AMC’s Interview With A Vampire: The Gothic Horror of Desire
By Anne Gregg
If you have read any gothic literature or consumed any media inspired by gothic characters, you may have noticed something in these stories that feels a little queer. Past the aesthetic of haunted places and humanlike monsters, gothic stories often tell tales of isolation, confinement, and emotional turmoil. Morally ambiguous characters discuss religion and philosophy while a creeping terror and a rising anxiety rumbles through the pages like an oncoming storm. Likewise, queer stories can be filled with isolation and emotional distress. They also can harbor conversation about religion and shame. Hidden sexuality casts the character’s dread over being discovered across the page. This is not to say that there is anything shameful about being queer, and there isn’t anything scary or macabre about loving who you love. However, sometimes we as queer people are made to feel as if our queerness is a monster enabling us to relate to the vampire myth.
The vampire is the perfect gothic monster for queer analysis. Like most monster stories, vampires can be a metaphor for fearing the other. Vampires are an uncanny reflection of humanity, an imitation of personhood lurking in a crowd. But the vampire story is not just about fearing what we do not know, nor is it meant to make a spectacle of fright for the viewer. Vampires highlight our fear of our desires. The decadent vampire delights in the taboo. They seduce their victims by showing them a world of indulgence. The protagonist of these gothic stories fears the desire that the vampire unlocks within them. The vampire is not the true monster of the narrative, desire is. Vampire narratives are ripe for exploring what we fear about ourselves.
AMC’s hit series Interview With The Vampire is one of the best modern gothic stories ever created. Based on Anne Rice’s series, The Vampire Chronicles the show reimagines the main characters Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson), Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid), and Armand (Assad Zaman) as trapped in a horrible romance. Queerness in Interview With The Vampire is not monstrous even though it appears in monstrous characters, desire is the destructive monster that fuels the plot.
Season 1 of Interview With The Vampire follows Louis’s transformation into a vampire, his turbulent relationship with Lestat, and the creation of the vampire Claudia (Bailey Bass/Delainey Hayles) who becomes the couple’s surrogate daughter. Louis begins the show as a deeply closeted gay black man living in New Orleans. After his father died, Louis became a pimp to support his family. He is wracked with guilt over who he is and what he does, and he is filled with anger from how he is treated because of his identity. Louis is seduced by Lestat, a mysterious Frenchman who sees Louis for who he is. Louis accepts Lestat’s offer to turn him into a vampire. Louis does not take to being a vampire. He desperately clings to his humanity. He resents vampires; he resents his dark desires, even though he indulges in them. He loathes what he loves, and that makes him miserable. Lestat is the premiere vampire. He feels no shame for what he is and what he does. Because of this, Lestat becomes the symbol for everything Louis hates about himself. Lestat and Louis have the same desires, but those desires destroy Louis while Lestat revels in them.
Interview With A Vampire is narrated by a modern day Louis who tells the story of his vampiric life in his luxury prison-like apartment in Dubai. Through these interviews, Louis is forced to confront how his desires manifest. The terror of the show is not any monster or murder. It’s the turmoil, rage, and sadness that builds inside Louis as he relives his past. Over the course of the show, he is forced to confront his role in Claudia’s death, how he used her to play-act a loving family, and how he ignored her to chase his own desires. He is forced to take responsibility for his actions. But his vampiric nature is not the monster, nor his queerness.
Louis’s actions are human. They do not stem from any part of his identity, they stem from a need to be a good person. He believes he needs to act. To perform a certain type of personhood. He’s been told his desires are wrong, so he loathes them. But he still follows his wants, living as a hypocrite. The monster is emotion. It’s cruelty. It’s love. It’s anger. It’s passion. Louis is in a constant battle with his capacity for cruelty, love, and regret.
Interview With A Vampire makes no attempt to create an evil other, or highlight a villain. The only villain, the only monster, is our minds, our messiness, our shame, and our desires.
About the Author
Anne Gregg is a poet and writer from Northwest Indiana. She is an English Writing major at DePauw University and is the editor-in-chief of her campus’s literary magazine, A Midwestern Review. She is a Media Fellow at her university and loves dissecting how LGBTQ+ people are portrayed in film and tv.
