Nature vs. 'Interview With the Vampire'
Did this movie make me gay?
I am not really a horror queen by any means, but when I was a kid (in my pre-teen years, mostly), I was a little obsessed with the genre. Most of my decision making at the time was based on pushing the boundaries my parents set up for me. The most rebellious thing I ever did was asking for a Dallas Cowboys Starter jacket when I was in sixth grade, partially because Starter jackets were very popular at school, and because my father was a Washington Redskins fan. You see, I have always been petty, even when it came to supporting a football team when I had no interest in or understanding of football in the first place. (One of my grandmothers eventually bought me the jacket for Christmas, and I think we should have had a family therapy session about this.) I was a good kid who followed the rules, so the only way to act out was to annoy my parents with ridiculous sartorial requests. The joke, of course, was on me — I then had to wear a massive, puffy coat with sports insignia all over it.
When it came to horror, my interest was rooted mostly in my parents’ refusal to let me watch R-rated movies. I was always obsessed with movies, and I trained my brain into being a pre-Internet IMDb by the time I was ten years old. The drug store in town rented videos, and I’d often ride my bike over there and stand in the little closet that housed them for hours, studying the VHS boxes. I was particularly fascinated by the horror section of any video store, because in the late eighties and early nineties the cover art for those movies was totally disgusting. I’m talking about Robert Englund pulling off his mask to reveal his bloody face on the cover of the non-musical Phantom of the Opera. The severed hand about to ring a doorbell on the cover of House. Every single film in the Hellraiser franchise. All of them were gross, and yet compelling to look at — especially because I wasn’t allowed to see the movies themselves, and could only imagine how revolting they actually were.
Vampires were also very appealing, probably because they combine an inherent spookiness and an overt sexuality, the latter of which I also found generally terrifying. I think there’s a moment when you realize how horny vampires can be; until then, they are just creepy figures who float outside your window and politely beg to be let inside to drink your blood. (For example: the made-for-TV adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot and the movie version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.) The snippets of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that I managed to catch on TV before turning the channel in fear (of my mother catching me, probably) were enticing. Those three sexy vampire brides, one of whom played by Monica Bellucci! Gary Oldman trying to bone Winona Ryder! Sadie Frost writhing in ecstasy and pain! I didn’t understand it, but I was fascinated.
I was eleven years old when Interview With the Vampire came out, and it felt like a very big deal at the time. I had already begun subscribing to Entertainment Weekly, and seeing the two-page spread dedicated to the film in the Fall Movie Preview issue was life-changing. There was Tom Cruise, suddenly blond and looking as if he had stolen Nicole Kidman’s haircut. There was Brad Pitt with long hair and full, pouty lips. Kirsten Dunst! A new star, some break-out actress who was my age and got to be in an R-rated horror movie that I was certain I’d never be allowed to see until I moved out of the house. I was desperate to see this film, and I thought I would die if I couldn’t.
It didn’t help that my friend Jannette was allowed to see the movie, just like she was allowed to watch anything she wanted, and not only bragged about it but described scenes in detail that were hilarious and terrifying and sexy and intriguing. Her parents didn’t care if she and her siblings said the f-word, either, which was fucked up!!! I was extremely jealous and it was more proof that life was ultimately unfair. (She lives in Australia now, probably a natural result of having a much cooler childhood than me, but I am not jealous because despite being borderline obsessed with Australian accents, I am extremely terrified of the local fauna.)
A year later, when I was in seventh grade, the film premiered on HBO and I began scheming ideas of how to see it. One might think it would have been easy enough to simply sit in front of the TV for two hours to watch it. But how, when nighttime TV time was devoted to watching things like the Thursday night Must See TV lineup on NBC with my parents? I didn’t yet have a TV in my bedroom — my parents finally let me have one on the condition that I save up my allowance and buy it myself, which wouldn’t happen for another year. I couldn’t watch it turning the day time because HBO didn’t air R-rated movies until after primetime. Imagine a time when you could not just put on any movie you wanted! That was my entire childhood: a lack of streaming video, limited private and uninterrupted access to a television, and my mom’s ridiculous insistence that I wasn’t mature enough for a movie that an actor my age was allowed to be in. (I did see the occasional R-rated movies after my parents vetted them first, but Interview With the Vampire was definitely not going to pass because my mother refused to watch it on account of the gore.)
Of course, I could have broken the rules. I could have snuck into the living room after my parents went to bed, watching a late-night airing of the movie at low volume in the hopes that they wouldn’t catch me. I could have simply tried to rent the video from a store — my grandmother would sometimes drive me there in the summer, never paying attention to what I actually picked out, and surely my good standing with the people who worked there would have convinced them it was fine to let me have it. But these seemed too easy — and thus, too easy to get in trouble.
So I had to come up with a plan.
On the second day of seventh grade, I was sitting in my English class waiting patiently for our teacher to line us up and take us to lunch. A few minutes before the lunch period began, Mrs. H. made an announcement: She had diabetes, and before lunch every day she needed to test her blood sugar by pricking the end of her finger and placing the tiny drop of blood into a device. Before I knew what was happening, she did this right in front of the classroom — right in front of me, as having a last name that began with a C meant I was cursed with always having an alphabetically assigned seat in the front row.
“See, it’s not even that big of a deal!” Mrs. H. said when the little device beeped a few times. She wanted to show us this at the beginning of the year so we wouldn’t freak out about it. And usually when someone does something with the intention of not freaking me out, it has the opposite effect — it becomes, indeed, a big deal.
I couldn’t even see anything, but my brain went into overdrive.
Blood. Needles.
Needles.
Bloooooood.
I freaked out. I started to feel light-headed and woozy, and when we all got up from our desks to head to the cafeteria, I awkwardly stumbled toward my teacher to ask if I could go to the nurse. I can imagine what I looked like, because I distinctly remember the look of terror on my teacher’s face. (“Your face went completely white,” she said after she escorted me to the nurse’s office.) Luckily I did not pass out, but it did begin a series of what I would refer to as “spells,” because that sounds so cute and charming, like something out of a Tennessee Williams play. But I was not a past-her-prime Southern lady who had been driven to madness by some gay man (a recurring theme in his plays, and also in my early adulthood); I was just a weird teenager with a sensitive soul who would work himself up into a nervous frenzy whenever blood or needles were discussed in school, almost as if I absolutely needed another reason to embarrass myself in front of the rest of the boys in health class. (I somehow avoided watching The Bad Video, the one that captured the miracle of childbirth — an infamous educational film that traumatized many kids at A. T. Johnson Middle School — probably because no one wanted to have to deal with my reaction to it.) Sometimes the fear of fainting in front of my classmates was enough to actually make me faint, a psychosomatic game I played with my dumb body, and one I kept losing. In hindsight, I now know that what I was experiencing were panic attacks; at the time, however, I (and every adult I knew) thought I was just being dramatic, having a physical reaction to an anxiety that was ultimately all my fault in the first place.
One might think that my feelings toward blood and needles in real life might have kept me from pursuing the biggest goal of my life at the time, which was to watch Interview With the Vampire. (I will suffer in the name of art — or at least I was more willing then than I am now.) And maybe Mrs. H.’s guilt over me nearly passing out in class on the second day of school was what allowed me to convince her to be complicit in my pursuit of achieving that goal. I also had a distinct ability to charm a grown-up into giving me what I wanted, a very good-kid quality that I saved only in cases of emergency. And this was a cultural emergency.
So, weeks later, when Mrs. H. casually mentioned in class that she liked vampire movies— and, after I asked, she admitted she had not yet seen Interview With the Vampire — my big gifted-and-talented brain, likely at its fullest potential (at the age of twelve, how sad), thought of a mutually beneficial situation: My parents had HBO, which was currently airing Interview With the Vampire in its rotation. My teacher did not have HBO (or the strong enough interest in going to the video store to rent the movie, I guess). So I naturally offered to tape the movie for her and bring it to school with me. It seemed foolproof: I was merely doing a generous favor for my teacher, something my parents couldn’t possibly refuse. Would you say no to a child who wanted to take a fresh apple to gift to his teacher? Of course not! The same goes for bootleg recordings of modified-for-cable-TV feature films, which is admittedly a much weirder present for a teacher.
I checked TV Guide, waited days for another primetime airing of the film, and by the end of the week had it in my possession, like some black market jewel I had defied all odds to obtain. All of this was on the books, as it were — I was upfront with my parents, letting them know about this extremely kind pop-cultural gesture (without letting on the way in which I would benefit from it). The following Monday, I treated myself to a fake malady (a headache, a sore throat, a stomach ache — some ailment that could not be disproven by my mother, and just bad enough to warrant a day home from school), and with my parents out of the house for a full day, I was able to finally watch the film I was most desperate to see before surrendering it over to my teacher as promised.
What the hell was happening inside my brain when I finally watched Interview With the Vampire?
This is not a rhetorical question. I remember so many details leading up to it: the fights with my mother in which I begged to watch it; the clips I saw in commercials and trailers and Entertainment Tonight featurettes; the HBO behind-the-scenes special. But I don’t remember anything from the afternoon I watched it, having finally achieved this very big accomplishment that required tricking at least three adults in the process.
I don’t remember having any nightmares, so it didn’t scare me. I don’t remember feeling sick, so the gore didn’t get to me. I do remember one scene toward the end, after Brad Pitt’s Louis and Kirsten Dunst’s Claudia have traveled from New Orleans to Paris and encounter a tribe of vampires who are living nearly out in the open, performing as a theater troupe and munching on poor French waifs for the delight of unsuspecting audiences who believe it all to be an avant-garde production. Those vampires, led by Stephen Rea, kidnap Claudia and her newly turned vampire nanny and lock them in a tower without a roof, so that when the sun rises the next day they are charred to crisps and eventually turned to ash — vampire justice served upon the immortal little girl who can never grow up, who murdered (or so we think) Tom Cruise’s Lestat before she and Louis fled for Europe. I remember that scene vividly, because it felt so shocking and unsettling to watch a girl my age be burned to death by the sun, even if, according to the laws of vampiric social justice, she deserved it.
Why then can I not remember how I felt about any other part of the movie? Is it because eventually, as an adult, I’d return to it multiple times as it is ultimately very good, even if Brad Pitt is wooden and boring and his uninspired narration nearly slows the whole film to a halt from the beginning? Have all of those re-watches erased that first viewing, the thing that at one point in my life I was so desperate to achieve?
I have another theory, which may be a reach, but let’s just go with it.
Interview With the Vampire is quite possibly the most homoerotic studio-backed film ever made. It’s still quite baffling, to be honest. Tom Cruise is hamming it up, giving a top-five performance as the devious Lestat, who literally picks up a depressed Louis on the street in New Orleans and carries him into the night sky as he sucks on his heck. Louis, once he is turned, pouts and mopes around Louisiana, existentially antagonized by the vampire who made him one of his kind. Lestat eventually turns Claudia so that Louis can have a companion, but really the pair raise her like a daughter. Claudia is an assertive and strong-willed woman stuck forever in a child’s body, furious with her eternal state and the fathers who made her that way. And later, in Paris, Louis meets Antonio Banderas’ Armand, and the two mope and pout together with long, luscious hair, the sexual tension off the fucking charts. These beautiful men, unable to age, spitefully ruining each other for all eternity, their faces and lips nearly crossing paths but always holding back. I mean, that is erotica, babe! Are you allowed to be a vampire if you’re not sexy? Not in Anne Rice’s world — and frankly, the same is true for mine.
I mean… kiss! kiss! kiss!!!
That mixture of darkness and desire, those broad strokes of queerness, those nineties heartthrobs coming together at the precise moment I was about to enter puberty — no wonder whatever thoughts I had at the time had to be buried somewhere dark and deep and out of reach. (“GAY? File it away!” would have been a cute slogan.) This was 1995, and I was twelve years old. I didn’t really understand what any of it meant, how it made me feel, what it said about me that I recognized something exciting and appealing about those men living forever, being eternally beautiful, always needing to suck the life out of somebody else in order to survive.
Today, of course, I think of the movie in the specific context of Hollywood in 1995. Tom Cruise was a star, but he was not really the giant action hero he is today; this is the kind of big-budget adult horror-drama that allowed him to actually act. Isn’t it ironic that the queer themes are so visible, considering he’s dodged those rumors for most of his career? (I don’t buy that he’s gay, by the way.) Plus he’s wearing fangs — drawing attention to his teeth in a way that his lawyers would eventually start to combat in the following decade when his star power intersected with his bizarre public behavior as the most famous Scientologist on the planet. (Go ahead and google “Tom Cruise teeth.”) Brad Pitt was also huge, and it’s a shame how awful he is in the movie; he’d later say that he had nothing to do in the film and was ultimately too depressed because the bulk of it was shot at night. And it’s another movie haunted by the ghost of River Phoenix, who was originally cast as the interviewer; Christian Slater booked the role after Phoenix died and donated his salary to charity. (And, if you’ve read Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland — a book I plowed through a couple of months ago, and one I recommend! — Stephen Rea showing up as some European vampire who’s into clowning is especially exciting. I won’t give away why.)
And, of course: Kirsten Dunst! She’s acting laps around most of the cast, proving that she basically arrived fully formed at the age of ten and was able to play a very adult role as a kid. (She’s also since expressed how embarrassing/gross it was that Brad Pitt was “her first kiss.”) I’d argue it’s one of the great child performances of all time (if not the best!) because she’s not simply playing precocious as much as she’s inhabiting the mind of a thirty-something in a child’s body. (Her only contemporary who could have handled that — and did, many times over — was Christina Ricci, another low-key goth icon. Do yourself a favor and watch The Ice Storm, The Opposite of Sex, and Buffalo ‘66. What a run she had over the course of two years.)
Back in 1995, though, none of these thoughts were on my radar. I probably just wanted to watch the horny sad-vampire movie, because maybe a little part of me — the awkward kid stuck in a small town, prone to worrying and fainting spells and having no one to talk about any of this with — thought that eternal life as a globetrotting vampire was aspirational. Honestly? It still kind of is. And while I don’t think it’s possible that a movie can make you gay (if that were true, I’d point blame at the 1985 made-for-TV movie Alice in Wonderland starring Carol Channing, among other wacky musical theater performers), it’s highly likely that this one in particular established a certain aesthetic for me. Louis is the sad boy, Lestat the bad boy, and I’m the one pining for both to notice me somehow.