There was that long moment in contemporary culture where vampires were the sexiest thing on screen. From Coppola’s “Dracula” which opened the gothic chakra to everyone, through the sexy sagas of “Buffy” and “Twilight”, to the rise of “True Blood” which exhausted the business when Literally turned the vampires into sex monsters, a little more than a decade and a half has passed us by Blatant sexual allusions with a touch of homoeroticism and AIDS allegories. And then it came down to us. Due to inertia, vampire series and movies continued to be created, but the subgenre gradually and steadily lost its mass sex appeal and became a parody of itself (it’s no coincidence that one of the few good vampire series of recent years is the wild mockumentary “What We Do in the Shadows”) . Since then, another decade and a half has passed and AMC is betting that the world misses sexy bloodsuckers and is ready for a seductive comeback, and yesterday they aired the premiere episode of “Interview with the Vampire”.
“Interview with the Vampire”, Anne Rice’s bestselling book from 1976, of course became a Hollywood hit of the same name in 1994 with Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas, Christian Slater and the tiny Kirsten Dunst who simply burned the screen and burned underwear around the globe. The “Interview with the Vampire” universe includes 21 books in total that have sold around 100 million books, AMC bought the rights to most of them and the “Interview with the Vampire” remake series is supposed to be the herald of a multi-season franchise and spin-offs. The plot is set several decades after the events in the film and takes place in the southern United States of 1910, and the vampire Louis Du Lac (the devastating actor-singer Jacob Anderson, who played the castrated warrior “Grey Worm” in “Game of Thrones”) tries again to give the interview of his life and tell about His complex relationship over decades with the vampire who raised him, Lestat de Leoncourt (played with enormous talent by the equally devastating Sam Reid), and that journalist who had trouble committing to the item even then (the great Eric Bogosian, recently seen in the premiere season of “Heirs”). At least according to the premiere episode, this sequel comes with a twist.
In contrast to the successful Hollywood film, the series created by screenwriter Rollin Jones is not satisfied with gay-erotic allusions, but instead turns Du Lac’s original character into a constant wake – from a manor owner with slaves who is attracted-or-not to a vampire who will bring him a bite, to a gay in the closet that he is Also a black Creole who made his fortune from a chain of brothels he owns in New Orleans. The homosexual/bisexual nuance that also appears clearly in the book that started it all, gets the center stage and all the spotlight here. The production is spectacular in its period beauty, early 20th century New Orleans has never looked better with you in the decadence section, and it’s all very sexy again. The critics in the United States quite fainted and it currently receives 97 percent on the Rotten Tomatoes index after 29 published reviews, its second season became an existing fact already last month even before the premiere, and we have a feeling that this is the beginning of a wonderful boom. Let it suck quietly.
>> “Interview with the Vampire”, 7 episodes broadcast weekly, AMC+