Interview With The Vampire director Neil Jordan has explained why the 1994 film doesn’t have any “jump scares” in it.
The movie became a cult classic upon its release, and starred Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in the lead roles.
It’s now been re-released in 4K and on 4K UHD Blu-ray, with additional bonus features, and director Neil spoke to Variety about helming the film, and how he had to ensure the “terror came from within” rather than making viewers jump out of their skins with certain surprises.
He mused: “The problem with it was I found, is that because we’re telling a story from the heart, from the perspective of the monster — from Louis’s perspective, and also from Lestat’s perspective in a way — the studio kept saying to me, ‘Oh, is it scary?’
“I had to say to them, ‘Look, you’re not going to get jump scares out of this because these people — you can’t kill them. You can harm them, you can burn them or expose them to daylight. But you can’t even chop off their heads effectively. How do you scare the scariest creature that has ever existed?’
“You can’t. So it becomes something different. It becomes about dread. It becomes about what Anne wrote about: the punishment of time. But that’s perhaps not the best subject for a horror movie in general.
“That’s what I had to grapple with, to make it kind of terrifying. The terror had to come from within, or the terror had to come from the ideas of these characters themselves.”
Neil also reflected on the lasting popularity of author Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire, which is one of 13 books in her The Vampire Chronicles series and has just been turned into a TV series.
He gushed: “Anne Rice changed the perception of this thing that doesn’t exist. She took the story of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” that image of Dracula and of the vampire. She placed it in the 18th and 19th centuries. She set it in this glamorous French Louisiana background and made the question of eternity the focus.
“What would it be like if you were given the gift of eternal life? What would it be like to live forever? How bored would you get with your partner — be it Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt or Kirsten Dunst?
“Most people can’t survive a marriage. How would you survive eternity with somebody else? She retouched the archetype of a vampire. It affected everything.”
