Sinking our Teeth into "Interview with the Vampire"--"Like Angels Put in Hell by God"(S1, Ep. 6)

The tensions within everyone's favorite undead family continue to mount, and Claudia contemplates a truly terrible action to free herself and Louis from Lestat's clutches.

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Well, we’ve now come to the penultimate episode of the first season of Interview with the Vampire. Louis spends months recovering from the terrible damage inflicted by Lestat during the latter’s rage in the previous episode, nursed along by a compassionate Claudia. However, the brat prince isn’t the type to just let matters stand like this, and he continues to beg Louis for forgiveness and the latter, still hopelessly smitten despite all that Lestat has done to him, finally accepts. However, this doesn’t sit well with Claudia who, driven to near-madness by her beloved Louis’ continued obeisance at the altar of Lestat, decides to do the unthinkable and plot his murder. 

Some, I’m sure, are going to balk at the idea that Louis, having endured so much at Lestat’s hands, would still go back to him. However, as Louis explains to Daniel, there is a bond between a maker and his progeny which is unlike anything that humans can ever experience. While this is fine as far as it goes, it’s pretty clear–both from Anderson’s performance and from Louis' expressions–that the reason for his return is at once far simpler and far more complex. He is in love with Lestat–truly, madly, deeply in love with him–and so it is quite simply unthinkable that he wouldn’t be able to find his way back to forgiveness. 

This adaptation of the story certainly hasn’t shied away from the monstrous Lestat angle and, as I wrote in my review of last week’s episode, I actually think that’s a strength. As he has from the beginning, Sam Reid gives us a Lestat who is simultaneously infuriating and irresistible, cruel and beautiful, endlessly love and unspeakably malicious. Rather than trying to resolve all of these contradictions into a coherent whole, somehow he manages to keep them in a relentless and pleasurable sort of tension. Lestat is just as bewildering in the novel, and it’s to the series’ credit that it doesn’t try to make him into something that he so clearly isn’t. 

Just as importantly, this episode also gives us some important biographical details. We learn, for example, that he was created against his will by the ancient vampire Magnus, who locked him in a tower with the corpses of other young men the vampire had disposed of. Is it any wonder, then, that he became  the deranged creature that he is in the present, given that he was denied the very things that Louis and Claudia seem to so desperately crave from him? He has no idea how to be a “good” maker because, like so many others, he wasn’t given this in his own vampiric youth.  

Though the series has taken some notable liberties with the vampire lore established in Rice’s novels, we do get our mention here of the “cloud gift,” which is the power that enables Lestat to fly. Likewise, it makes it clear that, given her relative youth, Claudia is quite limited in what she can do. And, as Louis explains to her, she can’t simply “learn” some of the things that Lestat can do, because the vampiric gift affects different people differently. One gets the sense that it is frustration with these limits which help to explain Claudia’s growing frustrations.

For, like any young person, Claudia yearns for understanding, both of herself and of other vampires. Whatever other liberties the series has taken with her character, this is true to the novel, for readers will recall that Claudia, more than either of her parents, wants to find others like them. In large part, this seems to stem from a desire to make sense of her own strange and liminal existence (a perennial concern of Rice’s vampires). But it is also because, at some level, she realizes that she will never have Louis’ entire affection in the way she so desperately needs. 

And what of Louis, anyway? In this episode, we get more insight into what makes Louis work as a person, er, vampire. He is someone who, above all else, wants equilibrium and harmony in his life. Like so many other tragic characters, he tells himself a number of lies to make this appear so, even as he also simmers with rage at Lestat and even, I would suggest, at Claudia. Both of them are relentless spirits and, when it comes right down to it, they have more in common with one another than they do with him. One can see his awareness of this fact in the soulful looks that Louis shoots in their direction; a voiceless cry of anguish. 

As always, this episode showcases the extraordinary acting abilities of its main cast, and I have to give particular credit to Bailey Bass, who has imbued Claudia with a fierce energy that is impossible to resist or deny. I’ll admit that I wasn’t the biggest fan of this particular iteration of the character at first, but she has grown on me, and this episode sealed the deal. There’s a cunning and a cruelty behind her eyes that is very much in keeping with the character that Rice created. It’s there in almost every one of her exchanges with Lestat, and she seems to take an especial delight in talking to Louis telepathically, knowing full well that Lestat can’t hear either of their thoughts. It’s a bit of devilish mischief on her part, but one with an edge. One gets the sense that she is only doing it to get under Lestat’s skin, and in that sense it is an unequivocal success. More than anyone else, she has the ability to drive the elder vampire into paroxysms of rage. 

Overall, I thought that this was a very good episode of Interview with the Vampire. As I’ve suspected from the beginning, this season will conclude with Claudia and Louis’ ill-advised attempt to free themselves from Lestat’s clutches. They might be an undead family but, like their counterparts among the living, they are as riddled with their own feuds and hatreds and resentments. And, Daniel Molloy is reminded, you can’t always escape the past, no matter how much you might like to.