Episode 122: Transcript

Episode: 122 The Incredibly Strange Career of Anne Rice

Transcription by Keffy

Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome to another episode of Our Opinions Are Correct, the podcast about science, science fiction, and all the stuff in between, like, you know, the lettuce and the tomato of the science world, yeah.

[00:00:16] I’m Annalee Newitz, I’m a science journalist and I also write science fiction. My new novel, The Terraformers, is coming out in January, so you can pre-order it now if you like stories about flying moose.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:30] Who doesn’t? I’m Charlie Jane Anders, I’m a science fiction writer. I also write comics and some other stuff. And my young adult trilogy, which ends with Promises Stronger Than Darkness, that third book comes out in April and you can also pre-order that right now.

Annalee: [00:00:42] Yay!

Charlie Jane: [00:00:46] I’m also currently writing the New Mutants comic from Marvel.

Annalee: [00:00:47] Yeah, so you should like, subscribe to that whereever you can subscribe to comic books. I mean, that’s a thing you can still do.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:54] You can contact your local comic book store. It is definitely a thing.

Annalee: [00:00:56] So, we just finished watching the first season of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire and we really loved it. I mean, you liked it, right, Charlie?

Charlie Jane: [00:01:07] Oh yeah, I thought it was amazing.

Annalee: [00:01:09] Yeah, and that got us talking about Anne Rice’s extremely weird and eventful career. She wrote horror about vampires and witches and shapeshifters, but she also wrote historical fiction. She wrote a whole bunch of BDSM erotica under the names Ann Rampling and A. N. Roquelaure. She also staged a fan revolt that almost destroyed the 1994 movie, Interview with the Vampire. 

[00:01:36] So I just have so many infodumps to give you about Anne Rice—

Charlie Jane: [00:01:40] Can’t wait.

Annalee: [00:01:40] And in this episode, we’re gonna go deep into Riceorama and we’re gonna revisit some of her most influential writing, and we’re also gonna talk about how she kind of transformed the way we think about monsters.

[00:01:56] Also, on our mini episode next week for our Patreon friends, we’ll be talking about all the incarnations of The Vampire Diaries because I guess we’re just doing vampire mode. I don’t know.

Charlie Jane: [00:02:07] [Hissing noise] I love vampires. That’s my vampire noise. Yeah, and you know, thinking of things that are not vampiric, we have a wonderful symbiotic relationship with our Patreon supporters who keep this podcast going. And this podcast is entirely independent and it’s entirely supported by you, our listeners, and you know, you’re our lifeblood, but hopefully we’re also your lifeblood, so again, nobody’s vampirizing anybody else. If you become a patron, you are helping to keep this podcast going. You are helping to fuel us in our quest to be correct about every single aspect of science fiction and fantasy, and science. Plus, you get mini episodes in between each main episode and those mini episodes are often pretty substantial. You get access to our Discord channel where we just hang out all the time. I’m in there right now. And, you know, just think about it. That could be yours for just two or three bucks a month and anything you give goes right back into keeping us going and making our opinions even more correct.

[00:03:03] So you can find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. Now, let’s get vampiric!

[00:03:11] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]

Annalee: [00:03:11] So first of all, before we get started talking about Anne Rice, I wanted to give you a spoiler warning which is that we are going to be talking about the plots of some of Anne Rice’s older books. So these are all books that are at least 20 years old at this point. So just FYI, there’s gonna be some spoilers, and also a content warning, which we will give you at the appropriate moments. But because we’re talking about Anne Rice, we’re gonna talk a little bit about nonconsensual sex and pedophilia. So we’re gonna warn you when that’s coming up so you can skip those bits.

Charlie Jane: [00:04:11] Yeah, so, Annalee, you have a personal history with Anne Rice, and please tell us about that.

Annalee: [00:04:16] Yeah. Saying personal history makes it sound a little bit more glamorous than it actually was, which is that when I was working on my dissertation, which was about representations of monsters in American pop culture, I wrote a whole chapter about Anne Rice's work.

[00:04:33] I went on a pilgrimage to her crazy Victorian mansion in New Orleans, and later I met her at a book signing after I had finished my dissertation, and I brought her the chapter about her work. And I was talking about her actually in the context of William Faulkner, because he's another southern writer who has a lot of weird family dramas. And also, little known fact, William Faulkner wrote a treatment for a vampire movie in Hollywood, which sadly never got made. It was called Dreadful Hollow. 

[00:05:06] And so I met Anne Rice. I talked to her a little bit. She actually had done graduate work in the same department as me, the English department at UC Berkeley. So we actually had a really nice talk. She was super sweet. She was excited to see this chapter of my dissertation, which I'm sure people hand her weird manuscripts all the time, but she actually seemed genuinely happy about it. And she was just a very kind, loving person to her fans. And I think my experience with her was really typical of that. And it's why her fans were so diehard when anything happened to kind of threaten the integrity of her books. 

[00:05:45] So I've spent a lot of time thinking about Rice's work. I've read a ton of her books, not all of them. There are way too many, but I have read a lot and I've thought about her life a lot.

[00:05:58] So this is kind of exciting for me that I get to tell you all about it. 

Charlie Jane: [00:06:01] And please do tell us about it, Annalee. Can you kind of sketch out Anne Rice’s career arc? For those of us who aren't as steeped in her work, who was she? What did she write?

Annalee: [00:06:12] Yeah, so let's do some biographical details and then kind of go through her books.

[00:06:18] She was born in 1941 and she passed away last year, so she had a very long, eventful life. She often incorporated autobiographical details into her work, so it's interesting to think about where she's from. She grew up in New Orleans as an Irish Catholic kid, and that detail shows up in a lot of her books. A lot of her books take place in New Orleans. A lot of them deal with Catholicism. 

[00:06:43] And as a young adult, she moved to San Francisco where she went to college. She lived in the Haight-Ashbury with her husband, who is a poet named Stan Rice. And while they were living out here in San Francisco where we live, they had a daughter named Michelle and she died at a very young age of leukemia. And Anne Rice has said in a ton of interviews that that experience with losing her daughter is what inspired Interview with the Vampire, which is about a couple of vampires who are in deep mourning for a lot of different things. 

[00:07:19] And one of the plot points is that Louis, the main character, converts a little, a sick five year old girl into a vampire. And that's the character Claudia, who's this iconic figure in the book and kind of throughout the whole Vampire series, as you know, her memory continues to haunt Louis. So Interview With the Vampire came out in 1976 and it was a huge bestseller and it really launched Anne Rice's career. 

Charlie Jane: [00:07:47] And then so she presumably just went on to write nothing but vampire books, right?

Annalee: [00:07:54] Yeah, so basically she's best known for her vampire books, but she didn't actually go back to vampire stories until 1985, which is when The Vampire Lestat came out and she wrote a ton of books in between that. It really seems to me like after Interview with the Vampire came out, what she really wanted to do was be a historical fiction writer, like maybe historical romance, because of course, Interview with the Vampire is a historical romance. It's set in kind of the, in the 1840s, 1830s.

[00:08:32] And her next book is called The Feast of All Saints, and it's also set in New Orleans in the 1840s, but it's not at all supernatural. It's about the free people of color in New Orleans and the culture that they created. And the main character is a young mixed race man who's dealing with what it means to be Black and free in a country that still has slavery.

[00:08:59] And like I said, it's set in basically the same period as Interview with the Vampire. And, more little known facts, The Feast of All Saints was actually made into a TV movie in 2001, which came out right before 9/11. So it kind of just, I don't think anybody was thinking about it. It was a mini-series with two episodes and it was… we'll talk about that later in the episode when we talk about adaptations, but it's a pretty interesting flick.

[00:09:29] And then, in 1982, Anne Rice publishes another historical romance called Cry to Heaven. This is set in 18th century Italy, and it's about castrati opera singers. So this is the book. So first of all, like there's just a lot of intense fetishization of castrati in this book, but also in other parts of Anne Rice's work, which I don't know, like it's just a thing.

[00:10:03] One of the parts of Cry to Heaven is that the main character Tonio, who is this incredible opera singer, Is this supercharged, erotic character. So he is a castrati, but he's completely sexual. He has sex with men, he has sex with women. He's just this beautiful androgynous figure. 

[00:10:30] So we learn a lot about the anatomy of castrati. Yes they can still fuck. And I think this is the book where Anne Rice really starts to get into erotica ‘cause it's a very hot book. It has a lot of gay sex and just a lot of sex in general. 

Charlie Jane: [00:10:46] Yeah. And fun fact, the only two Anne Rice books I have read are Cry to Heaven, which I read when I was working on my novel Choir Boy, which is about choir, choral singers and you know, I think you actually recommended it as a book to check out that's kind of along those lines. And I read that one and then I also, years and years and years ago, read Exit to Eden, one of her erotica books. So I've never read anything of hers that wasn't just like weird queer sex in history kind of. Or in the present.

[00:11:18] That's like, that's pretty much what I think Anne Rice wrote based on my two book sampling of hers. Okay. So what came after those two?

Annalee: [00:11:25] Okay, so speaking of smutty gay sex, so again, this is all stuff that she publishes in between Interview with the Vampire in 1976 and Vampire Lestat in 1985. 

[00:11:40] So next she publishes three BDSM romances in a row under the name A.N. Roquelaure. So there's the first, which is The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, which was a huge bestseller, and then Beauty’s Punishment and Beauty's Release, and they come out bang, bang, bang, three years in a row.

[00:11:56] They are a take on the sleeping beauty fairytale, except in this version, the Prince fucks Beauty in order to wake her up. Of course, gives her an amazing orgasm because it's that kind of book. And what he does with Beauty is he brings her to this kind of castle training school place where all the nobility in the kingdom are taught submission, because there's this idea that you can't be a good ruler without being a good sub.

[00:12:27] And it is pretty hot, actually. Especially the first book has a lot of hot stuff, but it's also just completely bonkers. Like people having sex with swords, like people doing horseplay, that's like, and when I say horseplay, I mean like, you know, being horses, in ways that are just anatomically impossible. Not that you can’t do horseplay, but not in the way it happens in this book. 

[00:12:56] There's many, many scenes where people are just doing things that are like, I'm a sexual superhero because I can maintain an erection for days on end without being fed. And it's like just, it's a fairytale. 

[00:13:09] And the series gets a little bit more problematic as it goes on. So here I'm gonna give you a content warning. Just skip a few skip like a minute ahead. In the third book, Beauty is captured by a quote unquote “Eastern Sultan.” And this is when we get back to Rice's obsession with castration. Except this time she's hooking up with a woman in the Sultan's harem who has been given a cliterectomy.

[00:13:37] And there's just this whole cringy thing with like how Beauty figures out how to give her an orgasm. And like, there's just all this like very close up looks at like vulvas and vaginas that have undergone various kinds of genital mutilation. And it's like, and it's eroticized and it's kinda… I'm not sure what was going on there, but that was what she was doing in these books.

Charlie Jane: [00:14:09] Kind of reminds me of the third Kushiel book by Jacqueline Carey, where it also goes to like Middle East, north Africa and features a lot of brutalization of women. And in the context of like mixed in with eroticism, it's very strange. I don't know why this is a place that people always want to go in these books and I don't, yeah, I don't fully understand it.

[00:14:29] Okay, so what happens after that?

Annalee: [00:14:30] So then let's get back on track thinking about these vampire books. So basically in 1985, Anne Rice publishes three books, The Vampire Lestat, Exit to Eden, which we already mentioned, and which is another kind of BDSM book, but it's a little bit more romancey. And then Beauty's Release, which is the third of the A.N. Roquelaure books.

[00:14:55] So at this point, she's basically an erotica writer. Like most of the books that she's famous for are just purely just BDSM fantasies. But The Vampire Lestat is, the book that her fans have really been waiting for, and it is just this huge bestseller. She makes a ton of money and basically she and her husband now have enough money that they can pretty much live wherever they want.

[00:15:22] And so they move back to New Orleans while she's working on the sequel to Vampire Lestat, Queen of the Damned. And they move into this famous mansion, the one that I visited which they refurbish and it becomes kind of this pilgrimage place for all of her fans, including me. And at the same time while she's doing these vampire books, she's still churning out these BDSM romances under the name Ann Rampling.

[00:15:52] Another quick content warning, just skip ahead maybe a minute. Her next book is called Belinda, and it's basically a book about pedophilia. It's about this underage Lolita type character who's hooking up with an older man. It's kind of similar to Cry to Heaven in the sense that Cry to Heaven also has this underage character, Tonio the castrati, hooking up with his older teacher.

[00:16:18] Both of these books present what amounts to pedophilia as pretty hot. And there's a lot of normalizing the idea that teenagers are sexy and should have sex with people who are over 18, much over the age of 18. And at this point, I also wanna note that one of the. parts of Claudia's character in Interview with the Vampire is that she becomes an old woman in the body of a five-year-old and she has all the desires of an adult woman and she winds up hooking up with men who are pedophiles because the only people she can find to have sex with are pedophiles. And so she seduces them and then kills them. So this is, again, a theme that is pretty constant in Anne Rice's work, and it just gets weirder and weirder as it goes on. 

Charlie Jane: [00:17:09] Yeah, I mean, I hadn't realized until just now how much of that is a, how much that is a motif with her. And it does feel, yeah. I mean, creepy. It's super creepy. 

[00:17:20] Okay, so what happened then with the vampire books? Like she wrote, it sounds like she wrote like three or four of them, and then that was it. Right? 

Annalee: [00:17:29] So ultimately she wrote 15 vampire books over the course of her career. So between 1976 and 2018, she created a whole universe of overlapping vampire characters. And they have this amazing story that's like with origins that stretch back to ancient Egypt. And like there's just a million different, you know, family relationships between vampires creating each other. It's, it's bonkers and amazing.

Charlie Jane: [00:17:59] So you mentioned a sort of a complicated backstory. How does that work? Tell us about ancient Egypt and vampires. 

Annalee: [00:18:06] Yes. Okay. So this is like, one of the really cool things about her vampires is that they have this bizarre, I've never seen this kind of origin story for vampires before. So basically we learn about this in Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned where we kind of get introduced to the oldest of the vampires and here's the story. So back, like, I don't know, somewhere in the mists of time, 6,000 years ago-ish, there are two sisters living on a mountaintop near Egypt. Their names are Mekare and Maharet, and they have this familiar named Amel. And mostly Mekare is connected to Amel and he's just a…

Charlie Jane: [00:18:54] And Amel is a demon?

Annalee: [00:18:54] Amel is like a demon or like a familiar kind of. He’s—

Charlie Jane: [00:19:00] Hmm, okay.

Annalee: [00:19:00] This is also part of Anne Rice's lore is that there are these kind of invisible demonic creatures that can work together with humans to become kind of superpowered. And this comes up again in The Mayfair Witches, which we'll talk about later. 

[00:19:16] So these two twins, they're just hanging out and whatever, but then the queen of Egypt, Akasha, who later becomes the Queen of the Damned, is jealous of their relationship with Amel. She really wants to be powerful, too. So she basically steals Amel from them. She imprisons them, she takes him away, but then she's also betrayed. So Akasha is betrayed and as she's being murdered by some bad guys, they're stabbing her a bunch of times. And Amel, the demon, enters her body and blood through these stab wounds and she becomes the first vampire.

[00:20:01] So she's kind of merged with Amel, but also Amel is in her blood, and so she turns her husband Enkil into a vampire as well by sharing the blood with him, which means that basically all vampires in the world are part of like a distributed blood network of— 

Charlie Jane: [00:20:22] It’s a federated network. It’s the Vampire Fediverse, Annalee.

Annalee: [00:20:28] It is the Fediverse. It's also a little bit shades of Midichlorians. I mean, obviously before the Midichlorian thing became a thing. It also feels like it's a little bit about kind of, you know, infection, a little bit like an infectious disease. Basically Akasha and her husband Enkil rule the land for a very long time as vampires, and they make a bunch of other vampires and Makare and Maharet kind of disappear into the sunset.

[00:21:00] Maharet becomes connected to this giant family of vampires when she chronicles like there are many generations of vampires over the millennia. Makare just kind of goes off and becomes a wild lady who does other stuff that we don't know about. 

[00:21:18] And there's a kind of reboot of the vampire world that happens during the life of Marius who's a vampire that shows up in a bunch of different novels. He's made during antiquity. So he's from sort of the ancient Roman world and around the time that he's made a keeper of Akasha and Enkil. They have lived for so long that they've become statues, basically. They're alive, but they're kind of catatonic. 

[00:21:51] So he decides he doesn't want any more vampires to be made. So he sticks, Akasha and Enkil out in the sun to kill them, which, they can't be killed because they're too ancient and too powerful. However, they do get a little toasted out in the sun, and that causes pretty much every vampire to be burned alive, and there's only a few who are left. 

[00:22:17] So it's this big shift in the vampire civilization. So then Marius takes over caring for Akasha and Enkil. I’m glossing over a whole bunch of stuff. But basically he goes and gets them, he puts them in a special underground place, and he's protecting them. 

[00:22:33] And he starts a whole new era of vampires and, I think that this, again, is Anne Rice really wishing that she was writing historical fiction.

Charlie Jane: [00:22:45] Right.

Annalee: [00:22:48] Because what she does with her vampires is she tells stories of different historical periods, and one of the things that's super great about her vampires is that they reflect the ages that they come from.

[00:23:00] So Armand, who's another big character in the series and is also in the TV series, he's kidnapped from Marius. So he's made by Marius in kind of the 15th century I think. and he's kidnapped by a gang of Christian vampires who think that they're the spawn of Satan because they've been raised in a kind of medieval context.

[00:23:25] And so whereas Marius saw himself as just like, well, I'm just a gentleman vampire and I’m a Roman guy and I don't have any Christian beliefs so I just think vampires are another form of life. And obviously Akasha, the ancient Egyptian vampire was just like, hey, you know, humans are gods. That's like part of our religion, so why shouldn't I also be a God? 

[00:23:46] So they sort of have normalized vampires, but these Christian vampires, they really buy into all of the legends about how they can't go into churches and like they’re horrible blasphemous monsters. And so they worship Satan because that's what they've been taught that they should do.

[00:24:07] And Armand joins them and they form, eventually they form a group, a theater group in Paris called Teatre des Vampires. And by the time Louis meets them in Interview with the Vampire, just to bring this full circle, they are now kind of this like decadent group that puts on plays that all of the humans of Paris think are just kind of grotesqueries, decadent artistic spectacles. And in the plays they pretend to be vampires who are eating a person. And in fact, they are vampires who are eating a person on stage in front of everybody. 

Charlie Jane: [00:24:43] Nice. 

Annalee: [00:24:45] And so that's when Louis meets them and Louis is like, whoa, this is so decadent. And he has to, basically over the course of his relationship with Armand, Louis has to kind of deprogram him and help him see that like he's been twisted by his Christian beliefs into hating himself. And so there's like a lot of like thinking through how Christianity kind of warps our perspective as well as just celebrating sucking blood.

Charlie Jane: [00:25:16] Yep. Sucking blood good. Christianity bad. And so, okay. So does she have other supernatural creatures in her fiction, or is it mostly just vampires? 

Annalee: [00:25:27] So this is what's interesting is that Anne Rice just really loved monsters in general. So during the time that she's writing about vampires, she also wrote two novels about werewolves, a book about a shapeshifter or like a body shifter called Tale of the Body Thief, which is I just love that title. She wrote a book about djinn called Servant of the Bones. She wrote a book about a ghost. She wrote three novels about mummies, which dealt with the Pharaoh Ramses. So she got to go back to ancient Egypt, which she clearly likes to hang out in. And then of course, she wrote the three books about witches and demons in The Mayfair Witches trilogy.

[00:26:04] So I would say her big innovation was that all of these books see the world through the monster's eyes and she’s really… It’s not that no one had ever thought of doing that before. Obviously there's many, many stories that do that, but there hadn't really been a big popular book about vampires that was from the vampire's point of view. 

[00:26:29] And again, there were other books that did that, but hers, really, Interview with the Vampire really popularized that. And now of course it just seems obvious. Of course you would tell a story from the vampire's point of view, but really up until the 1970s, if you think about it, most vampire stories were from the perspective of people being victimized or from the perspective of the vampire hunters.

Charlie Jane: [00:26:54] Okay. So you mentioned the Mayfair Witch books and I know that those are also going to be a TV show soon, and I don't know anything about those, so please enlighten me.

Annalee: [00:27:05] Let me tell you about these books. So they're about a family of witches who originate in Scotland and then come over to, you guessed it, New Orleans. And for about 13 generations, they've had a relationship with a demon, kind of like Amel, the demon, who made the vampires. And his name is Lasher. And Lasher's power is, as we discover in The Witching Hour, the first book, which really is an incredible book. It's the best book of the trilogy by a long shot. Highly recommend. 

[00:27:44] Lasher is a very sexy ghost . And if you've ever seen the movie, The Entity, which is a cult classic about a woman who is being sexually assaulted by a ghost, which has a lot of scenes of the actress naked, having sex with an invisible creature. That happens all the time in this book.

Charlie Jane: [00:28:08] Oh my God. So it's all very non-consensual, once again.

Annalee: [00:28:12] It's non-consensual. It does not have pedophilia, which is good. And the main character in the first book, who's sort of the character throughout all three of the witch books. She is the most powerful witch allegedly in her line. And so Lasher is particularly interested in her because he's hoping that he can use her to become human. Like he's gonna figure out some way to merge with humans, just the way Amel merged with Akasha. 

[00:28:43] And one of the things that's interesting about The Witching Hour, I want to tell you a little bit more about Lasher in a second, but like Witching Hour as a book has this amazing structure where we're following the main character, we're following this witch, and her name is Rowan. We're following Rowan and her life, and she's in San Francisco and she's trying to just have a normal life. And then she meets Lasher, she's trying to figure it out and she meets up with a group of people called the Tamasca, who also show up in Queen of the Damned. 

[00:29:23] They’re kind of like a scholarly organization that's devoted to studying the supernatural. And they're a secret society and they have all of these books and manuscripts and scrolls about ancient monsters. And so Rowan meets one of these Talamasca dudes who gives her this book that's a history of the Mayfair Witches, her ancestors. And Anne Rice is like, okay, so there's this book. Now I'm going to spend the next 200 pages of this novel just showing you this book. 

[00:29:58] And so you and Rowan, the main character, just read this 200 page book together in the middle of this other book, which is a great book. I love that. I love books within books. And it's this crazy history of all her ancestors having sex with this ghost. And like one of her ancestors was a gay guy who had sex with the ghost, Julian. 

[00:30:20] And it turns out that Lasher has been doing this kind of eugenics breeding program on the family plantation in New Orleans. And he's been doing this to breed the perfect witch over many generations. So he's basically picking who gets to have sex with his witches. I mean, he gets to have sex with his witches, but also he picks which human males get to have sex with his witches, so that eventually in the 13th generation he'll get Rowan, who is the super powerful witch who is endowed with all these abilities that he wants. So there's all this creepy stuff about eugenics and witches and non-consensual sex.

[00:31:04] And ultimately what happens is that Lasher figures out that he can merge his consciousness with Rowan's unborn baby. And oh boy, this is when it really creepy.

Charlie Jane: [00:31:17] Do we need another content warning at this point? 

Annalee: [00:31:21] Yeah, content warning might skip ahead a minute or two. 

[00:31:26] So he is inside of her baby. She gives birth and he is what's known as a taltos or a walking baby. This is a big trope in sort of horror fantasy. He immediately grows into an adult the instant he's born. And Anne Rice spends a lot of time explaining how beautiful walking babies are because they're adults, but they have like baby soft skin and they've like never been exposed to like the wear and tear of adulthood. So they're just like, almost like uncannily, beautiful and childlike, yet like yet they're also grownups. 

[00:32:01] And, of course, the first thing that Lasher does as soon as he grows into his adult form is like rape Rowan over and over again trying to have another baby with her. So yeah, she gives birth to a walking baby and is immediately imprisoned and made into like his sex toy.

[00:32:20] And that's kind of what happens in the next two books is like the weird battle between Rowan and Lasher and the weird walking babies that they have and like their connection with the Talamasca. 

[00:32:32] And one of the things that's really interesting about this, and that comes up again and again in Anne Rice's work is that even though Lasher seems really evil, especially when we first meet him. In the second book and in the third book, Anne Rice devotes a huge amount of time to rehabilitating him and showing us that actually he's been really abused and the reason why he's such a terrible person and this bad rapist eugenicist guy actually is rooted in how he has this tender abused part of himself.

[00:33:10] And this is also kind of the story of Lestat as well. In the second vampire book, in The Vampire Lestat, you know, we get the whole story of Lestat and Louis romance, kind of from Lestat’s point of view and in Interview with the Vampire, Lestat comes across as being a really terrible person. He is a terrible person. He's an abuser. He cuts Louis and Claudia off from all the people that they love, and then suddenly we're supposed to think he's a really great guy. 

[00:33:41] And you know, I think this, as I said, this is a recurring theme in her work that men who are aggressive and overpowering and abusive are intended to be forgiven. They always go on a redemption arc. So we're always, in the end, supposed to sympathize with not just actual monsters like vampires and mummies and stuff, but human monsters, people who are cruel. 

[00:34:11] And so, these books cross over with the vampire books in a lot of different ways and deal with a lot of the same themes.

Charlie Jane: [00:34:16] Yeah, it’s probably just as well that our listeners can't see the face I've been making for the last, like five minutes or so while you described the sexual assault and the walking babies. 

Annalee: [00:34:27] The walking babies.

Charlie Jane: [00:34:31] Yeah, oh god. Like I've just, my face has been just basically screwed into like a weird… like when you just bite into something and you thought it was gonna be delicious candy and it turns out to actually be like a weird, you know, I don't even know. Like it turns out to be cough syrup flavored or something. I don't, I can't even. No. Like something that’s really disgusting.

Annalee: [00:34:55] Yeah. It turns out that it's like some kind of toilet cake.

Charlie Jane: [00:34:58] Some kind of toilet cake. Exactly. You thought it was regular cake and it's actually toilet cake. That's the face I've been making. And you know it genuinely baffles me that, as you described these books, it baffles me that they were published by a mainstream publisher and were bestsellers and were treated as though, like, yes, this is completely. Yes, being raped by your own walking baby is like a completely normal thing to happen in a book.

Annalee: [00:35:23] Honestly, the Twilight books also have stuff that are equally bonkers. You know, there's like the baby that as soon as it's born imprints on the werewolf? 

Charlie Jane: [00:35:34] No, the werewolf imprints on the baby not the other way around.

Annalee: [00:35:36] Imprints on the baby, but still, it’s like creepy as fuck. 

Charlie Jane: [00:35:39] It is. I feel like…

Annalee: [00:35:40] And also the baby eats its way out of her womb. 

Charlie Jane: [00:35:42] Okay. 

Annalee: [00:35:44] And like there's the vampire sex where they like break every piece of furniture in the house.

Charlie Jane: [00:35:51] I think that, you know, Stephanie Meyer tries really hard, but I don't think she can quite approach the Anne Rice levels of fuckatude.

Annalee: [00:35:58] The thing about Anne Rice is that she's actually… I mean, clearly she's a very talented and imaginative writer who's got a lot of really weird preoccupations that are quite unique to her. And it’s like you always know when you're reading an Anne Rice book. And it's always gonna have weird, kinky shit.

Charlie Jane: [00:36:18] Dubious consent or just like no consent.

Annalee: [00:36:20] Dubious consent, incest, weird family dynamics, and also Christianity.There's gonna be a lot of Christianity. 

Charlie Jane: [00:36:34] So, you know, you mentioned that the vampires who were raised Christian are kind of fucked up by it and end up becoming satanists. So I'm gonna just go out on a limb and assume that Anne Rice is really anti Christianity and that she hates Christianity and that her books are all about Christianity being terrible, right?

Annalee: [00:36:52] Kind of, I mean her books are all about exploring many dimensions of Christianity and she actually went through a very religious phase starting in the late 1990s. Anne Rice declared that she had become a very religious Christian. She wrote two works of historical fiction about Jesus and then a couple of books about angels.

[00:37:18] They were very popular in the Christian book community. She really reached out to Christian readers who like this kind of stuff and was actually pretty accepted. When I was researching this episode, I found a lot of very friendly reviews of her work in Christian book blogs and stuff like that.

[00:37:43] These books have the same kind of interests as her vampire books in that, especially the books about Jesus, they're very much historical novels. She's really trying to recreate this historical era. They don't have the kinky sex, of course, of the monster stories, but they do have that rich historical detail, that sense of place that her other books do.

[00:38:06] And then in around 2010, she basically just rage quit the church. She did this big post on Facebook where she talked about how she still believes in God, she still believes in Jesus, but she doesn't like Christians. And I think that probably a lot of that had to do with the church's attitudes toward gay people. Anne Rice has always been a huge supporter of gay rights. Her son, Christopher Rice, who's also a very accomplished novelist, he's gay. He's very out and gay, and she, toward the end of her life, she moved out to live near him in California and the two of them worked really closely together on her literary estate.

[00:38:47] He's been working now on helping bring her books to the little screen and the big screen, and I think she just realized that maybe Jesus is cool, but Christians not so much. And in the last decade of her life, after she did the rage quitting of the church, she returned to writing vampire novels and mummy novels.

[00:39:09] She actually published a fourth Beauty book called Beauty's Kingdom, which I have not read. So maybe it's… Maybe it's great. I don't know, but I'm not gonna read it. And her very last book, which was published posthumously this year, was called The Reign of Osiris, and it was the third book in her Ramses: The Damned Mummy Trilogy.

[00:39:29] So she was right back in ancient Egypt with monsters. 

Charlie Jane: [00:39:35] Well, I'm glad that she got to bring it full circle. 

Annalee: [00:39:36] Yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:39:38] Speaking of bringing a full circle we're gonna take a break now, right? And then we're gonna talk about her movies and TV shows and all the adaptations of her work.

[00:39:44] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]

Charlie Jane: [00:39:50] So it blows my mind that she published both The Vampire Lestat and Exit to Eden in 1985, and then in 1994, she had two movies come out based on her books in the same year, within a month of each other. So how did that come to pass? 

Annalee: [00:40:07] So basically in 1994, the movie version of Interview with the Vampire came out and the movie version of Exit to Eden came out.

[00:40:17] So probably a lot of you remember Interview with the Vampire or you've heard about it. It starred Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt as the gay, but not gay, but maybe gay vampires. And Kirsten Dunst played Claudia, so she wasn't five, like in the novels, more like 12, which seems like a bit of an improvement.

[00:40:40] So that comes out as a Thanksgiving movie in 1994. And a month before that moviegoers were, shall we say, blessed, with the notoriously terrible adaptation of Exit to Eden, which had Dana Delany playing a BDSM resort owner and Rosie O'Donnell and Dan Akroyd played two goofy cops who were going undercover at the resort trying to solve a crime.

[00:41:09] None of that comic stuff was in the book, by the way. The book is just a romance between the BDSM resort owner and a dude. These movies were so closely intertwined that actually Antonio Banderas had to turn down the role he'd been offered in Exit to Eden because he was playing Armand in Interview with the Vampire.

[00:41:29] So I bet he's glad he did that. 

Charlie Jane: [00:41:30] I think he probably chose the right one. Okay, so we're gonna get into both of those movies, but first let's talk about the fan controversies around Interview with the Vampire. 

Annalee: [00:41:41] Yeah. So the story of the Interview with a Vampire adaptation is long, and we're not gonna go into all of it, but basically the movie was optioned… the book was optioned almost immediately in 1976 after the book came out and it went through a bunch of different studios and different scripts. 

[00:41:56] And at one point, very close to the time that the movie was actually made, Anne Rice had written a script where Louis, the main male character was actually gonna be trans and played by Cher. So they were gonna be cross-dressing as a… Cher was gonna be cross-dressing as a man. And Cher was so close to the project that she actually wrote a song for the movie called “Lovers Forever,” which she released a long time later in 2013. So this project got pretty far along.

[Clip from “Lovers Forever” by Cher plays.] “We’ll be lovers for all time. Ageless and sublime. We’ll be lovers for all…”

[00:42:44] Anne Rice said that the reason that she made Louis a woman dressed as a man was because she didn't think that Hollywood would accept a gay relationship, and she just thought that the only way the story could possibly be told is if it was kind of heteronormative. 

Charlie Jane: [00:43:02] Yeah, they would totally accept trans guy, but not, not two gay men. I mean…

Annalee: [00:43:06] Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure if Cher was supposed to be a trans guy or if it was just supposed to be like a cross dress—I don't know. Anyway, the point is that it was, yes, it was very weird to imagine that that would be more acceptable than two guys. 

Charlie Jane: [00:43:24] But so we, I guess, didn't get to have Cher star in that movie, and instead we had Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, and you notice that Anne Rice was totally fine with that, right?

Annalee: [00:43:33] No. So this is where it gets interesting. So basically David Geffen is, is producing the film. Neil Jordan comes on board as the director right off of his hit film, The Crying Game, and he casts Tom Cruise as Lestat and Brad Pitt as Louis. 

[00:43:55] Anne Rice is at a fan convention the year before the movie comes out. So this is 1993, and the fans bring her this petition that they've created that tons of them have signed that is begging for the studio to not cast Tom Cruise in the role. And Anne Rice is radicalized by this. She agrees. She signs the petition and she starts making a huge stink in Hollywood, very publicly about how she hates Tom Cruise for the role.

[00:44:26] She goes so far as to say that she wishes that the studio had cast someone like Julian Sands. She suggests John Malkovich for the role. She, and again, she's doing this very publicly in interviews.

Charlie Jane: [00:44:38] Oh my God.

Annalee: [00:44:38] She's saying that even if they can't get those other actors, maybe they could switch Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise because she thinks Brad Pitt would make a better Lestat. She talks about how she thinks that Tom Cruise is rewriting the script to make it less sexual. 

[00:44:58] She is pissed, and so is Neil Jordan, the director. He does a bunch of interviews where he talks about how Anne Rice is being really unprofessional. David Geffen says the same thing. They're basically terrified that she's gonna sink this movie before it even comes out.

[00:45:13] And so a couple of months before the movie comes out, David Geffen and Neil Jordan invite Anne Rice to a special private screening of the film, and she watches it and she loves it. And she comes out a couple months before the film and says, actually, I was totally wrong. Tom Cruise is amazing. She calls Tom Cruise on the phone personally to apologize, and it winds up being kind of a tempest in a teapot.

[00:45:42] There's a lot of fan theories that maybe Anne Rice did this just for attention because when she kicked up a fuss about the casting, Interview with the Vampire got back on the New York Times bestseller list because of all the publicity around it. I don't think that's true. I think she genuinely was upset and I can see why, because I remember when the movie got cast and I was like, what the fuck? Tom Cruise is a gay vampire? I don't think so. It just felt really weird for like the Top Gun guy to be in this like role where he's supposed to be like lush and like French. 

Charlie Jane: [00:46:21] I mean, yeah.

Annalee: [00:46:22] It's a really weird casting choice and I get it. I mean obviously, having Tom Cruise signed on meant that people would go see the movie, but it also just felt like a really strange choice. 

[00:46:37] So I think that she really was genuinely swept up in the excitement of this fan campaign. And it's worth noting that, you know, back in 1993 when this happened, this was one of the first really big fan campaigns that Hollywood producers worried would actually wreck the possibility of the film doing well.

[00:46:57] There had been other fan campaigns, but this was incredibly high profile and it really set the stage for later fan campaigns that we see online. 

Charlie Jane: [00:47:07] Yeah, and I think it's really interesting because now if an author came out and publicly denounced the film or TV adaptation of their own work, it would be a huge big deal.

Annalee: [00:47:18] Yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:47:18] Thanks to social media and stuff. People would be freaking out and tearing their faces off and it would just become like a giant blow up. And there’s so much more—

Annalee: [00:47:28] Which it was at the time, like it was in all the… I mean, it was all over the media. It was big news.

Charlie Jane: [00:47:34] But I think social media would make it even bigger and even more insane and more toxic. And it would just, it would become, like, you'd have movie fans versus book fans, which I think has happened with one or two other properties recently. 

Annalee: [00:47:45] Yes. 

Charlie Jane: [00:47:45] So I did not remember that Exit to Eden came out right around the same time as Interview with the Vampire and, you know, so, okay. Anne Rice was very upset until she wasn't about Interview with a Vampire, but what kind of reaction did she have to Exit to Eden? 

Annalee: [00:48:05] So she doesn't seem to have cared very much about Exit to Eden, which is funny because talk about completely mangling the source material.

Charlie Jane: So, I've heard somewhere that the zany cop subplot with Dan Akroyd and Rosie O'Donnell was added after the film was made in reshoots or something.

Annalee: [00:48:27] Yeah, I heard that too, but it's actually not true. I did a bunch of research and the only place you can actually find that claim is on a TV Tropes trivia page. And I think that's probably because it seems like it should be true because this weird zany cop subplot feels so tacked on. But the reality is a lot weirder.

[00:48:52] Gary Marshall, who adapted the book, bought it after he had a hit movie called Pretty Woman, which was also about a kind of light romantic comedy / kinky sex, except not really kinky, just that one of the characters is a sex worker. 

[00:49:12] And so I think he decided that after Pretty Woman, obviously, Exit to Eden would be a great place to go.

[00:49:19] And then he said in interviews that he wanted to make a light and comedic version of the book because when he was reading it, he kept thinking about what he and his wife would do at the BDSM resort and how confused that they would be and like he wanted to offer that perspective to the reader. 

[00:49:40] So a little backstory, remember, Gary Marshall, aside from Pretty Woman is probably best known for creating the show. Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley and Mork and Mindy, which were classic cheesy sitcoms of the seventies and early eighties. And in order to adapt Exit to Eden, he actually brings in some of his colleagues from the Happy Days days to help write the script, which seems like a…

Charlie Jane: [00:50:08] Happy, Kinky Days.

Annalee: [00:50:11] I, yeah, so already, this is sounding really bad. So he just wanted to help people who were squeamish about BDSM deal with the story. Rosie O'Donnell and Dan Akroyd were definitely part of the project from the very, very beginning, and it's really hard to imagine how they would've been added after just like a test screening, because they're just integral to the show. They're huge stars at this point. But I also think that the rumors about how they were tacked on later might have gotten started because when the film came out, both Rosie O'Donnell and Dan Akroyd basically refused to do publicity for the film. They did a tiny bit and then they really distanced themselves from it.

[00:50:48] And so basically it was just Dana Delany and Gary Marshall promoting the film. And supposedly it completely tanked Dana Delany's career. 

Charlie Jane: [00:50:57] Oh, man. 

Annalee: [00:50:59] She had been a big TV star from her role on China Beach, and she basically went nowhere after that. It also helped to destroy the production company, Savoy Pictures, that made the movie. The movie only grossed $6.8 million and it cost about 25 to 30 million to make. And this is in ‘90s dollars. So yeah, it was a huge, huge misstep from every angle. This movie, Exit to Eden, is often listed on, you know, worst movies of the 20th century lists. Worst movies of all time lists, worst adaptations.

[00:51:36] So I think it's kind of no surprise that after this movie, after Exit to Eden and after Anne Rice's temper tantrum over Interview with the Vampire, there really aren't any big budget movies that are made of her work. 

Charlie Jane: But of course there is the delightful Queen of the Damned, which we recently watched and which is just, I don't even know how to describe it. It's like a weird fever dream of a Nine Inch Nails video featuring Aaliyah. Tell us more. How did that movie come to be?

Annalee: [00:52:03] It came out in 2002. It really was a hot mess. It's mostly remembered because it was the last movie that Aaliyah did before she tragically died at such a young age. And the only thing I could think of as I was watching that film is so they have Lestat as a rockstar who's like a fake Trent Reznor kind of character. And there's like, I would say, fully 20 minutes of the film is just him singing. 

[00:52:31] They have fucking Aaliyah in their movie, okay? Who is an incredible artist, an incredible singer. Never once does she get to sing or do shit. She just walks around in a sexy Egyptian outfit, pseudo-Egyptian outfit. Meanwhile, we have to listen to like boring, freaking bad, knockoff white boy goth guy. And it’s a terrible movie. I mean it's partly based on The Vampire Lestat,  it’s partly based on Queen of the Damned.

[00:53:04] It is, I guess, a sequel to Interview with the Vampire . None of the actors from Interview with the Vampire came back. None of the production staff came back. So that came out. 

[00:53:15] And then, actually, as I mentioned earlier, there was a TV mini-series of The Feast of All Saints, which came out the year before Queen of the Damned. Feast of All Saints, I am sad that that has been forgotten because it's cheesy, but it's actually kind of great. It has James Earl Jones in it as the main character. 

Charlie Jane: [00:53:39] Oh, wow. 

Annalee: [00:53:42] I mean, the main character is played by a younger guy, but there's a voiceover from James Earl Jones, like telling the story for the whole thing.

[00:53:49] And then the sort of young James Earl Jones is played by Robert Ri’chard, who was later in Veronica Mars and Vampire Diaries and Empire. He's great. It has Eartha Kitt and Ossie Davis and Forrest Whitaker. 

Charlie Jane: [00:54:02] Oh my God. 

Annalee: [00:54:03] It's like a who's who of like awesome African-American actors at the time. 

Charlie Jane: [00:54:07] That's a stacked cast.

Annalee: [00:54:10] I know, and it's about this historical period and this community of free people of color in New Orleans that just, I mean, barely ever gets talked about in historical dramas. I mean, I think now if you made this movie, it might find an audience because we have had so many fantastic Black directors and Black writers creating historical tales and creating historical fiction and movies. So maybe people would be more prepared. I don't know. 

[00:54:47] Anyway, it's great. You can find Feast of All Saints in various places online and you know, like I said, it's cheesy, but it's still really delightful. I really liked it.

Charlie Jane: [00:54:56] So that's kind of the end of Anne Rice in movies, right? Is you know, Queen of the Damned and Feast of All Saints and then there's like nothing for 20 years, right?

[00:55:05] But meanwhile her influence just pervades every corner of pop culture and especially goth culture and you know, how are we living in Anne Rice's world today?

Annalee: [00:55:16] Obviously she wasn't the only artist who was mainstreaming goth culture, but I think we can blame Anne Rice for Hot Topic a little bit.

[00:55:25] And I think that, just the idea that goth culture was something that any high school kid might be able to aspire to, that's a very Anne Rice influence. But also her erotica has continued to be incredibly influential. So it's not just about vampires. 50 Shades of Grey is absolutely inspired by the Beauty books.

Charlie Jane: [00:55:50] Oh yeah. 

Annalee: [00:55:50] And I have this weird idea that I was talking to you about earlier, which is that weirdly enough, Exit to Eden, the movie is kind of like an origin story for Chuck Tingle, who is an erotica writer who does comic BDSM and other types of erotic fiction. And he started out on Kindle and really hit the big time. And now Chuck Tingle is not just writing about being pounded in the butt by various fantastical entities, he's also under contract to write some mainstream horror books. 

[00:56:33] So he's kind of going the opposite route of Anne Rice, like he starts out with goofy erotica and is making his way into mainstream horror.

[00:56:41] But of course, Anne Rice never had a sense of humor. Like, you know, there's many wonderful things and many bad things about Anne Rice that we could say, but her sense of humor is nonexistent. Like it's neither good nor bad. She would never have written something silly. And anytime she does try to write things that are silly, it's a little embarrassing, so.

Charlie Jane: [00:57:00] And I think that's probably part of what people appreciate her is that it's just so sincere. 

Annalee: [00:57:05] Yeah. She is really, really sincere.

Charlie Jane: [00:57:07] I feel like irony would've actually ruined it. And like, I'm actually really nostalgic for the era when erotica was a big publishing category, like when you would have erotica sections in bookstores and there were publishers just putting out like gorgeous books of erotica all the time. And I feel like the internet and some other stuff have really kind of cut into that. Like there's not really a market for erotica like there used to be in the ‘80s and ‘90s and to some extent in the 2000s. And specifically that kind of career that Anne Rice had where she was alternating between writing kind of mainstream genre stories and also popular erotica books under a pseudonym, but everybody knew it was her. 

[00:57:45] That's the kind of career that you just can't have anymore. At least not in that way. Like I feel like it just doesn't exist anymore, and I feel like something has really been lost because it just feels like a bygone age of wonder that we could have, someone who was occupying both of those spaces and kind of those were cross fertilizing a little bit.

Annalee: [00:58:04] Yeah. It's interesting because we did talk a lot in this episode about how there's a lot of problematic sexuality in her books. There's a lot of problematic relationships that are represented as sexual, which are actually in fact just abusive, but at the same time there's a lot of really glorious, consensual, wonderful sex in her books, and I think she really normalized the idea that gay sex could be awesome.

Charlie Jane: [00:58:30] Yeah. 

Annalee: [00:58:30] That gay romance could be awesome. That gay romance could transcend the ages and last for thousands of years and be just this beautiful, complicated thing. And that families were not just a mommy-daddy-baby situation. 

Charlie Jane: [00:58:45] Yeah. 

Annalee: [00:58:45] That you could have families that were big extended groups, that included queer people, that included people who switched bodies and switched genders. 

[00:58:57] And I think that's something, also, that we really owe to Anne Rice in a sense is the ability to write books where, and tell stories where you have big gay romance, you know? And that's just part of the story. It's not the point of the story. The point of the story is vampire shit, but also lots of gay romance and that brings me to the last thing I want us to talk about.

[00:59:24] We're kind of winding up in the present with Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, the TV series. 

Charlie Jane: [00:59:32] Yay. 

Annalee: [00:59:32] We finally got back to it. I fricking love this series.

Charlie Jane: [00:59:38] Same.

Annalee: [00:59:38] I started out thinking of it as really cheesy because the first couple episodes truly were cheesy.

[00:59:46] I mean, I loved them, but they were just big old plates of goof. And then it got really serious, you know, I mean like, look, the first episode has floating blood sucking butt sex in it. And I was like, I love this, but it's a little silly. 

Charlie Jane: [01:00:02] Who doesn't want that? 

Annalee: [01:00:05] Who doesn't want that? I mean, it was, it was great. But by the end of the series, it was like incredibly deep and mournful and complicated. I just, damn, and I love the way that the writers of the series updated it to the 1920s. Instead of setting it in like the 1830s under slavery, it's clearly they're into Jim Crow. And a bunch of the story deals with how Louis is being kind of boxed in by the laws of Jim Crow era, Southern good old boy, people, I don't know. I'm piling a bunch of nouns together here. 

[01:00:46] But what I mean is that it’s a show that kind of combines the Feast of All Saints with Interview with the Vampire and sets it in the 1920s because it's very much about race in New Orleans and about how people of color in New Orleans had this special status.

[01:01:09] And it's also about being a vampire.

Charlie Jane: [01:01:10] Yeah. And you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but Louis goes from being like a slave owning plantation guy in the book in the 1830s to being a Black man dealing with racism in the 19-teens and 1920s in the TV show. And I think that that's a much better way of telling this story and I think the dynamic between Louis and Lestat gets a lot more interesting because of that. And you know, I'm gonna be honest, especially after our conversation that we've just had, I'm probably not gonna read anymore Anne Rice books because I just don't think that they'd be my cup of tea. But I am obsessed with this show, and I think that this show is giving me the version of this story that I really need.

[01:01:49] And there's kind of an art to updating things that are beloved, but problematic. Like this is something that we talk about a lot is how to kind of preserve the good aspects and the core of what makes it so wonderful while kind of shucking away some of the more cringey or upsetting or just super messed up aspects of the story.

[01:02:10] And I think that the makers of the Interview with the Vampire story did a really good job of having things like Claudia, the child vampire, and this abusive relationship between Louis and Lestat without ever kind of like spilling over into kind of really wanting to explore pedophilia or, you know, non-consensual/abusive relationships in a way that kind of glamorizes them.

[01:02:34] And I think it’s very deftly handled.

Annalee: [01:02:36] Yeah, I think that… so in the book, Lestat and Louis have an abusive relationship where Lestat is clearly controlling Louis in many ways and having them be an interracial couple really highlights that in a way that brings it home. I mean, it really gives us a way of thinking about how their dynamic isn't just a personal dynamic.

[01:03:06] It's not just that there's a controlling, overbearing dude and his boyfriend. It's like Lestat has the weight of culture on his side, and he's also a rich guy from out of town. So whatever he does, it won't have any consequences. Whereas Louis has family that goes back generations in this town, and he actually an entrepreneur. He runs a brothel and he’s supporting his family that way. And if his business is wrecked because his messy white boyfriend is just traipsing around town, tormenting all the other rich white people, Louis’ family's gonna suffer if from the blow back. And so it's very richly textured.

[01:03:51] Claudia is a fantastically interesting character. She's still represented as a teenager, but it's not a sort of squicky pedophilic thing. It's more that she's kind of stuck in this family dynamic with Louie and Lestat, who are more her brothers than her fathers. 

[01:04:09] They sort of start out as her fathers but then there's a great scene where she's like, I am not your daughter. I am your sister. And they're like, yeah, actually. Yeah. And I loved that they, they shifted the tone tremendously in that moment where it was like, yes, now we're equals and we're a family in that way. 

Charlie Jane: [01:04:28] Yeah. Claudia's just such a great character in the show. 

Annalee: [01:04:31] Yeah, she's really at the center of the first season for sure. And I love the ending, too. What did you think about the ending? Spoilers.

Charlie Jane: [01:04:40] Not being steeped in the lore. I wasn't like, when the big reveal happens of who this guy who's been by Louis’ side the whole time is I was like, oh, okay. But I did love… I loved kind of the way that everything was wrapped up and the way that the dynamic between Louis and this interviewer, this journalist character, Daniel Malloy, kind of shifts over the course of the season. And I loved that. It turns out this guy who's just been kind of standing there inconspicuously the whole time is actually this super badass, awesome, ancient vampire guy.

Annalee: [01:05:12] Yeah. I think anyone who's familiar with the vampire books when they get to the end of the series will be like, oh my God. Yeah, ahmigawd. And it sets the tone for next season. They've been renewed for a second season, and word from the writers is that the second season of the show will focus on basically the second part of Interview with the Vampire, where Louis and Claudia go to Paris and discover the Teatre des Vampires and meet Armand and discover what it's like to have been a vampire who grew up with a very dark version of Christianity. So I can't wait for the next season. 

Charlie Jane: [01:05:58] I cannot frickin’ wait.

Annalee: [01:06:01] So it's been really fun getting to info dump to you about Anne Rice and I continue—

Charlie Jane: [01:06:06] I loved it.

Annalee: [01:06:07] –to feel like her career is just fascinating and it's something, as you said, that I don't think could happen now, and she was part of so many cultural shifts that we now take for granted, like the idea of a sympathetic monster, horny monsters, writing erotica that becomes best-selling which is also something that we kind of take for granted now, I guess with 50 Shades of Grey.

[01:06:34] She was also part of this fan protest movement, which again, something we take for granted now that was really, really weird in 1993. And I think honestly, that a lot of people are enjoying work now that she influenced and they don't even realize it. 

Charlie Jane: [01:06:51] Yeah. And you know, I have come away from this discussion with like a new appreciation of how, even though I haven't read most of her work, and I probably won't ever read most of her work, I am definitely in many ways indebted to her like I just didn't even realize.

[01:07:06] But also, holy cow, those books are weird. I mean, just so much weirder than I had possibly ever imagined. Like the whole, I'm gonna have nightmares about the walking babies. I'm just gonna like put that out there. Fricking nightmare fuel. 

Annalee: [01:07:18] It is severely gross. Yeah. And I didn't even—

Charlie Jane: [01:07:19] Nightmare fuel.

Annalee: [01:07:20] Yeah, I didn't get into all the vampire incest stuff too, but there's plenty of that. Plenty of that. It's—

Charlie Jane: [01:07:26] Why? Why, Anne, Why?

Annalee: [01:07:29] See, this is why I compared her work to William Faulkner's work in my dissertation, because we all think of him as like an August literary figure, but his books are full of rape and incest and fucked up southern families and slavery turning families into horrific, monster people.

[01:07:53] And if you want the literary version of Anne Rice, check out The Sound and the Fury. Check out Absalom, Absalom! They basically are about vampires.

[01:08:03] All right, so on that note, now that I've given you some English literature homework, thank you so much for listening. Remember, you can always find us on Patreon at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.

[01:08:20] We'd love it if you would help us out by throwing us five bucks a month. You can find us on TikTok and Instagram, and thank you so much to our wonderful producer, Veronica Simonetti, who is sitting here producing the show while she has the flu because she a fucking powerhouse. And thank you to Chris Palmer for the music and see you on Discord if you're a patron.

[01:08:44] Otherwise, you'll hear us in your ears in two weeks. 

Together: [01:08:46] Bye.

[01:08:46] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]