with the Vampire" premieres at 9 p.m. Sunday, May 12 on AMC and streams on AMC+.

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Melanie McFarland is Salon's award-winning senior culture critic. Follow her on Twitter: @McTelevision

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AMC’s ‘Interview With the Vampire’ Remains a Bloody Good Time in Season 2: TV Review

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In a sea of rote, listless IP, the first season of AMC’s “ Interview With the Vampire ” felt like manna from heaven — or blood to a thirsty nightwalker. Yes, the show was part of a reverse-engineered attempt at an Anne Rice cinematic universe. But in the hands of showrunner Rolin Jones, “Interview With the Vampire” set itself apart from both Rice’s original and the 1994 film adaptation, all while maintaining the story’s Gothic romanticism.

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Like “True Blood” before it, “Interview With the Vampire” understands that a great vampire story combines genuine eroticism with campy flair. As the specter of Lestat, Reid is more alluring and more unhinged than he’s ever been. Molloy began the series as an arch commentator who punctured the vampires’ self-importance, and still plays that part in Season 2. (“You both fucked Lestat!” he crows after Armand discloses some romantic history.) But the writer is also given more vulnerability and agency as the series goes on. Seizing the chance to expand Rice’s canvas, “Interview With the Vampire” keeps adding layers of paint. It’s the best kind of bloody mess.

Season 2 of “Interview With the Vampire” premieres on AMC and AMC+ on May 12, with new episodes airing weekly on Sundays .

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• Trivia Christian Slater was given the role of Daniel Malloy upon the death of River Phoenix , the original choice for the role. Slater donated his $250,000 salary to two of Phoenix's favorite charities.
• Goofs (at around 1h 16 mins) In the Theatre des Vampires, Santiago unties the string on the woman's shirt but just seconds before this it is seen already untied and she moves it to cover herself.

Lestat : Don't be afraid. I'm going to give you the choice I never had.

• Alternate versions Reportedly, in original screenings of the film there was extra footage in the scene where Louis finds the burnt bodies of Madeleine and Claudia. In this version, after the bodies crumple to ashes, Louis takes Madeleine's locket that has the picture of the little girl who resembles Claudia.
• Connections Edited into Island of the Living Dead (2007)
• Soundtracks Terpsichore and Harp Concerto in B Flat Written by George Frideric Handel (as George Frederick Handel) Adapted by George Fenton Performed by The King's Consort

User reviews 542

• slightlymad22
• Sep 29, 2017
• Is "Interview with the Vampire" based on a book?
• In what order should one read "The Vampire Chronicles"?
• In what year was Louis made into a vampire?
• November 11, 1994 (United States)
• United States
• Official Facebook
• Interview with the Vampire
• Oak Alley Plantation - 3645 Highway 18, Vacherie, Louisiana, USA (Louis de Pointe du Lac Estate)
• Geffen Pictures
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $60,000,000 (estimated)
• $105,264,608
• $36,389,705
• Nov 13, 1994
• $223,664,608

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 3 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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It’s Time to Let Interview With the Vampire Seduce You

The age of “Peak TV” is over. We’re living in the rubble after the fall of the empire, in the damage it’s wrought, in a sulfuric landscape of pale imitators, mushroom monsters or nuclear zombies or whatever else I have no personal desire to ever watch, ruled over by Fury Road– style warlords like David Zaslav. We’re swimming in marital mysteries based on Strand-approved paperbacks, prestige comedies that don’t know how to be funny, dull Marvel nothings , and slick Netflix IP grabs . It sucks! And not in the pun-intended vampiric way I’m about to describe.

Popping up through the muck like a gorgeous swamp lily is AMC+’s horny-horror vampstravaganza Interview With the Vampire , which returned for its second season on May 12. This show slurps the marrow out of its many hours the way its vampires suck blood from their victims: sexily, dramatically, full of vim and deranged gusto. Based on the Anne Rice best seller and plié-ing out from behind the shadow of that book’s 1994 adaptation with Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, Interview With the Vampire debuted in October 2022, which was ideal timing for its gothic spooky vibes. The premise: Aging truth-to-power badboy-journo Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) interviews vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac ( Jacob Anderson , brooding) about his immortal life, which began upon meeting sire-lover Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid, chewing scenery so hard he’s fracturing his special-effects canines) in 1910s New Orleans. Decades of chaos ensue: swimming up rivers to spy on cheating lovers, domestic disputes that end in one partner launching the other into space, and at least one costume ball .

The first season wasn’t the biggest, most talked-about show on TV (maybe because it streams on AMC+), but it was undoubtedly the most most show on TV. Season two is only more-er, taking the story to the sordid playhouses of postwar Paris and looping in Armand (Assad Zaman) as Louis’s co-interviewee and, of course, lover. If vampire-human love quadrangles appeal to the dormant Twilight stan in you, or if you just want to see some good multi-hyphenate-genre TV, stop spending time on shows that aren’t trying this hard to entertain and let Interview With the Vampire seduce you. Here’s why you should watch it, even if you have to go to the great lengths of using AMC+.

It’s better than the book.

Okay, you might disagree. And I’ve only read part of the first book. Anne Rice did some incredible world-building in her Vampire Chronicles , but based on what I’ve read, this show has made exactly the right amount of changes to improve upon the story, balancing reverence for the books with a willingness to make substantial changes, and the result lets her characters shine and resonate in new ways. It’s an adaptation that seems to please book devotees (like Sam Reid, who’s obsessed ) and newbies alike.

In the first book, Louis is a Louisiana plantation owner, and he and Lestat brutalize the enslaved people he owns, eventually killing them all to prevent an uprising. It’s southern Gothic, but Rice didn’t seem interested in going beyond shock value, which makes it difficult to lean in to the fun of the rest of the book. The show, on the other hand, makes the brilliant choice to anoint Louis the scion of a prominent Creole family, which introduces new themes, dynamics, and historical details into the story. Louis’s race gives the character much more dimension. As a human, he is in the awkward position of having access to New Orleans society’s halls of power while dealing with racism within those spaces. As a vampire, he has a unique lens on history as he lives through the decades. His identity makes his moral conflicts more pronounced and deepens his bond with Claudia (Bailey Bass in season one, Delainey Hayles in season two), particularly when the two are positioned against Lestat’s blond obliviousness. In this version, Claudia is orphaned when a racist mob burns down a neighborhood, and she’s aged up from being turned as a 5-year-old to something more like 13 or 14, which gives the character much more to do. And the most important change this adaptation made is …

Vampires have always been gay, and they always will be gay. The 1994 Interview With the Vampire is one of the gayer movies of that decade, and it’s perverse and fascinating in the ways it doesn’t let its characters actually name or act upon their desires. This has merit in its own intense, closeted way, particularly when you read it as a product of its era, but the AMC+ show busts the whole saga wide open by actually letting the characters fall in love and fuck. Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid have truly unreal chemistry, as do Anderson and Zaman as his present-day lover and former coven leader Armand. Even during normal, shirts-on scenes, there’s a horny undercurrent that runs through the whole show as IWTV explores these characters’ dynamics in their relationships to each other: predator/prey, dom/sub, lover/ex, couple/third. This isn’t like other R-rated prestige TV shows where the sex scenes — when they even exist — feel perfunctory . They are not an afterthought or an addition. Romance, desire, abuse, jealousy, yearning … they’re the whole point! It’s a hot and very queer show!

“Camp” gets tossed around a lot nowadays, often to (incorrectly) describe stuff that’s tacky and bad. Interview With the Vampire is “camp” in the true sense: in the Tiffany-lamps-and-gold-fringed-kimonos way, in the sense of ornamentation taken too far, in ecstatic bursts of genre horror à la midnight movies, in the emotional and aesthetic language of opera applied to a non-opera medium. Reid’s Lestat is a block-jawed Australian doing the poutiest French accent you’ve ever heard, enacting sadistic violence on the people of New Orleans with a skip, twirl, and upturned pinky until he decides to get dead serious and scary. Then there’s the production design: the French Quarter townhouse and its unhappy clutter, costumes inspired by by J.C. Leyendecker illustrations, goth makeup, ridiculous colored contact lenses to set the vamps apart, big group scenes at opera palaces and whorehouses. The occasional rips in the fabric — when a set or wig in an early episode looks cheap or a costuming decision feels off — only enhance the experience. They remind you this show is really just people having fun and trying shit. Wabi-sabi, baby.

This show goes through gallons of corn syrup and red 40. That’s not unexpected, but all the ways the show figures out how to use it is. IWTV makes good on all the nasty people-eating terror Yellowjackets teased for an entire season, but piles on decapitations, mutilations, immolations, and too many shots of Jacob Anderson eating a rat. Toward the end of the pilot , Lestat punches a priest in the face and his fist comes out the back of his head , which will either turn you off the rest of the show or hook you immediately . Later in the season, Lestat prances into the luggage car of a train wearing a conductor’s hat, holding the conductor’s severed head, and puppeteering his mouth while playing a sick game of choo-choo. Very few vampire romances also count as legit horror; this is one of them.

It’s crawling with undead theater kids.

In season two, Louis and Claudia go to Europe to find more vampires like themselves and soon fall in with the centuries-old Paris coven. What Rice imagined, and what this show brings to life in brilliant fashion, is that the Paris coven takes the form of a goth vampire theater troupe co-founded by Lestat. The show introduces a whole new supporting cast of immortal theater kids, which is maybe the most horrific thing it’s done yet. They wear pancake makeup and eyeliner to accentuate their vampireness, they bicker, and they sleep together backstage after the shows. Their elaborate snuff plays are packed with German Expressionist–inspired aesthetics and stage tricks that make their real vampire abilities (flying) look fake (Elphaba-style wires and harnesses). The Théâtre des Vampires seduces audiences seeking thrills and fun and ends up implicating them in a show of human suffering. It’s everything Eddie Redmayne’s Cabaret wants to be, but it actually has teeth.

The writing, mon dieu, the writing. It’s so much.

And I mean that in the best way possible. The characters speak as if the scripts were written longhand in a giant, fluffy quill on parchment or anticipating their own fan fiction. Lestat, while discussing how he came around on the clunky English language, says, “I have English consonants to thank for this astonishing jawline.” It’s giving No one’s slick as Gaston, no one’s quick as Gaston. Or when Louis kills a racist white dude and says, “It was random and unfortunate that the man picked that night to dabble in fuckery.” Or lines pulled directly from Rice’s first book and delivered with a madman’s commitment, like, “You alone, of all creates, can see death with that impunity. You alone, under the rising moon, can strike like the hand of God!” It’s like nothing else on TV, except maybe Hannibal , if every character on Hannibal spoke like Hannibal . If you were to take a group of 400-year-old vampires, explain to them what a TV show was, and put them in a writers’ room, they would write a show that sounded like this.

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‘Interview With the Vampire’ Season 2 Premiere Recap: That Creepy New Monster Explained

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[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for  Interview With the Vampire Season 2 Episode 1, “What Can the Damned Really Say to the Damned.”]

Interview With the Vampire Season 2 is worlds different from what we saw in New Orleans both figuratively and literally. Our vampire family is far from home in the long-awaited season premiere, which began with a four-year time jump that landed Louis ( Jacob Anderson ) and Claudia ( Bailey Bass ) in war-torn Europe during World War II.

Their “four years of grim wayfaring,” as Louis’ guilt-induced hallucination of Lestat ( Sam Reid ) said, were done in the hopes of finding more of their kind. Romania was the latest leg of their search, and it was in this bleak land that they finally found what they were looking for. Sadly for the desperately lonely duo, meeting the old world vampires didn’t go as well as they had hoped. They met two vampires unlike anything ever seen in the series, and they put the horror in gothic horror. But what were they?

One of the two vamps looked like a true monster. Claudia encountered it in the woods while Louis was relaxing with English journalist Morgan Ward (a book character whose plot was tweaked , played by  The Gilded Age ‘s Blake Ritson ). Its skin was gray and decaying, it had thinning hair, and a terrifying screech. It didn’t speak, but it could hear Claudia speaking to it through telepathy. Her excitement to meet was met with defensiveness; it didn’t want Claudia taking its food (a Russian soldier that was part of the occupying forces in the area).

It took some convincing to get Louis to join her in the woods to find the creature again. Louis, exhausted by years of travel and the painful emotional distance between him and Claudia, had a hard time believing that she actually found a vampire after all this time coming up short. When they returned to the woods, they found not one vampire, but two. A more recognizable vampire, this time a woman, helped defend the decaying vampire. But Claudia being Lestat’s daughter, she viciously fought their attack by ripping out the creature’s eyes to get it off of Louis. Its screeches are nightmare fuel.

The woman vampire, whose name was later revealed to be Daciana (played by Diana Tofan), cried out as she killed the creature that was writhing in pain. Without its eyes, it couldn’t hunt, which would be no life for a vampire. Daciana revealed to Louis and Claudia the creature was a “child,” which is a fascinating development given what this kind of creepy (but still pretty cool) vampire is in Anne Rice ‘s books.

Daciana, the old world vampire, in Interview With the Vampire Season 2 Episode 1 (Larry Horricks / AMC)

The decaying vampire is called a revenant, a word that’s long been used to describe creatures that return from the dead in real-life folklore and other literature. Rice’s revenants are humans that are bitten and then buried, thus preventing a proper transformation into the dark gift. They become a mindless creature; think of of them as vampire zombies. It’s also said to be what becomes of vampires when they don’t have enough blood. ( Tom Cruise ‘s Lestat was seen as a decaying, rotting version of his former self in the 1994 film adaptation, the result of drinking dead blood and a lack of proper sustenance.)

'IWTV': What Does 'Memory Is the Monster' Mean?

It seemed that Daciana was beginning to decay as well. The “blood was bad” in Romania, as Louis told her of his theory, making it nearly impossible for vampires to feel warm and satisfied from feeding. Claudia was hopeful that Daciana would come with them to America where they could live together as a coven, back where the blood was plenty and Daciana could revive herself. It was a warming thought, but a fantasy. After painting a picture of what their lives together could be like, Daciana said “we own nothing” and threw herself on the fire inside her home as Claudia watched in horror.

The revenant was the last vampire in Daciana’s undead life. She kept on trying to make new vampires (baby ones are called fledglings) to stave off her loneliness but constantly failed. She chose death over starting anew away from her homeland. Louis and Claudia, traumatized by what they had just witnessed, left Romania behind and set off for Paris. During their travels, Louis made an important promise to Claudia that’s going to be referenced throughout the season. (Get a full breakdown of the scene with Anderson, Reid, and Hayles here .)

“If you were the last vampire on Earth, that would be enough,” he told his daughter, adding that as long as she walks the earth, he’ll “never taste the fire” and that it will be “you and me, me and you” from then on out. Paris will put Louis’ promise to the test.

Louis and Morgan swap war stories in Interview With the Vampire Season 2 Episode 1 (Larry Horricks / AMC)

The aforementioned book character, Morgan, had his plot changed some in this episode. In the book, Morgan meets Louis while on his honeymoon in Europe with his wife, Emily. She’s bitten by a vampire and he’s scared of what the locals will do to her. In the Interview With the Vampire Season 2 premiere, Morgan wasn’t married to a woman named Emily. Instead, he was in love with and hoped to marry a local woman named Emilia who gave Louis and Claudia food and shelter.

The locals in this area were extremely suspicious of vampires; they strung garlic on their front doors along with hanging crucifixes to ward off the creatures. We also saw soldiers opening coffins pulled out of graves and shooting the bodies in them, which must have meant that they knew something about the existence of the revenants and were attempting to make sure they couldn’t return from the dead.

Emilia (played by Stephanie Hayes) was bitten while out hunting for food for everyone, causing an uproar among the terrified community. Morgan insisted that she needed medical care, but the townspeople became a mob driven by their superstitions. Terrified that Emilia would become a bloodsucker, they said that the only way to solve her bite would be to cut off her head. Morgan begged Louis for help to no avail.

If you’re still wondering what that Lestat ghost was all about, here’s all you need to know: “Dream-stat,” as the cast called him, is a projection of Louis’ grief and guilt that came to be after he and Claudia conspired to murder Lestat in the Season 1 finale. This specter is more Louis than he is Lestat, so whenever you see him remember that he’s Louis’ memory of his former lover. How he looks and how he talks is entirely decided by Louis’ tortured subconscious.

Anderson previously told TV Insider that Season 2 is a “slow descent into hell.” If what Louis and Claudia saw in Episode 1 wasn’t hell, we’re terrified (and thrilled) for what’s next.

Interview With the Vampire , Sundays, 9/8c, AMC, Streaming Sundays on AMC+

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'Interview with the Vampire' Season 1 Recap: What to Remember Before Season 2

"Memory is a monster."

The Big Picture

• Memory is a haunting monster that reveals surprising twists in the lives of Louis and Daniel in Interview with the Vampire Season 1.
• Season 1 also explores Louis' journey into immortality and deep, complicated relationships with Lestat and Claudia.
• The shocking finale sets the stage for Season 2, unveiling secrets and introducing mysterious new characters.

"Memory is a monster." The line, uttered by both Daniel Molloy ( Eric Bogosian ) and Louis de Pointe du Lac ( Jacob Anderson ) throughout Interview with the Vampire 's first season, means that memory is ever-changing, horrifying, something that haunts us every day and every night. Occasionally, it seems as if it would be best for us not to remember certain aspects of our past. However, every now and then, we need to recall a thing or two. And, every now and then, it might even feel pleasurable to do so. For instance, it feels good to remember a great TV show's first run as we get ourselves ready for a Season 2 that is fast approaching . Here's a recap of everything you need to remember about Interview with the Vampire Season 1 .

Interview with the Vampire

Based on Anne Rice's iconic novel, follow Louis de Pointe's epic story of love, blood and the perils of immortality, as told to the journalist Daniel Molloy.

'Interview with the Vampire' Season 1 Starts with, Well, an Interview

The first season of Interview with the Vampire kicks off with journalist Daniel Molloy (Bogosian) receiving a box full of cassette tapes and a letter through the mail. Now old and suffering from Parkison's disease, he's invited by a vampire he once knew to redo an interview that he recorded more than 50 years in the past. Having also reached a standstill in his career and just dying to publish a new book, Molloy agrees to take a trip to Dubai, where he encounters a certain Louis de Pointe du Lac in a dimly-lit penthouse, surrounded by servants.

Unlike in Neil Jordan 's film and in the Anne Rice novel that inspired it, in which Louis is a plantation owner in the 1800s, in the TV series he is a Black man who makes his fortune by running a string of brothels in the neighborhood of Storyville, New Orleans, in the early 20th century. Despite having a complicated relationship with his brother Paul ( Steven G. Norfleet ), who claims he can hear God's voice in his head, Louis is close to his family and enjoys a somewhat respectable reputation around town. When he's not working, he enjoys visiting a rival brothel by the name of Fair Play. It is during one of these nights of pleasure and revelry that Louis meets a man by the name of Lestat de Lioncourt ( Sam Reid ).

Recently arrived from France, Lestat is a charming man with a magnetic personality and a true obsession with Louis . The two quickly strike up an intense relationship, first as rivals, then as friends, then, finally, as lovers . Louis starts taking Lestat to his family functions, which proves to be a problem when Paul senses that there is something off about this man. At first, Louis pays him no mind, believing this paranoia to be another symptom of his illness. It takes a tragedy for him to realize that Paul might have a point. You see, following their sister's wedding, Paul takes his own life by jumping off the roof. And when Lestat shows up to disturb his brother's funeral, Louis decides that he wants nothing more to do with him. Alas, it is too late. After a particularly intense conversation inside a burning church alongside two dead priests, Louis agrees to let Lestat turn him into a vampire .

The Wildest Stories From Anne Rice’s Immortal Universe

Following the transformation, Lestat instructs Louis on the vampire ways, eager to make his lover a part of his world. However, Louis is not very good at being a vampire. First and foremost, he doesn't like feeding on people and prefers to drink animal blood, even if it does taste like crap and makes him weak. Secondly, he insists on preserving his human connections, particularly with his family - something that becomes harder and harder as years go by without him aging a day. From the get-go, Louis' relationship with Lestat is a fraught one , and not just because Louis isn't necessarily thankful for his "gift." Lestat is also an abusive lover, the kind of man who is manipulative and has an extramarital affair with a woman named Antoinette ( Maura Grace Athari ), but balks when Louis goes out with a former flame.

Still, by Lestat's side, Louis grows as a businessman until segregation and Prohibition come knocking. Segregation comes first. As World War I rages on, a series of new regulations are put in place by white men that, thus far, Louis believed to be his allies. Chief among them is Alderman Fenwick ( John DiMaggio ), who offers to buy the Azalea, Louis' greatest club, formerly known as the Fair Play, for 15% of its worth. Offended, Louis visits him and kills him before hanging his body outside City Hall , bowels hanging out in a Hannibal -like display.

This leads to a series of hate crimes in New Orleans, in which the Black people of the city have their homes and businesses burned down by the white populace. Guilt-tripping over the destruction that he believes to be his fault, Louis uses his telepathic vampire powers and hears the voice of a young girl pleading for help inside a house swallowed by flames. He runs inside, picks up the girl, and takes her to Lestat .

'Interview with the Vampire' Season 1 Introduces Us to Claudia

The girl is, of course, Claudia ( Bailey Bass ), everyone's favorite child vampire. As she is transformed into a creature of the night in the past, in the present, Molloy is given a package full of journals containing her own accounts of her first years by Louis and Lestat's side. Initially, 14-year-old Claudia is ecstatic to be a vampire, and, unlike Louis, she takes to it with an immense amount of ease. However, as time goes by, she begins to suffer with the realization that she will never physically mature and have a life of her own. Things seem like they're about to get a little better when she meets a young man called Charlie ( Xavier Mills ) and falls deeply in love with him. It all starts sweetly enough until, one day, during a make-out session, Claudia drains him dry.

This, of course, breaks her little vampire heart, and she begins self-harming by exposing her skin to the sun and going on secret killing sprees. As the law comes knocking on Louis and Lestat's door, wondering if they have something to do with the bodies that have been popping around, their already frail marriage collapses as they find themselves at a loss about what to do. Increasingly rebellious, Claudia reveals to Louis that Lestat is still having an affair with Antoinette and runs away from home .

Claudia doesn't have an easy time on the road, though. As the Depression settles down in the US, she's met with racism wherever she goes and is eventually — the show suggests — assaulted by a fellow vampire by the name of Bruce ( Damon Daunno ). Distraught, but having learned a lot about the existence of other vampires through her research in college libraries, she returns home, determined to convince Louis to go to Europe with her . The problem is that Lestat is not having it. As Claudia insists that Louis leave with her, Lestat beats him to a pulp and, having flown with him to the sky, drops him from that height back down to the ground.

It takes Louis years to fully get back on his feet. In the meantime, having been cast out of their home, Lestat does everything in his power to buy his way back into the family through presents. Eventually, Louis accepts him back in, but there are now certain rules in place. The most important of them is that now everyone must feed on humans and that Lestat must get rid of Antoinette. As he fails to do so, Claudia tries to leave once again, but Lestat violently forces her to stay.

Claudia and Louis Part Ways With Lestat in the 'Interview with the Vampire' Season 1 Finale

This is the final straw for an already enraged Claudia. Seeing both herself and Louis as slaves to Lestat, she makes up her mind to kill her oppressor, something to which Louis agrees. With Lestat having decided to move camp to Buenos Aires, Argentina, Claudia convinces him to throw a party before leaving New Orleans for good. And not just any party: a Mardi Gras ball, in which he shall reign as king. The plan is to invite a handful of people who covet their secret to immortality to a private room and then feast on their blood. Claudia, however, poisons one of the guests so that Lestat will be forced to drink the blood of the dead, something that can kill any vampire.

The plan works, at least to some extent: for a second, Lestat and a nearly turned Antoinette believe they have gotten the best of Claudia, but she is the one that has deceived them all by poisoning the least expected guest. However, the poison did not kill its initial victim right away, and thus Lestat was merely made sick. Now, according to Louis' account, he killed Lestat by slitting his throat and dumping him in the trash . But Molloy is not so simply deceived . He soon realizes that a vampire cannot die out of hemorrhage. Slitting Lestat's throat would merely leave him severely wounded. And, at the dump, with the rest of the trash, he could find himself enough mice to feed on until his full recovery. Molloy presses Louis on this matter, and Louis refuses to answer him properly. That's when the show's biggest revelation takes place.

One of Louis' main servants in Dubai is a man named Rashid, whom Molloy one day remembers having met before , all those years back, when he first ran into the titular interviewed vampire at a bar. It turns out that Rashid is no mere servant, but an ancient vampire by the name of Armand who is now Louis' longtime partner. Claiming that he will no longer stop Louis if he decides to kill Molloy, Armand's big reveal wraps up the season, leaving us with a series of questions for Season 2 to answer. How exactly did he and Louis meet? What happened to young Claudia? And, perhaps most importantly, where on Earth is Lestat ? Now that we remember everything that happened in Season 1, it's time for us to get our well-deserved answers!

Interview with the Vampire is available to stream on AMC+ in the U.S. Season 2 will premiere May 12 on AMC and AMC+.

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Interview With The Vampire

1994, Anne Rice

Related Papers

Sara Wasson

Anne Rice's twelve vampire “autobiographies” continue to be hugely influential for vampire fiction and other artifacts of popular culture. This article explores two tropes which structure and enable the vampire communities throughout the twelve texts. Both are crucially gifts: the “Dark Gift” of blood to be swallowed, and the gift of autobiography to be shared. Anthropological gift theory is a fruitful tool for analyzing the way exchange functions in Rice’s texts, as well as in the vast array of texts influenced by her vampire chronicles. Rice’s vampire community is forged by complex exchanges of blood and words, joining mouths that swallow and mouths that speak.

This paper discusses the concept of the New Woman Heroine as characterized by one of Anne Rice's heroines from her short story, the Master of Rampling Gate. The paper further talks about the implications of the New Human Heroine particularly their portrayal in Vampire Literature.

Pascal Lemaire

Myth, according to the Académie Française, is a fabulous story that may hold a more or less implicit moral. One may also define myth as a story trying to explain some fundamental aspects of the world and of the society in which it is created. Mythologies are the grouping of such stories in a more or less coherent ensemble, and form the basis on which a community defines part of its identity. According to such definition of myth, many contemporary fantastic novels do, in their own way, attempt to reach such goals by legitimizing the existence of the supernatural in our world with “rationalized” mythologies that explain the origin of monsters and tell us of the story of some of them. Communities grow around those stories, defining and defending a “cannon” of the new mythology and creating a world parallel to our reality. The Vampire Chronicles of Anne Rice (born 1941) are a good example of this phenomenon. Since the world famous “Interview with the Vampire”, published in 1976, she has written, amongst other, a dozen vampire novels, creating a complete rational explanation for the existence of her supernatural characters which she imbedded within the classical Christian mythology and the recorded history. The very wide appeal of her novels (and the movies made out of them) largely contributed to the resurgence of the vampire character in popular consciousness during the 90’s and the 2000’s. But few, if any, of the other creators of vampire novels or movies went as far as Anne Rice to integrate their creatures in our world, most relying much more on simple suspension of disbelief by their public: the Blade comics and movies, or the Underworld movies are good example of the phenomenon, as are the many “bit-lit” novels published in recent years. Two books in particular will be the focus of the talk, namely “The Queen of Damned” (1988) and “Memnoch the Devil” (1995). The mythology, deeply rooted in the Christian mythology, created in those books became the inspiration for later role play games (Vampire: The Masquerade, the basis for the Underworld movies) and other cultural artefacts which we’ll also mention. Through this example we intend to show that rather than being in a crisis, more myths than ever are blooming under the pens of writers, but maybe without trying to become universal anymore.

Ingunn Ragnarsdóttir

The myth of the vampire can be found throughout history. When the literary vampire came forth its popularity kept growing steadily. This essay will be discussing the author Anne Rice and her Vampire Chronicles and how her writing helped change and forge a new tradition in vampire fiction. The specifics of Rice’s vampires characters will be discussed, the changes she produced, and the explicit traits of the vampires in Rice’s fiction such as their connection to the Byronic hero and to the sexuality of the vampire. To bring out the these traits this essay will analyze the first three books in The Vampire Chronicles to show how Rice manages to grab the reader through not only her story-telling talent, but Rice’s intellectual, melancholic, erotic and alluring characters that are somewhat perverse but in an oddly charming and seductive way.

Shakira Hoosain

Marie Levesque

To perpetuate itself in time, tradition makes recourse to figures that convey it. This proposal takes as its object the vampire figure that, in transmitting important aspects of the cultural tradition, takes the form of its own tradition, manifesting itself in a series of narrative and cultural works. As this article maintains, the vampire figure possesses its own literary and cinematographic tradition, even as it provides an understanding of transmission, tradition, and education. In order to persist through time, traditions need to retain a static core, while also being malleable enough to allow for the transformation of the secondary features. The vampire is a malleable cultural figure, making it the perfect emblem of the concept of tradition. Moreover, five recurring traditional constellations are present, in various degrees, in vampire-centric narratives. The victim choice, the vampiric bite and the transformative blood exchange – with its undeniable relation to “perverse” sexuality (in psychoanalytic terms), the training process, the desire to belong to a family or a community, and the search for one’s origins all illustrate the link between the vampire and the concept of tradition. This paper will explore the impact of the vampire figure as an emblem of tradition through the first three installments of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles – Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and The Queen of the Damned.

Master's Degree dissertation

Wadie Touahria

The main purpose of this thesis is to study the revision of the male vampire figure in Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker and Interview with the Vampire (1976) by Anne Rice. The first chapter is mainly concerned with the socio-historical contexts and literary backgrounds of Stoker’s and Rice’s novels. The second chapter is concerned with the analysis of the male vampires in both works. It shows that the male vampires in Dracula and Interview with the Vampire embody the concepts of the Id and the Superego in light of Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconcscious as developed in his The Ego and the Id (1923). In addition, this chapter shows how the religiosity of the Victorian Age and the secularity of the Postmodern era play a determining role in the representation of the male vampires. Also, Freud’s theory of the ‘‘Uncanny’’ is used to scrutinize the appearance of the vampire in the Victorian era. This dissertation also aims at demonstrating that Anne Rice, as a postmodern author, revises and redefines the image of the vampire from a Victorian destructive figure to a more humane constructive creature. To reach this aim, this thesis relies on Julie Sanders’ theory of ‘‘Appropriation’’ as developed in her Adaptation and Appropriation (2006). Key words: Stoker, Rice, vampire, Victorianism, Postmodernism, Appropriation, evil, morality.

Samantha Schäfer

When considering the current developments in popular culture, the steadily rising popularity of vampire narratives is stunning: from 'Interview with the Vampire' to 'Twilight', a wide range of different conceptions of the vampire circulates. The introspective, dark, brooding and attractive vampire whose nature becomes highly eroticised is present everywhere, but what about the undeniable dark side of a ruthless killer that every vampire necessarily possesses? In other works, such as 'The World on Blood' written by Jonathan Nasaw in 1996, the vampire is not even considered supernatural anymore and instead is simply a human whose genetic predisposition makes him or her addicted to drinking blood. At the same time, there is a steadily growing fascination with the concept of evil and villainous characters in both popular and academic culture, with several current academic conferences dedicated precisely to this matter. This paper analyses the way vampire identity is dependent on evil and how vampire nature in general is portrayed in 'Interview with the Vampire', and compares this to the portrayal of these elements in its movie adaptation. Especially the character of Claudia is cited as a prime example for vampire nature as being animalistic and evil, where the gothic trope of the innocent victimised virgin is the reason for her capability of pure evil.

Fernanda Carvalho

In this thesis, I provide an analysis of Angela Carter’s and Anne Rice’s works based on their depiction of vampires. My corpus is composed of Carter’s short stories “The Loves of Lady Purple” and “The Lady of the House of Love” and of Rice’s novels The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned. My analysis of this corpus is based on four approaches: a comparison between Carter’s and Rice’s works, supported by their common use of vampire characters; an investigation of how this use consists of a particular way of exploring gothic elements, related to the contemporary context; an identification of the mechanisms through which this use of vampire characters conveys discourses on the issues of sexuality and gender in the 1970s and 1980s; and an investigation of the possibility for the vampire characters to express such discourses, in terms of their symbolisms. I demonstrate here that Rice and Carter explore the potential of abjection of the vampire and the subversive potential of a gothic representation of life experiences to question and subvert in their works patriarchal ideologies about the issues of sexuality and gender. This strategy of questioning and subversion is informed by the debates about these two issues in late-twentieth century, a period marked by the development of theories about sexuality and gender, by political movements towards sexual and gender freedom, and by the eminence of the AIDS epidemic that influenced the direction followed by these theories and movements. My analysis of Carter’s and Rice’s works demonstrates that, although they are different in their focuses and concerns, both authors represent, through their vampires, discourses against the imposition of gender roles and of sexualities by patriarchal societies, reflecting the contemporary view of gender and sexuality as constructed, complex, and fluid categories. In this sense, their works can be said to characterize a contemporary gothic fiction written by women.

M. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo

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How to watch Interview with the Vampire season 2 online — TV channel and streaming

Louis and Claudia enter the world of the Theatre Des Vampires

• Watch from anywhere
• Global streams

Like a nibble at the neck, Rolin Jones' gorgeously gothic Interview with the Vampire had viewers twisting this way and that. Season 2 takes us back into the room with Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) and Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian), as the vampire recounts his escape to Paris and introduction to the alluring Theatre Des Vampires.

Watch Interview with the Vampire S2 online

The fate of Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) hangs in the balance after the attempts on his life at the Mardi Gras ball, with Molloy figuring that Louis secretly engineered a means for his survival. The season finale also revealed that Louis' apparent human servant Rashid is actually Armand (Assad Zaman), his vampire lover, though it appears we'll meet the real Rashid (Bally Gill) in Paris.

The growing mass of deceptions and half-truths has cast doubts over Louis' recollections, though season 2 purports to trace his and Claudia's (Delainey Hayles) initiation into the world of Old World Vampires, a hedonistic community with an insatiable appetite for high culture.

Read our guide below for how to watch Interview with the Vampire season 2 online and from anywhere in the world.

How to watch Interview with the Vampire S2 from anywhere

If you are traveling away from home, you may be unable to watch like you normally would due to regional restrictions. Luckily, there’s an easy solution.

Downloading a  VPN allows you to stream online, no matter where you are. It's a simple bit of software that changes your IP address, meaning that you can access on-demand content or live TV just as if you were at home. And NordVPN is the no. 1-rated provider you can get right now.

Use a VPN to watch from anywhere:

NordVPN – get the world's best VPN We regularly review all the biggest and best VPN providers and NordVPN is our #1 choice . It unblocked every streaming service in testing and it's very straightforward to use. Speed, security and 24/7 support available if you need – it's got it all. The best value plan is the two-year deal which sets the price from just $3.69 per month , and includes an extra 3 months absolutely FREE . There's also a 30-day no-quibble refund if you decide it's not for you.

- So, try NordVPN 100% risk-free

How to use a VPN

Three simple steps to using a VPN to watch your usual TV services when traveling abroad:

1. Download and install a VPN – we recommend NordVPN

2. Connect to the relevant server location – launch the VPN app, click on 'choose location' and select the right location e.g. UK for BBC iPlayer

3. Head to the chosen broadcaster's live stream – in this case AMC Plus

Interview with the Vampire S2 global streams

Watch interview with the vampire s2 in the us.

In the US, Interview with the Vampire season 2 premieres on AMC on Sunday, May 12 at 9pm ET/PT.

Alternatively, you can stream the show on AMC Plus , which starts at $4.99 per month after a seven-day free trial. If you're happy to commit to the ad-free, $83.88 12-month subscription, that will work out at $6.99 per month.

AMC is a broadcast network that's accessible through a cable TV package, but if you've already cut the cord you can also watch AMC on a live TV service, like Sling TV or Philo .

AMC Plus : Get the the best of AMC, BBC America, IFC, and Sundance TV with this streaming bundle that also includes Shudder, Sundance Now, and IFC Films Unlimited. 

You can get AMC via either of the Sling TV Orange or Blue plans, which start at $40 per month. New subscribers can get  50% off their first month . Which plan you go for depends on the channel line up that's right for you. 

Can I watch Interview with the Vampire S2 in the UK?

There's no word yet on when Interview with the Vampire season 2 will arrive in the UK, though it's likely to be worth the wait.

That's because the previous season – which landed 12 months after the U.S. premiere – was free-to-air on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer.

For now, anybody currently abroad in the U.K. from the U.S. can use one of the best VPN services, such as NordVPN , to access their usual streaming service. 

Can I watch Interview with the Vampire S2 in Australia?

It's a similar situation in Australia, where the previous season of Interview with the Vampire was on free-to-air ABC and iview, albeit seven months after the US premiere.

If you're away from home use NordVPN to access your usual streaming service. 

Interview with the Vampire S2 cast

• Jacob Anderson as Louis de Pointe du Lac
• Sam Reid as Lestat de Lioncourt
• Eric Bogosian as Daniel Molloy
• Luke Brandon Field as young Daniel Molloy
• Delainey Hayles as Claudia
• Assad Zaman as Armand
• Ben Daniels as Santiago
• David Costabile as Leonard
• Roxane Duran as Madeleine
• Bally Gill as Real Rashid

Aatif is a freelance copywriter and journalist based in the UK. He’s written about technology, science and politics for publications including Gizmodo, The Independent, Trusted Reviews and Newsweek, but focuses on streaming at Future, an arrangement that combines two of his greatest passions: sport and penny-pinching.

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