Interview With The Vampire (1994)
Gothic Horror, Drama
Watched on February 11th & 15th, 2024
I may have gone a little overboard when writing this. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I would be lying if I said I wasn't comparing this movie to the book it's based off of the entire time I watched it. I love the book, easily one of my favorites. Unfortunately, this movie is missing a majority of what made me like the book so much. The main part is the style of the prose and deep insight into the protagonist Louis's mind, the detailed conversations and monologues about human nature and good and evil and such, which is lost in the transition from book to movie.
The visual and audio format and cuts out the majority of that, though there was some narration occasionally that I wish they used more often. (They did have a lot of exact dialogue. I was very pleased when I heard it spoken). To tell the story of around 350 pages in a single movie--and it is a solid two hours--they had to cut a TON of dialogue, which I can understand the time constraint, but for I am kind of annoyed, because cutting it lost a lot of the nuance that the book had.
The cutting of some scenes from the book also changed the story in a detrimental way that made it slightly harder to follow what was going on, and also made Louis less likeable as a protagonist. Lestat was shown in a less negative light than he was in the book, making him seem just a bit careless, somewhat mean, when in the book he is absolutely terrible at telling Louis anything about being a vampire, leaving him in the dark to struggle by himself and mocking him when he doesn't want to take human life. This makes it harder to understand why Louis and Claudia want to leave him so badly.
Also, in the scene where Lestat kills those two prostitutes, in the book directly before that Louis tells Lestat that he is going to leave and at the end Louis comforts one of the women as she is dying, but those two parts being cut makes Louis seem kind of weak willed and disconnected to human suffering, letting Lestat walk all over him. He at one point switches from only killing and feeding from rats to only feeding on humans, which is commented on but not shown? Like, why. C'mon. The scene where Louis is followed and attacked by Santiago is really creepy and disconcerting in the book, but in the movie is turned into Santiago doing a little dance and smiling like some goofy-ass motherfucker, and it makes zero sense why he would suddenly turn suspicious and murderous towards our protagonists Claudia and Louis.
Speaking of Louis, I swear that Brad Pitt only has one face that the he can do when he's trying to look sad. The film consists of Lestat bouncing around happily killing women in pushup bras while Louis stands in the background, Brad Pitt looking sad while a single tear runs down his face and drips off his weirdly square and muscly jaw, letting us know that he is a tortured man.
That being said, twelve-year-old Kirsten Dunst, who play Claudia, was amazing. Her story was very well done; she did a really good job, especially being as young as she was. She's a better actor than Brad Pitt was in this, that's for sure. Also, I had no idea when watching that Lestat was played by Tom Cruise, it looks nothing like him, though I admit I am not that familiar with what he looked like in the 90s, or with many actors at all. And Antonio Banderas Armand, baby!!
As for other changed the movie makers made, they worked extra hard to make this movie as heterosexual as possible. Not going to list all the changes they made, but goddamn there were a ton. Giving Louis a dead unnamed wife and child instead of brother and having him be accompanied by some random hookup when attacked by Lestat are two things within about the first five minutes that reinforcing that he is indeed straight as the director and straight audience wants him to be.
The book states over and over how intimate getting your blood sucked is, and the movie follows this logic too: but except for at the start when Louis gets turned to vampire, only women ever get attacked, and they do not hold back on acting like they are gettin' some. Louis never acts like that though (booo), though I can't tell if that was director's orders or Brad Pitt's fault. Also they wayyy toned down how much the vampire Armand wanted Louis and Louis wanted him in return. I don't care that having a faithful adaptation of all of this would have been detrimental to ticket sales in the mid 90s, I'm not happy.
I do really like the costumes and the sets, those are really well done. The effects were also pretty good, if a bit goofy at times. I think I would have had a much better time if I had been able to shut off the part of my brain that makes me need to read the book before watching the movie adaptation and complain about what they changed in it. I first watched this a couple years ago, which is what got me to read the book in the first place. However, I quit reading it and put it down for sever years until I picked it back up again recently, having mostly forgotten the movie aside from the main plot points.
The reason for the large gap in between my watching the first and second half of the movie is that I started watching in the evening on an impulse and by the time I got to the halfway point it was late and I wanted to go to bed. (It also took me a while to get there because I kept pausing to read sections of the book that the scenes had adapted.) The next two days were really busy, so I didn't get the chance to continue it until later. Honestly, I cannot say that I was all that eager to get back to it, which is why I didn't watch it on the 13th or 14th even when I had the time to. I do think that I liked the second half of the movie better than the first, maybe because I had time to let my frustrations with the first half cool.
I think I am being a little harsh in this review. I did have a good time watching it, I am just unfortunately incurably a hater. TDLR: Should've been gayer.
I watched this here. They really like to mumble and whisper and do anything but speak at a normal volume to give it more of a spooky feel, which means that it's hard to hear what they're saying sometimes. Luckily this site has subtitles :)
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