It starts with drums, heavily reverbed: da-doom-ba-CHA, da-doom-ba-CHA, da-doom-ba-CHA, da-doom-ba-CHA-CHA. Cheap, chugging electric guitars kick in. A song plays, and although it’s an original composition it is at least 60% Blockbuster by Sweet. What in the Tony Visconti is happening? This is meant to be season three of Interview with the Vampire! Has it turned into a glam-rock musical?
Yes. Yes, it has. The show based on Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles books – a text it is serially unfaithful to while remaining loyal to the source material’s essence, a camp melange of the sinister, sordid and the deeply, sincerely emotional – was previously set in a lush vision of the past, starting in New Orleans in 1910. There romanced the vampires Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) and Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid), a sensitive pupil and wild, brittle master whose tumultuous relationship was remembered in a second timeline set in 2022 during an interview with Louis conducted by the journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian). At the close of season two, Molloy published the titular book.
