I've never read any Anne Rice novels and don't really have any nostolgia for the Interview With The Vampire movie. I'll absolutely admit it's a good movie, it's just not the type of vampire story I typically enjoy. I guess I'm too low-brow and prefer vampire action/horror over the more introspective stuff. And I guess that's why I probably won't be posting anything here about Only Lovers Left Alive or Let The Right One In. I understand these are good (great?) movies, but they're not for me.
Anyway, I've heard good things about the new Interview With The Vampire TV show. I'm curious if any of you have seen it and how you'd compare it to the movie. Is it any good? What'd they do differently from the movie? Does it follow the books more closely? If you haven't seen it, here's a trailer. You can currently watch it on Netflix or, if you have a US library card, on Hoopla. Or I guess on AMC+ if anyone has that.
I love both. The movie is legit cinema from the director of The Crying Game. He got a performance out of little kid Kirsten Dunst that raised the bar for what can be expected from child actors.
The show also is fantastic. It incorporates the idea of people having preexisting notions of what the story should be into the story itself in a really interesting way. It gives itself a framing device (the titular interview) that also has stakes, so it's not just cutting back to people talking in a room getting away from the interesting story in the past. The performances, the set and costume design, the gore effects, they're all absolutely brilliant. The only complaint that I have is that it isn't longer... there are a couple of spans of time that they gloss over in a scene or less that could have been entire multi-episode arcs in and of themselves. That said, wishing that there was more of a show isn't really that bad of a complaint.
I've heard that some people are very not happy with the show, which I suspect is because it made really strong decisions about how to adapt and reinterpret the material, which is bound to upset some people. I don't try to convince people to change their aesthetic opinions, but I think the show is amazing, and I can't wait for the third season.
The less said about Queen of the Damned, or the AMC show Mayfair Witches, the better.