Interview with the Vampire is a book by Anne Rice, which I’m sure all you vampire lovers know all too well. It was released on film in 1994, and has become one of the most well known vampire films of today. And it is a pretty spectacular film. It has the theme of the struggle of the vampire to be good and to cling to his humanity, despite having become a monster.
Enter Louis, (Brad Pitt), the tormented vampire himself, who was made a vampire mostly against his will by the vampire Lestat. (He did have a choice, but the choice was to die or to live as a monster. And what sort of a choice is that? Granted, at the time he was going out looking for death, but still.)
He fights his new vampire nature and tries not to kill anyone. He believes that human life has value, and that it is morally wrong to kill. He attempts to feed on rats. But he is inevitably driven to attack a human, and in his case it is a little girl named Claudia. He clings to his humanity for so long, only to go after an innocent child. You can see the struggle and torment in him, but to kill a child sort of destroyed him in my eyes. Lestat making Claudia into a vampire was also a new level of evil. But this is vampires we’re talking about, they’re supposed to be monsters, right?
It’s a tragic story, really. But vampires are dead (or undead, I suppose), and bring death everywhere they go. Without tragedy, it wouldn’t be an honest story about these creatures. It also has interesting rules that exist in Anne Rice’s world of vampires, including that they cannot kill one of their own kind, and that it isn’t permitted to create child vampires. I wonder if there is a rule against feeding on and killing children? Maybe vampires do have some morals. Louis certainly seems to maintain a small amount of his humanity, at least until the point where he turns a woman into a vampire, passing on his cursed life to another.
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