Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (Jordan, 1994)
Irish director Neil Jordan has made some interesting horror-adjacent movies in his time.
The Company of Wolves, a feminist reimagining of the Little Red Riding Hood story, came out while I was still in high school. More recently, Byzantium was a low budget vampire movie about two sisters (Saoirse Ronan and Gemma Arterton) holed up in a past-its-best English seaside town.
The biggest and best-known, though, is Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles, made in 1994 when he was the hottest director in town (after The Crying Game) and producer David Geffen could just about afford the huge fees for co-leads Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.
More psychologically sophisticated than it has a right to be, but still played at a suitably high pitch to match the gothic trappings, there’s a decent amount of practical gore thanks to effects maestro Stan Winston.
Fans of Anne Rice’s books – and they are legion – will only be partially satisfied, as so much of the world she created has to be jettisoned to make the two-hour duration but if you have no stakes – so to speak – the film is an evocative and atmospheric undead melodrama and even with all that melancholy the actors – especially Cruise – look like they are having fun.
If you want a longer and, I’m led to believe, more faithful representation of Rice’s work, there’s a recent mini-series available on AMC+.
Where to find Interview with the Vampire
Aotearoa: Streaming on ThreeNow
Australia: Streaming on FoxtelNow, Netflix and Paramount+
USA: Streaming on Hulu and Paramount+
UK: Streaming on SkyNow
Editor’s note
Greetings to the new subscribers we have picked up in the last few weeks. I hope you’ll enjoy these little offerings to the gods of motion pictures.
Each entry is tagged with the New Zealand streaming or rental location – at least the location at the time of writing – and there are direct links on the Substack home page to each one.
For example, here are all the posts tagged Netflix and here are all the posts tagged AroVision. If you only subscribe to a couple of services, you can head to the relevant link and check the archive for ideas about what might fill the viewing void. Archive posts that are more than a month old are behind the paywall.
