I've been a huge fan of Anne Rice's vampire books since I first read them in the 1990's. Her writing even inspired a couple of trips to New Orleans to check out the city she so wonderfully describes in many of her books. So, I was very excited by the news today regarding the fact that Universal Studios has purchased the rights to Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles novels. More excitingly, producing and screenwriting team (and soon to be directors) Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman are involved as producers. These two have had their hands in a number of very successful (and mostly good) films such as Star Trek, the original 2007 Transformers movie and many other TV shows and movies. At the very least, they are now experienced about getting movies made and if anyone can guide the Vampire Chronicles out of Development Hell it's these guys.
The first book in the series, Interview with the Vampire was published in 1976 and became an unexpected best seller and is now considered a seminal piece of vampire fiction. Interview was born from exploring the idea of what it would really be like to be a vampire and live for hundreds of years. Stylistically, it gave us vampires who were complex characters instead of snarling villains. Although it has some trappings of the horror genre, Rice's vampire novels are more concerned with moral or philosophical horror than scares and boogymen.
Interview was followed in the 1980's by a series of best selling sequels featuring Lestat, who was only a supporting character in the first book but who quickly took over as a more active and interesting protagonist in The Vampire Lestat, Queen of the Damned, Tale of the Body Thief, and Memnoch the Devil. Lestat retired and the series continued without him to tell spinoffs and some ancillary tales that flesh out the rich of backstories of the supporting characters in the chronicles.
There had been plans to make a movie out of Interview for many years but it was a difficult project for many reasons such as the oppressively dark tone of the first book, the passive and brooding protagonist, ambiguous relationships between male characters, ambiguous relationships between "adult" vampire characters and a "child" vampire, etc. When it comes to issues of love and gender, Rice's writing can be too transgressive for some audiences, certainly during the 1970's and 1980's. It took almost twenty years to have a movie made and Interview with the Vampire was released in 1994 under the direction of Neil Jordan, a director who was certainly unafraid of the material. It was a worthy adaptation of the book and one that was surprisingly faithful to the source material.
The movie was a hit and there was talk immediately afterwards about making a sequel, likely based on The Vampire Lestat, which acts as both a sequel and prequel to Interview but the creative team moved on and the eventual sequel was a cheapo hatchet job based on Queen of the Damned and aimed squarely at the Hot Topic crowd. It was not treated with any of the respect or care as the previous movie. And that was the end of the Vampire Chronicles on film. Until today.
What's less clear about today's announcement is which book will be adapted and filmed. A couple of years ago, there was talk of a screenplay loosely based on Tale of the Body Thief but starting with that book seems like a strange thing to do as it skips over so much important material and is really a self contained story that relies on your intimate knowledge of the characters. If it were me, I would start with Lestat. I don't think we need another Interview with the Vampire adaptation, we have a good one already and, frankly, Louis' story is a bit of a downer. A new movie based on The Vampire Lestat could even reference the Interview with the Vampire movie in the same way that the novel references its predecessor.
My biggest fear with this production team, though, is that their wheelhouse is very much big blockbuster movies and the Vampire Chronicles despite their success as best sellers have never been an overtly commercial type of book series. Her writing is deeply personal and often dark and challenging. Rice's vampires are also aggressively bisexual (or perhaps passionately asexual) and I would hate to see this watered down in order to make the movies more palatable, although I would hope that this would be less of an issue today than it had been in the past.
My biggest hope is that the filmmakers go very ambitious with this series. After all, they did not just by one or two books, they bought The Vampire Chronicles, which contains about ten books or so and can loan itself very well to the kind of shared world that Marvel is doing with their superhero movies. There is certainly plenty of material to work with.
What's more, most of Rice's supernatural novels already exist in a shared universe. In 1990 Rice published what many consider her best book, The Witching Hour about a dynasty of witches and their deadly relationship with a spirit called Lasher. Forget American Horror Story: Coven, this is the real deal when it comes to New Orleans witch stories and it is more overtly horror than her other books and probably more commercial. This book is practically begging to be made into a cable miniseries. These books eventually cross over with the later Vampire Chronicles. Rice has also written a terrifically fun Mummy story in the same universe. So there is really potential to do something ambitious with her work that could go cross-media.
Above all, I hope that the material is treated with the respect it deserves and it attracts talented filmmakers who are passionate about this universe and these great stories. I hope bold and fearless actors are drawn to this material. In an age when novel adaptations are increasingly popular and book fans are treated to loving multi-movie adaptations their favorite books, I hope the Vampire Chronicles get the loving adaptations that they deserve.
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