31 Nights Of Terror! Interview with the Vampire

I’m not sure why but when I tell friends that I am going to include Interview with the Vampire in my 31 Nights of Terror I always get the same response that ‘that’s not a Halloween movie’ and I don’t think that I entirely understand. Certainly the film is not exclusively a Halloween movie and obviously that is what the producers felt back in 1994 because they released it in November, possibly for fear that calling something a holiday movie of any kind cheapens it and limits its appeal though on that I am simply speculating.

With that said, Interview with the Vampire is not only in my opinion a Halloween movie, but a great example of what film makers should be aiming for when they set out to make a movie. Anne Rice wrote the screenplay for her own book and the film was directed by Neil Jordan, a man known not to compromise quality for quantity and the end result of so much effort shows in this film. There are perhaps three main ghouls of Halloween: ghosts, monsters and vampires and it is often difficult to imagine what one could do with such characters to be original again and that is where Interview with the Vampire comes into its own. Despite being relatively linear in its narrative, Interview with the Vampire is a complex multi-layered story which runs the gambit of themes including the more obvious ones of life, death and religion but also skewed morality and ambiguous sexuality. More brilliant still is that the film is by no means art house movie and if you’re the kind of person who is not interested in so much drama because it is all too artsy then you can skip over all the themes and just enjoy a good vampire movie and that is film making at its best.

The set pieces are amazing and in their day were nominated for a number of awards. Grant it, not every film gets such a blockbuster budget and so maybe it isn’t fair to compare, but then again not every painting of the renaissance was well funded but that doesn’t take away from the fact that monumentalist pieces are monumental and in this case, Interview with the Vampire is the Sistine Chapel of vampire movies.

The acting is perfect, the costumes are amazing, the locations are well shot and the score is spot on though perhaps just one tone away from being perfect because I didn’t find it to be haunting, which would have gone well here. Speaking of haunting, though I wouldn’t say that the film scares me, there are moments which will shock you the first time around and leave you feeling trully disturbed for a while. I have seen the film a hundred times and I am still always awed by the ‘theater’ scene of ‘vampires pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires’ who are, as Louis calls them, ‘monstrous.’

The location shots are beautiful and truly capture the essence of the night in all of its dark beauty, a quality which I think is exaggerated particularly in October as it is in the film- every single frame of this film could be cut, framed and sold as an artistic masterpiece of photography and, watching Interview with the Vampire, I get to enjoy all 2952 of them.

Perhaps Interview with the Vampire is not what we think of immediately when we think of Halloween, but if ever there was a film that inspired you to play dress up and run about in the night pretending to be a servant of the shadows, this would be it.