Interview With the Vampire
Serious question. What is this show even about? Where are we going with this? This is hard because while I can’t see any real rhyme or reason connecting one episode to the next, I am nevertheless enjoying myself immensely. Each episode has the dramatic pacing of a soap opera but with a monster-of-the-week plot structure. It’s like every episode is a season premiere.
“The Ruthless Pursuit of Blood With All a Child’s Demanding,†for instance, would like us to forget everything we learned about Louis’s character development and emotional arc over the previous three episodes. Yesterday he wanted to break up with Lestat forever — but that was yesterday. Today, he’s ready to coparent. What about his efforts to lift up his Black community? His struggle to maintain some relationship with his family? Whatever. His moral anguish about the necessity for human blood? From Claudia’s perspective at least, Daddy Lou has settled for animal blood and a not-in-my-house rule for everybody else.
And yet, I’m not too bothered about the apparent sudden personality shift in Louis, in part because this episode is narrated almost entirely through Claudia’s diaries, and she wasn’t there for any of his previous, seemingly contradictory traits or actions. The other reason I am unbothered by the narrative and tonal inconsistency is that Claudia is an absolute delight.
Having been rescued from the burning building by her Black angel (that’s Louis), Claudia is moments from death by the time he gets her home and has to convince her white angel (that’s Lestat) to make her a vampire to save her life. Sure, she has absolutely no choice in whether or not she wants to live as a horror movie monster for all of eternity but that’s less important right now than Louis’ need for personal redemption. Luckily, when Claudia transforms and learns that her angels are actually devils, she takes a “when life gives you lemons†approach.
I suppose we should at some point discuss Molloy, easily the least entertaining character on this show. You just know he’s insufferable at dinner parties because he thinks he’s making hilarious and incisive and cutting remarks when they’re really just dad jokes spoken in an ironic drawl. He’s volunteered some details about his life: He’s in addiction recovery. He has Parkinson’s disease. He has daughters. And he has an amazingly permissive boss-type person who could be an editor or could be an agent (it’s unclear) who seems to trust Molloy on faith that he has enough story for a book and that said book will get picked up by a publisher. I assume they’re not hiring a fact-checker.
But back to Claudia. Unlike Louis, who became crippled with unassuageable shame from the moment he became a vampire, Claudia reacts to every aspect of vampire life — from the mind-reading, to the body incinerator in the backyard, to the murdering — with the same positive attitude. Little miss sunshine is as undisturbed by the coffin room as she is by her two undead gay dads, who she refers to as Daddy Lou and Uncle Les. The only thing that really throws her off is the fact of her eternal pubescence.
Before we get to that, however, let’s have some fun. The following scenes of domestic life in Claudia’s description are absurdist comedy gold. It’s The Addams Family. It’s What We Do In the Shadows. It’s a little bit Dracula with the slightest hint of Carrie. It is certainly not Nosferatu — a highly inaccurate film that makes our little vampire family guffaw heartily from the back of the theater. Claudia has to abide by her fathers’ rules just like any 14-year-old. No running in the house. No staying up all day writing in her diary. No eating cops.
Like any young vampire girl, she is thrilled to pick out her very own coffin. Louis tells the undertaker that she’s so close to death, they’re just trying to get her used to the idea of going home to God — a lie Claudia completely blows by bouncing exuberantly in her pink satin coffin and exclaiming how comfortable it is. When Louis’ mamaw dies, Claudia completely freaks out Grace at the wake, because she has not yet gotten used to interacting with people. (I wouldn’t have brought Claudia and Lestat to my mother’s funeral, but Louis makes a lot of choices that confuse me.) As you may have already surmised, Lestat is the fun dad and Louis is the responsible dad. Daddy Lou teaches Claudia important life lessons like, love is love and morals are a thing. Uncle Les teaches Claudia how to murder couples mid-coitus on Lover’s Lane. Kids need both, ya know?
Like any other growing teen, Claudia has moments of angst and is highly curious about sex. Unlike any other growing teen, Claudia is not actually growing. Soon, though her body remains 14 years old, her mind is 19, and Claudia develops her first crush — unfortunately for the crush. They meet when Claudia hears a group of white mean girls making fun of her clothes, but before she can eat them, Charlie stops her from running into the road.
It’s important for parents to teach their kids about sex, which is why I really blame Louis for what happens next. Charlie, who has veins like rivers flowing right down his arms, takes Claudia for ice cream. She climbs into the back of his car, just as she’d seen the people on Lover’s Lane do. Before you know it, kissing has turned to biting, and suddenly, Charlie is dead.
Claudia has a few moments of real darkness that cut through what would otherwise have been a pretty straightforwardly comedic 40 minutes of television. At first, she makes a game of sticking her fingertips into the sunlight and then hastily removing them. But by the end, she deliberately thrusts her arm into the shaft of light just for the pain of it. The lighthearted tone of her first diary entries give way to a raging tirade addressed to her “stuck-up, flower-covered, three-dollar fancy fucking paper diary.†And when she finds out she’s accidentally killed Charlie, she is devastated. Uncle Les, also on occasion the cruel dad, makes Claudia watch Charlie’s body be incinerated. This is why they don’t get close to humans.