Anne Rice's Interview With The Vampire

Throughout the many media that I've seen that have handled vampires as a subject matter, vampires have almost always been described as a creature, even though they're mostly described to have rooted from humans. Therefore, vampire seems like an afterlife of humans. Mostly associated with cold body temperature and immortality, to me vampires are like a beautiful version of a 'walking dead'.

From Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire, the protagonist of the book itself is vampire Louis, which I believe allows the readers to experience themselves the somewhat surreal view of the world and experience of the vampire. Just like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the narrative structure of the book is unique in the way that the book itself is not directly telling the story, but instead it is the protagonist who is telling the actual story while participating in an interview with a boy.

Nowadays, modern literature and film productions that illustrate vampires mostly depict the actual everyday life of a vampire, trying to build out the difference between the creatures and humans in an accurate way. I feel that this is why vampires mostly feel like a ‘different being’, because the contrast is so clear. Interview with the Vampire also illustrates Louis as having lost his ‘human like emotions and feelings’ after becoming a vampire, including the ‘blood thirst desire’ that is common in vampire literature.

However, Anne Rice doesn’t jump into Louis’ life as a vampire, but focuses more on how he has ended up in that shape. Especially between the contrast that is shown between Louis and Lestat, Louis is comparably more human-like, and his terror of turning into a vampire is much more obvious as well. While other literature such as Twilight pushes the part of ‘humans turning into vampires’ towards more of a minor element, Interview with the Vampire starts off the story with Louis’ tale of what it was like to change into an entirely different being.

It was interesting how Anne Rice was still able to push the human-parts of Louis while her descriptions and choice of simile made him look almost as a ‘nonliving’ being. Just as I said about vampires felt like a beautiful version of a walking dead, vocabularies that I found were associated towards vampires in the first impression of Louis were “bleached, skull, and statue”. It all feels very artificial and does pushes vampires away from the well-known descriptions we are most familiar towards.

However, there is a mixture of Louis’ experience of horror that really pulls us back from the sense of difference. Even though Louis quotes that as Lestat said his feeling of terror wasn’t real, it is the process of his realization that really stands out. Louis went through this moment of enlightenment because he had to lose what he had, which is his ‘human emotions’. The loss really emphasizes that there is a piece of human nature within vampires, which is why this novel contrasts from all the well-known vampires spread throughout modern media.