‘You have no idea how few vampires have the stamina for immortality!” Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt bring the staying power in Neil Jordan’s entirely outrageous horror-comedy bromance, produced by Stephen Woolley and adapted for the screen by Anne Rice from her own bestseller, now rereleased for its 30-year anniversary. The histrionic energy and ambition, operatic pathos and dapper, jaunty offensiveness are undimmed. Succeeding decades have only increased the film’s fanbase. I remember a dinner at the Edinburgh film festival with Catherine Breillat, director of Romance and Anatomy of Hell, as she discoursed with passion on how she adored it.
It is now almost mandatory with people of a certain age to claim that a certain masterpiece of their salad days “couldn’t be made now”. But … two hottie vampires who contrive to apply a sexualised bite-kiss to a 12-year-old girl (Kirsten Dunst – a performance for the ages) … and that girl becomes as worldly as any depraved grownup and travels with our two heroes through the night-time fleshpots as a daughter or stepdaughter or (sort of) platonic lover? Erm, which year was that ever OK for, again?
Christian Slater plays Malloy, a journalist roaming around modern-day San Francisco searching out likely looking bohemian types to interview for his life-in-the-city reportage. He chances across an elegant, watchful young fellow called Louis (Pitt) who takes him back to his tiny rented room and (once the tape recorder is switched on) tells him he is a vampire, over 200 years old, a former slave master and plantation owner in 18th-century Louisiana, longing for death after the loss of his wife and child. Perhaps something in the parasitism and spiritual death of slavery attracted the attention of Lestat (Tom Cruise), a sensualist vampire with a cruel twist to his sanguine lips. Naturally, Cruise can’t help making his Lestat hyperactive, super-focused and frustrated at others’ lack of discipline and commitment, and his performance is hilarious, a glorious comic turn of the sort he never tried again. Lestat befriends Louis, intuits his pain, offers him a chance to start again in eternal life, delivers his fangs to Louis’ neck and welcomes him to the vampire brotherhood.
Lestat-Louis is an occult teacher-pupil relationship that Brad Pitt was to duplicate five years later in Fight Club, only with himself in the alpha role. But Louis has squeamish qualms about living off human blood, timidly at first preferring only that of animals, to Lestat’s genial contempt. The two of them are to get in an adorable two-bloodsucking-fiends-and-baby (or rather girl) situation when they find Claudia (Kirsten Dunst), orphaned by the plague, and the poor child gets to be one of them. They find themselves in Paris where a nest of vampires led by Armand (Antonio Banderas) and Santiago (Stephen Rea) run a secret theatre of cruelty, patronised by the beau monde, in which they pretend to be humans playing vampires, killing real victims on stage: meta-vampire snuff horror.
So what is it like being a vampire, Malloy asks Louis? Is it all Dracula, crucifixes, garlic etc? Louis dismisses all this as “the vulgar fictions of a demented Irishman!” (Well really, Anne Rice! Is that any way to talk about Abraham “Bram” Stoker, the creator of Dracula and populariser of the entire vampire genre?) But what the film makes so brilliantly clear is that the vampire’s lived experience is in fact a complex business. It varies from vampire to vampire. Louis himself has a romantic, almost idealist concept of vampirism, entranced, in his pained way, by the eternity of longing; whereas cruel Lestat just lives in a permanent state of greed.
At first it seems as if Louis finds a kindred spirit and even love with Armand in Paris on this basis, but is finally repelled by the abysmal cynicism and disillusion that Armand’s Euro-vampirism represents. Louis is a modern vampire, full of democratic openness, a vampire of the American enlightenment. He even frees his slaves and burns down the big house – to Lestat’s petulant rage. Interview With the Vampire is still horribly exciting, shocking and funny.
• Interview With the Vampire is released on 16 February in UK cinemas.
