The reboot shapes Anne Rice’s genre-defining tale in intriguing ways, shifting the timeline to New Orleans’ Storyville red light district in the early 1900s.
It is the question that gives liftoff to a newly reconstructed “Interview With the Vampire” series
Blessed by Rice , this reimagining strikes me as the best sort of reboot in that it takes the mould of her genre-defining tale but shapes it in intriguing ways. Starring Jacob Anderson as Louis de Pointe du Lac and Sam Reid as Lestat de Lioncourt, it has — for one — shifted the 1791 Louisiana timeline of the original book to the heyday of the storied Storyville red light district in New Orleans in the early 1900s.
Most significantly, this series deftly nails the emotional fluency of the Anne Rice books, in that as much as her world is, of course, about bloodsuckers, it really is about the burden of existence … and longing … and, well, a howling loneliness. Including the storied home she settled in and I found myself looking up at. Pink-hued, three-storied and Italianate. A beauty. With a giant mossy tree that looms in front and winds toward an upper window. It stopped me in my tracks. There was something moving about seeing the tree that Rice herself looked out at for years, standing firm, as she wrote and wrote.