Interview with the Vampire review – Anne Rice's gothic horror gets queer TV update - The Guardian

On Saturday Night Live, the late Weekend Update anchor and occasional short-form film critic Norm MacDonald delivered what would become the definitive review of 1994’s Interview with the Vampire: “Not gay enough!” At the time, he was being facetious, a ripe homoerotic energy radiating from every frame of the undead Louis de Pointe du Lac’s recounting of his dalliance with fellow bloodsucker Lestat de Lioncourt.

The inability to follow through on longing only ups the intensity, a concept with which the show is itself intimately acquainted, teased out as the ethical Louis refuses the human blood that his body craves like an addiction.

The amour fou that flowers between Louis and and Lestat – alternating between hungry desire, fussy annoyance and the flirty bickering that bridges the gap from one to the other – rehashes many of the film’s insights about makeshift family units in the queer community, particularly in how a younger man can find both partner and father figure in an elder.

(Lestat is, ultimately, a vampire daddy.) Once played as a 10-year-old by Kirsten Dunst, the wayward girl (Bailey Bass) they convert to vampirism and take in as a surrogate daughter has been bumped up to 14 this time around, her untethered id a clearer analog for the reckless excitement of each successive generation as they sexually come into their own.

Due to the prejudiced mores of the setting, Louis must pose as Lestat’s butler for a night out at a society ball, an exercise in humiliation they redeem by treating as a taboo-pushing game of role play.