Interview With The Vampire

PLOT

In modern-day San Francisco, reporter Daniel Molloy interviews Louis de Pointe du Lac, who claims to be a vampire. Louis describes his human life as a wealthy plantation owner in 1791 Spanish Louisiana. Despondent following the death of his wife and unborn child, he drunkenly wanders the waterfront of New Orleans one night and is attacked by the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt. Lestat senses Louis's dissatisfaction with life and offers to turn him into a vampire. Louis accepts, but quickly comes to regret it. While Lestat revels in the hunt and killing of humans, Louis resists his instinct to kill, instead drinking animal blood to sustain himself. Disgusted by Lestat's pleasure in killing, Louis comes to suffer tremendously as a vampire.

Wandering the streets of New Orleans amid an outbreak of plague, Louis can resist his hunger no more and feeds on a little girl whose mother died in the plague. To entice Louis to stay with him, Lestat turns the dying girl, Claudia, into a vampire. Together, they raise her as a daughter. Louis has a pure fatherly love for Claudia, while Lestat spoils and treats her more as a pupil, training her to become a merciless killer. Thirty years pass, and Claudia matures psychologically but remains a little girl in appearance and continues to be treated as such by Lestat. When she finally realizes that she will never grow older or become a mature woman, she is furious with Lestat and tells Louis that they should leave him. She tricks Lestat into drinking the "dead blood" of twin boys whom she killed by overdose with laudanum, which weakens Lestat, and then slits his throat. Though Louis is shocked and upset by Lestat's death, he helps Claudia dump Lestat's body in an alligator swamp. They spend weeks planning a voyage to Europe to search for other vampires, but Lestat returns on the night of their departure, having survived on the blood of swamp creatures. Lestat attacks them, but Louis sets him on fire and, in the ensuing blaze, they are able to escape to their ship and depart.

After traveling around Europe and the Mediterranean but finding no other vampires, Louis and Claudia settle harmoniously in Paris in 1870. Louis encounters vampires Santiago and Armand by chance. Armand invites Louis and Claudia to his coven, the Théâtre des Vampires, where the vampires stage theatrical horror shows for humans. On their way out of the theater, Santiago reads Louis's mind and suspects that Louis and Claudia murdered Lestat. Armand warns Louis to send Claudia away for her own safety, and Louis is intrigued to stay with Armand and learn about the meaning of being a vampire. Claudia demands that Louis turn a human woman, Madeleine, into a vampire to be her new protector and companion, and he reluctantly complies. Shortly thereafter, the Parisian vampires abduct the three of them and punish them for Lestat's murder, imprisoning Louis in a coffin and trapping Claudia and Madeleine in a chamber, where sunlight burns them to ash. Armand does nothing to prevent this, but the next day he frees Louis. Seeking revenge, Louis returns to the theater at dawn and sets it on fire, killing all the vampires. Armand arrives in time to help Louis escape the sunrise, and once again offers him a place by his side. Louis rejects Armand and leaves, knowing Armand had allowed Claudia's murder so that he could have Louis to himself.

As decades pass, Louis never recovers from the loss of Claudia and dejectedly explores the world alone. He returns to New Orleans in 1988 and one night encounters a decayed, weakened Lestat, living as a recluse in an abandoned mansion and surviving on rat blood as Louis once had. Lestat expresses regret for having turned Claudia into a vampire and asks Louis to rejoin him, but Louis declines and leaves. Louis concludes his interview with Molloy, prompting Molloy to beseech Louis to make him his new vampire companion. Louis is outraged that Molloy has not understood the tale of suffering he has related, and attacks Molloy to scare him into abandoning the idea. Louis then vanishes, and Molloy runs to his car and takes off, while playing the cassette tapes of Louis' interview in his car. On the Golden Gate Bridge, Lestat appears and attacks Molloy, taking control of the car. Revived by Molloy's blood, Lestat offers Molloy the choice that he "never had" — whether or not to become a vampire — and, laughing, continues driving over the bridge.

CAST

Brad Pitt as Louis de Pointe du Lac

Tom Cruise as Lestat de Lioncourt

Christian Slater as Daniel Molloy

Kirsten Dunst as Claudia

Antonio Banderas as Armand

Stephen Rea as Santiago

Domiziana Giordano as Madeleine

Thandie Newton as Yvette

George Kelly as Dollmaker

Marcel Iureş as Paris Vampire[5]

Sara Stockbridge as Estelle

Indra Ové as New Orleans Whore

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

based on Anne Rice's 1976 novel of the same name