There are two remakes of vampire classics currently competing for the public’s attention: Interview With the Vampire, underway on AMC, and Let the Right One In, which debuted Sunday night on Showtime. Two of Vulture’s vampire-obsessed TV critics, Jen Chaney and Roxana Hadadi, seized the moment to discuss which of these dramas effectively sinks its teeth into audiences.
Jen Chaney: Interview With the Vampire and Let the Right One In are two of the most revered stories in contemporary vampire pop culture. And they’re stories that have been told multiple times before. The saga of Lestat and Louis unspooled in Anne Rice’s novels as well as the 1994 Tom Cruise–Brad Pitt movie based on those books, while the latter story of a befanged middle-schooler was told most famously in a 2004 Swedish film, written by John Ajvide Lindqvist, the author of the novel on which it is based, as well as in the 2010 American remake, Let Me In, written and directed by Matt Reeves.
Basically, we’ve all drunk this blood before. Which is why it is such a pleasant surprise that two new serialized takes on both — AMC’s Interview Qith the Vampire and Showtime’s Let the Right One In, airing opposite each other in Sunday’s 10 p.m. Eastern time slot — succeed (with caveats) as fresh, complicated, and rich expansions on established material. Their sensibilities are certainly different. Interview is largely a period piece that unfolds in early 20th-century New Orleans and takes a borderline campy approach, while Let the Right One In is set in present-day New York, rooted in something akin to reality, and more consistently serious. Yet both of these shows make some similar creative choices that suit both narratives.
But before we get into all that, Roxana, what did you think of these shows?
Roxana Hadadi: The ’90s were very much a vampire time, so I must admit I am pretty susceptible to this content! I was watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer when it premiered, when I was in fourth grade (way too young, but I have no regrets); I remember reading Interview With the Vampire in middle school after checking it out from the library. There is a real sense of sensuality and danger to vampire stuff that isn’t always present in other horror media, so I was genuinely curious about how these series would fit into the existing subgenre and what they might add. How do you update an iconic book like Rice’s, for example, that has spawned so many other novels and films and so much fan fiction?
I think the approach of “make the implicit explicit,†which both series have applied, is promising so far. Vampires have long served as metaphors for otherness, and Interview With the Vampire and Let the Right One In tap into that via characters who are Black and queer in the former and Mexican American in the latter. There’s the baseline “Oh, look, they are drinking blood! Ew! But ooh!†stuff, but additional thematic and emotional layers are built into their experiences being ostracized by their families, ignored by their communities, or abandoned by their faith. I have some quibbles, but as a broad answer to the “Do the setups work?†question, I say yes. What about you, Jen? Do you think the “subtext as text†of these series is effective?
Jen: First of all, thank you for stating the fact that vampires are the most interesting monsters. (Witches come in close second.) There is so much to explore, as you said, with regard to their otherness, sexuality, and the burdens that come with satisfying an unspeakable hunger. While the subtext of vampirism is often the text in other vampire films/books/shows, I agree that it is particularly blatant in both of these series in ways that do work for me. Interview With the Vampire more aggressively intertwines the societal alienation of being a vampire with the societal alienation of being Black and queer, especially in the early 1900s, making the casting of Black actors Jacob Anderson (as Louis) and Bailey Bass (as Claudia, who appears later in the season) crucial to the story being told.
And I appreciate how unafraid this show is to let Lestat and Louis be queer. I recently rewatched the ’94 movie for the first time since probably the 1990s, and it’s comical how close it skates to allowing for some gay moments. It’s obvious Lestat and Louis are basically life partners, and at one point Brad Pitt comes a half-inch away from kissing Antonio Banderas’s character — without doing it, perhaps out of fear that mainstream audiences couldn’t handle it. There is no such fear in this new Interview, and it’s all the sexier because of it. I guess the question, though, is whether the subtext-as-text thing can get too obvious. Did you feel that way at all?
Roxana: While I appreciate the new backstories that are provided by, say, Louis being a wealthy Black man trying to take care of his family and pursue his own romantic happiness in the racist South or Let the Right One In’s Ellie (Madison Taylor Baez) being a devoted Catholic and aspiring foodie whose dreams for her adulthood are dashed by her tragic transformation into a vampire, I did get caught up on how often the series reiterate these points. In Interview, there are a few moments that practically scream, Do you get it? That Louis and Lestat are in love? The characters can’t stay away from each other in the past timeline, and Louis paints this half-halcyon, half-tortured portrait of their relationship in the present timeline; Interview doesn’t just show us that it’s centering the romance, it outright bellows it at us.
But my feelings here are complicated by the Lestat of the book and the film, who is so compellingly villainous. It is hard for me to buy him as a genuine partner rather than a withholding abuser. That’s not a failure of Sam Reid’s performance but a reflection of how subjective our individual approach to adaptation might be. I’m always curious about this when it comes to adaptations of popular works: What do fans cling to, and what differences are they willing to entertain?
A difference I do like is what Interview With the Vampire is doing with the journalist character, Daniel, who in the film was played by Christian Slater and who in the series is played by Eric Bogosian. Bogosian’s Daniel is in the twilight of his reporting career when he’s invited by Louis to interview him again — a direct nod to the film. There’s a nice friction to Daniel challenging Louis on how his biography now (in the series) differs from his biography then (in the movie). That layer of self-awareness is a wink from Interview With the Vampire to the audience, an acknowledgment of “Yes, this is different from what you thought,†and I hope the series goes a step further and engages in whether Louis is an unreliable narrator, too.
Let the Right One In takes a couple of big creative swings, too, primarily with its choice to incorporate a pharmaceutical narrative centered around a company that is doing research into vampirism as a communicable disease and trying to find a cure. We’ve seen zombie stories go this way with I Am Legend and, of course, The Walking Dead. Are you liking that approach here, Jen? Am I reading too much into it if I think this is how Let the Right One In is referencing COVID?
Jen: Interview also touches on COVID in a conversation that takes place as soon as we meet Daniel. It’s clear that his conversations with Louis are happening in some approximation of right now, after the pandemic took root. And I agree, I think the relationship between Daniel and Louis works far better in this series than it did in the movie, which never truly explained why Christian Slater was interviewing Louis.
I also agree that the notion of vampirism as a virus that can be cured, as it’s presented in Let the Right One In, feels very specifically like a COVID-era touch. Conceptually, that works for me. Mark, Démian Bichir’s character, needs a reason to keep relentlessly supplying his daughter with human blood, and the idea that he’s keeping her alive until he finds something to “make her well†again makes total sense.
By the way, this is an important point of deviation. In the Swedish Let the Right One In, the quote-unquote father who cares for Eli is a more nebulous figure. He’s not technically her dad; he’s her caretaker. But the nature of their relationship is kept deliberately vague, at least in the movie. In Let Me In — spoiler alert! — Reeves implies that the father figure, played by Richard Jenkins, is a boy who fell for the young vampire (Abby, played by Chloë Grace Moretz) years earlier, just as Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee) does, and who has continued to help her ever since. Which is just a heartbreaking reveal.
The Showtime version is similarly heartbreaking — there’s a stand-alone episode later this season that tells the whole Eleanor-Mark backstory, and it’s a crusher — but it establishes a legitimate father-daughter relationship instead. That really resonated with me. I’ve been in the position of trying to care for a sick child, and the desperation Bichir feels is very relatable even if it does involve vampires and, you know, murder.
I’m a little less enthused about the additional plot rail that involves Grace Gummer’s Claire Logan, a scientist who is entangled in the pharmaceutical side of the story for reasons I won’t elaborate on too much. Her character remains a bit underdeveloped, in part because she and her story line are crowded out by what’s happening with Mark and Eleanor as well as Isaiah (Ian Foreman), Eleanor’s next-door neighbor and new friend, and Isaiah’s mom (Anika Noni Rose), who happens to be a homicide detective investigating why so many dead people keep popping up around New York City.
The show is doing a lot, and while I appreciate several of the new paths it embarks on, I do think the intimate focus on the relationship between the two teens gets slightly lost in this telling. All previous versions of Let the Right One In have been coming-of-age stories, and this isn’t quite that. Which is okay. But I also miss that part of what the other ones brought to the table. That brings me to another question sort of related to what you were suggesting about how steadfastly we cling to the versions of these stories we’ve seen before: Do you feel like these series are effectively building their own new worlds?
Roxana: I’m so intrigued by what you said about Let the Right One In losing some of its coming-of-age essence because I think in the film adaptations, Ellie is this tragic-monster character. There are moments of really shocking violence that reflect how far she is willing to go to protect herself and protect those she loves, and that circle is tiny. There’s a smallness to her life that will last forever because of what she’s become, and the movies are really melancholy and macabre as a result. I don’t think the TV series is really going for that; as you pointed out with the pharma-research subplot, Let the Right One In is inventing all these other human characters as a means to avoid making Ellie grotesque, and as a result, that coming-of-age angle gets a little lost. We haven’t seen the entire season yet, so maybe these story lines will converge in a way that pushes Ellie a little more toward the character arc we’re familiar with. But if Let the Right One In has left me cold in any way, this sprawl is exactly why.
I’m having the inverse issue with Interview With the Vampire, which is so focused on building the dynamics between Louis, Lestat, and their “daughter,†Claudia, in the first five episodes of this season that I think we’re losing sight of the grander world. I’m not sure if this is because of COVID restrictions affecting what the production could and couldn’t shoot, but the show’s version of New Orleans is basically some streets and a few interiors. Where is the lushness I expect from vampire stories like this? I need that blood to look like velvet! I need New Orleans to feel shadowy and foreboding! I need some other vampires to show up and make shit pop off! I’m getting antsy for this series’ version of Armand to appear just to make Interview With the Vampire feel a little more full.
Jen: That is such a good point about the sprawl versus insularity, although I think Interview combats that problem by being able to toggle back to Louis’s world in Dubai and his interactions with Daniel. Also, until you described what you’re visually missing from this version, I did not realize how much I would love to see Baz Luhrmann’s Interview With the Vampire.
Ultimately, I think we agree that both of these shows have some flaws and issues that deserve a wait-and-see approach. But the fact that I am invested and intrigued by both of these reboots still feels like something of an accomplishment given how much these stories have been done (and redone). Maybe the best vampire sagas, like vampires themselves, never really die?
Roxana: I think you’re right on that front — and that we need a Luhrmann-directed vampire story, immediately. A Lost Boys revamp miniseries? Sweet sustenance for us all.