review: interview with a vampire season three

12 Jun, 2026

or: he gothic horror show with no goth and no hor

okay. i've had a bit to think about it. so. interview with a vampire, the tv show. this is not going to be coherent and it's not going to be a real essay, but it is going to be a list of thoughts that my brain keeps circling the drain on as i hardblock ten thousand users a day here and on tiktok for talking about season three like it has anything worthwhile to contribute or like fans of the original book series have to dignify rolin jones with a response.

— made louis a pimp instead of a slave owner as part of his new backstory as a black man, explicitly shows him engaging in textual sexual violence with the women under him because of it. i think "well, it's not an inaccurate depiction of brothels, and it's not like it isn't just making explicit a part of owning slaves that was already present. this is a gothic horror story and i don't need louis to be morally perfect as long as this is handled thoughtfully and with a clear intent." and i let it slide.

— they age claudia up. i feel personally very bothered by this given the way that she's a proxy for anne rice's own dead daughter. i feel as though making claudia physically older than the girl she represents ever got to be is a little tacky. but i let it slide.

— they also make claudia black, after making her older. i like the actresses and i wait to see if it truly is just a casting choice based on the risk of having a little kid on-set and the incredibly low odds of finding another kirsten dunst. i worry that her being aged up from "little girl" to "preteen" in addition to being made a black girl is going to have the fans and story treat her as more of an adult, with the racist implications that has, but the show itself has been ...pretty ok? so far? about protecting the actresses and treating this thoughtfully in canon.

— lestat says several deeply racist things to louis, and then wifebeats him. this is also a change not in the books, and while (again, gothic horror) i'm not unwilling to see the man who fucked a slave owner in the books instead just be cluelessly antiblack in the show, i do dislike the optics of him being made into someone who physically abuses their partner. i do not think this change is necessary and i do feel uncomfortable with the showrunners adding in a scene where a black man is tortured and brutalized.

— they make armand a grown adult man, despite how important his being a csa victim is to his character and to the way he moves through the world. they have already aged up claudia, and assad is as amazing an actor as bailey and delainey, so i assume it is simply to avoid the optics of louis and lestat etc getting into sexual relationships with someone who While Their Elder appears prepubescent. i worry about what that means for other parts of the story that also depict the vampires acting in ways that read as morally abhorrent to humans, and notice that the show is beginning to disagree with anne rice's positioning as vampirehood removing you from the human moral matrix and allowing you to murder and engage in dynamics common in gothic horror like pedophilia and incest without actually harming a child or a relative. i worry that they will not differentiate between armand at 800 with lestat and armand pre-turning being sexually abused by marius. but i charitably assume that, as with them aging up claudia to protect a little girl, they aged up armand so a teen didn't have to kiss adult men on set. i let it go.

— they make nicki ugly and downplay his role. this is armand's pov so i let it slide but i very much do expect lestat's gay awakening to get a little better treated from his pov. this truly isn't that deep but he's my favourite side character, deeply relevant to how lestat forms relationships later on, and it sucks to get to watch characters from the mcu-ification attempt talamasca show eat my baby boy's slice of cake

— lots of people in the show rag on lestat and the show increasingly makes him the punchline for behaving the way he does. i begin to expect daniel to look at the camera and go "yeahhh..... that just happened" and it bugs me. i don't need people to like lestat, but at the intersection of him having "antiblack wifebeater" noncanonically added to his character traits and the way everyone responds to him in the later episodes like an annoying clown, i worry. so much of interview hinges on lestat being the distilled essence of vampirism, driving his way into abject chaos because to stop would be to be less of himself, and then coming out clean the other side because of those same traits. if the show doesn't think lestat is cool, how are they going to handle all of the characters who think lestat is cool and all of the plots that only occur because of how cool lestat is?

— they add a rape subplot for claudia. after aging anne rice's metaphorical dead daughter past the point she lived to, they reveal that it was partially so they could have her raped on tv. this is abhorrent to me in its misogyny. it is not handled well, it is not handled thoughtfully, it is a rehash of how lestat was turned by magnus and now we have that textually side by side on screen i see neither rape plot being handled with dignity or care. i fucking detest that the difference between white film/book claudia and black show claudia now includes that because she "looks older" she was an acceptable* target of sexual assault. *acceptable as in, this made it to screen without being shut the fuck down. it also makes it clear that they have no problem with a teenage actor sexually interacting with an adult for the show (damon daunno, who plays her rapist, is 41 years old. for the record.) if that actor is a black girl.

— louis is implied to have given armand the idea to kill claudia. this just pisses me off, honestly. we've established that above all else i think the concept of anne rice's dead duaghter should be given excessive narrative care, so to see louis get the ball rolling on her execution for the purpose of "getting her out of the way" of two men having sex is a massive fucking piss take even before the show decides to do functionally nothing in the narrative with that concept. in addition to this, the show no longer seems to care about its own priorities. in season one we got genuinely good and meaningful interrogations of how lestat being a white man impacted his relationship with louis and claudia. we got an almost acceptable oversight of how louis being a man gave him leverage over the black women in his employ as sex workers and how what was seen as degrading them gave him the social capital to go to poker night. where the fuck was this when he used that same position to dismiss claudia from his imaginary future? we don't have shit to say about disposable black womanhood even when it's picking up a conversation we already started having about louis? which sole feminist in the writers room died in between seasons?

— claudia and madeleine get a lore update which implies they will have a romantic and sexual connection. i like this ship and go insane about how madeleine dies choosing claudia, but i do note again that an onscreen relationship with sexual implications between an adult and an apparent teenager is fine when the teenager is a black girl.

— louis picks a fight with lestat about his past sexual relationship with gabrielle that makes it clear that louis considers gabrielle to be a pedophile who sexually groomed and abused lestat. he is, nevertheless, using that fact to hurt and mock lestat. the louis in the show no longer drinks from animals, delivers cutting verbal beatdowns, can take any vampire in a fight, is catnip to every person he meets, and gets constantly cool scenes. i begin to feel as though they've given him all of lestat's character traits and ignored what actually makes louis as a vampire in the books so charming.

— lestat's music is bad and his band is unpopular. again, stripping his character down out of some clear distaste for how much anne rice loved to throw him around.

— they reveal gabrielle. sorry, "gabriella". changing her name to gabrielle would have implied that her entire identity down to her culutral one was erased and subsumbed by the marquis de lioncourt when he married her, lmao. cna you imagine?? yucky! anyway gabriella, who refused to be reduced like that, is feminine, her hair is either inexplicably cut into a saucy little bob or she's wearing a really good wig of a saucy little bob over her hair. she looks visibly and aggressively older than lestat, instead of like a child bride with severe malnutrition who could have been his older sister in a kinder world. her relationship with lestat is changed from the show. i will say now that i don't care about if you like or dislike the plotline in the book, or if you consider that to still be grooming and abuse on gabrielle's part. i will say that there is a marked fucking difference between a loud and self-possessed angry woman and a very frail borderline-dying one whose body has been left in ruined agony by conceiving and birthing seven sons, only three of whom survive. book gabrielle sits at the intersection of feminist misery and transgender implications every time she tells lestat that she feels as though she was always meant to be a man and be allowed to move through the world as a human (rather than as a wife) and mourns the loss of all autonomy that she feels being born a woman has doomed her to. this is a girl who was sold to an old lord to acquire his title, whose money passed from her father to her husband without touching her (and whose jewels and other dowry treasures are meaningless when she cannot use them to buy her escape or be certain her husband won't just rip them from her hand at random) who is being raped and used as breeding stock for more boys the way so many women were (and are). her viewing lestat as different to "men" because he has a kind nature and loves her is an extension of that, as is her semi-incoherent babble to him at times about how she views him as the penis she was denied having and views his victories in the world as an extension of her own self and capacity to live that life (if only allowed). it happens in lockstep with lestat's father viewing his other two semi-bestial sons as successful extensions of him - including in sexual conquest, and a lot of his abuse of lestat stems from the fact that he is kind and shy and gentle and attracted to men. both of his parents treat his existence as proof of their own virility and confidence. it is just shocking within the gothic novel when gabrielle does it because it is seen as acting against her role as mother and pseudo-assuming a place as his father. when lestat comes home and turns her, it also picks up rice's theorem about vampires as seperate to and removed from humanity. lestat makes gabrielle into a creature who can do anything a man can, who has the power and lacks the moral contraints to treat the people around her the way she was treated, and more importantly within vampire society transforms their relationship into one where he is the father figure. he is the maker. she is the fledgeling. when they meet other vampires, the only relationship they will care about is this new one where gabrielle is something lestat created. it is very, very accepted in vampire circles to make a fledgeling because you are romantically and sexually intimate with them. it is very interesting, actually, that gabrielle does not begin a sexual relationship with lestat at all until she is the "daughter" of the dynamic! for all of your possible criticisms and valid dislikes of her in the books, that is a far more intentionally complicated and nuanced view of their relationship than the show gives us. in the show they flatten this entire arc and what it means for lestat down into one where his mother was a pedophile and his mother is still sexually abusing him. gabrielle is the second most significant female character in the story at the point that they're adapting, and as with claudia her relevance to it has been changed to one that centers sexual violence while also being too cowardly to actually interrogate or say anything about the rapes they're depicting besides "wow, that was bad! how does every man in the show feel about this? let's line them up and ask!"

— in the original books, which came out in lockstep with the aids crisis, louis and lestat and even daniel are all gay or bisexual men whose sex lives are intrinsically tied to the spilling and sharing of blood. louis textually has to drink lestat's infected-with-vampirism blood (depicted in queen of the damned as tiny particles of a malicious demon in a way that clearly feels like a commentary on viruses) and then the effect it has on him is to vomit and shit himself empty before waking back up as a creature unconcered with human lives. like. i do not need to explain this in relation to the aids crisis, right? they ignore the family system, they kidnap a daughter for their gay marriage from a dying woman and change her in a process previously only shown with sexual connotations, they engage in relationships that look pedophilic with armand, they cruise bars in 1980 to bring home nubile young victims. they are not sanitized at all, many of them are additionally bisexual and do the same thing to women, and throughout all of this they are vibrant and often happy and deeply in love. they cannot be killed unless by a court of law in a sham trial. fifty years later, the show adapting it is somehow less willing to address any issues threatening the lgbt community or commit to messy depictions of its members. "gabriella" is a cisgender woman and hyper feminine besides. louis begs god to forgive him for being gay and then never talks about it again. armand was bought as a sex slave but the man who did it looks goofy and he has no hangups about sex because of it that show in his dynamic with daniel. the sex so far is either beautiful and healingly consensual or it is drawn out onscreen rape, and almost 100% of the time the rape involves a woman. it has nothing to say about what it shows you anyore besides "isn't that cool" "isn't lestat stupid" "isn't that shocking and upsetting? don't worry, we don't intend to interrogate why it is or how it came to happen within any kind of literary or political framework!" and of course "here is one of our female cast members and here is her required 5 minutes of onscreen sexual violence" ← harping on about this but why the fuck would i not 🪉 🪉 🪉 HELLO??

— a friend i trust who didn't stop watching in disgust said that they also aged up baby jenks and had her fuck lestat as a distraction for a plot against him. that makes another woman whose complex book position to sexual misogyny (in this case, csa victim who died of a back alley abortion gone wrong & what that says about reproductive violence) has been flattened down into rape on screen (because thats rape by deception. she's lying to him about something that will hurt him so he will consent to sex for the specific intent of hurting him with the thing she is lying about.) also AGAIN we see an ostensibly-pedophilic relationship aged up so that the other participants are not depicted as having sex with someone physically prepubescent, making claudia AGAIN the only time an adult has sex with a child on screen, FURTHER enforcing my belief that the writers room does not view this as unacceptable explicitly and only when it is happening to a little black girl.

so no, i will not be tuning in. my goodwill is run exceptionally out for a show that has spent the past view years doing its best to make the people who felt connected to and seen by the actually complex and messy relationships in the books out as just boring fucking losers who hate to see black characters in their media. but i do not see anything good in watching louis be dropped from the sky and strangled and set on fire, or watching claudia be raped. any complex and interesting interrogations of what those changes mean for the characters have been abandoned in season one when it became obvious that louis (french cajun accent) would simply not make the choices that louis (deadpan english accent) did, and that the show planned to align those contradictions by just making jacob anderson do it anyway. the actors do magnificent award-worthy work with what they're given, but what they're given is a writers room deciding to grow anne rice's dead daughter past the age she died at for the sole purpose at this point of having her raped for it, and then they made her black on top of that to compound their hatred of little girls. i cannot fucking stand it. the books are stupid and lumpy and messy and lestat meets jesus who tells him that nobody has ever been more of the most special princess alive and none of the people act normally. but anne rice knew what the fuck she wanted to say with them to other weird outcast bitches, and unlike the show, i think that what she wanted to say was worth hearing out.

...anyway (manually stops myself from seething) nickstat forever on tumblr dot corn. sam reid could body "i thought, i am glad nicki took his hands with him into the fire, because if he had not, i would have to go back to paris and get them before i could go on." and its cowardice and evil that they don't give him the dignity or the fucking chance