Artistic bloodletting in ‘Interview with the Vampire’
Heat (1995) gained fame because it was based on Alex Colville’s 1967 painting Pacific. Several shots in the Lars von Trier film Melancholia (2011) recreated works by artists like Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Sir John Everett Millais. Rolin Jones’ series Interview with the Vampire, based on Anne Rice’s eponymous 1976 Gothic horror novel, takes the engagement with classic art to a new level, with several shots from the series resembling baroque paintings.
With the show’s ongoing second season (Amazon Prime), art also permeates every frame in more direct ways. The Kiss of Judas (1908) by Dutch-Flemish artist Jakob Smit hangs in the background in episode one, as one of the series leads, Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson), fills the foreground. In a flashback scene set in post-World War II Paris, we see a painting by Louis Icart, noted for his depictions of Parisian life in the 1920s.
The show’s other lead, Lestat, even wears a dressing gown inspired by the American commercial artist J.C. Leyendecker. Interview with the Vampire will wrap up its second season on 30 June, while another Anne Rice adaptation, 2023’s Mayfair Witches (based on her Lives of the Mayfair Witches trilogy of novels), is now available to Indian viewers on Amazon Prime.
Both shows are a part of AMC’s declared “Immortal Universe", based on the works of Anne Rice. A New Orleans native like many of her characters, Rice specialised in Gothic and horror fiction. She wrote over 30 novels during her lifetime, over a dozen of which featured her character Lestat the vampire.
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