June 7 2026 was a historic day for musical vampires. The stage adaptation of The Lost Boys won four Tony awards and the third season of the TV show Interview with the Vampire, now retitled The Vampire Lestat, premiered on AMC in the US and BBC Two in the UK. In the new season of the show, the French nobleman vampire Lestat is now a rockstar, and the series features original songs and extended musical scenes.
Lestat (played by Sam Reid) carries a legacy rooted in melodrama, opera, alternative music and musical theatre. But while musical vampires were hugely popular on the 19th-century stage (see Heinrich Marschner’s 1828 opera Der Vampyr), the modern musical vampire has been somewhat cursed.