‘Interview With the Vampire’ pumps fresh blood into Anne Rice’s story on AMC, and into the modern world of the undead.
The new Anne Rice series “Interview With the Vampire” is the perfect antidote to the usual vampire movies, which may make for less-than-flattering metaphors for us. Its debut episode, titled “Blood Feast,” sees a character, in this case a vampire princess, named Isolde (Eliot) hunting a werewolf who’s made her the new king of her country. At the same time, the vampire queen also is engaged in a love affair with Isolde’s human father (James Rebhorn) — the two, in fact, are having an affair, which makes the whole situation seem rather unhinged. After all, the way Isolde describes her feelings for her father’s love interest, she says, “I wish the only vampire who ever had a human was mine.”
As I found out in my interview with the series’ star, “Isolde” was inspired by Anne Rice’s novel “Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles.” But in actuality, “Interview with the Vampire” stands on its own as a separate and unique piece of entertainment — a story that also takes us into a new time, a time where vampires, instead of living under bridges, are the new masters of our cities.
“I would say that the first two episodes of the first season set up the characters’ relationships, and what’s going to happen in season one, in a way that’s really exciting,” says Anne Rice, who’ll soon play Isolde in the new series. “It’s interesting, I guess, that when I thought about writing ‘Interview with the Vampire’ for the first time, it was a story of a vampire princess who had just had her father killed by her unrequited love. It’s a story of having a romance with a man who has lost all his friends and family. Then, in season one, I thought of it as a vampire story about her being chased by a werewolf, a vampire who has decided to kill a king, and suddenly having to find love with a man who is now her enemy.”
Rice’s new series will also explore how vampires are adapting to the modern world, an issue that has been of paramount concern to