Since it’s Halloween time, everyone is taking the time to get together to have some watch parties, do costume contests, and take time to binge on their favorite films that involve the horror and thriller genre. One of the most-watched movies during Halloween time is the now-timeless 1994 classic “Interview With The Vampire”, a movie by Neil Jordan whose ensemble cast and complex plot and ending we will try to unravel for you.
An adaptation of Anne Rice’s novel of the same title, this movie features an ensemble cast starring Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Antonio Banderas, Christian Slater, Stephen Rea, Kirsten Dunst, and Thandie Newton. With such a talented cast, the movie became a cult film, spawning a franchise and a following that endures with spinoffs and even a reboot series.
Interview With The Vampire Plot
Daniel Molloy is a reporter looking for a story and he talks to this shady looking dude called Louis de Pointe Du Lac in San Francisco. Louis writes of his existence as a prosperous plantation owner in Spanish Louisiana in 1791. Dejected after losing his wife and unborn child, he wanders about the New Orleans shoreline intoxicated one night and is ambushed by the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt.
Upon detecting Louis’s discontentment with life, Lestat proposes to transform him into a vampire. Louis agrees, but he soon regrets it. Lestat enjoys hunting down and murdering people, but Louis fights the need to kill and survives by consuming animal blood.
Louis eventually comes into contact with a young child whose mother perished from the plague during a New Orleans outbreak. Claudia, the dying girl, is turned into a vampire by Lestat in an attempt to get Louis to stay with him. They raise her like a daughter together. Lestat nurtures Claudia and treats her more like a student, teaching her to be a cold-blooded killer, while Louis has feelings for her.
After three decades, Claudia experiences psychological growth, but she still has the appearance of a small child and is regarded as such by Lestat. She is enraged at Lestat and tells Louis that they should part ways with him after realizing that she will never age or mature as a woman.
Lestat weakens after he swallows the “dead blood” of the twin boys she killed by poisoning them, and she then cuts his throat.
In shock, Louis helps out Claudia in getting rid of of Lestat’s body in a dark and filthy swampy marsh. Lestat arrives the night before the two are supposed to leave, because he drank blood from swamp animals.
Louis sets Lestat on fire, preventing him from attacking them and then they take off on their ship.
Louis and Claudia find themselves in Paris in September 1870, having traveled throughout Europe and the Mediterranean region in search of additional vampire communities.
By coincidence, Louis runs into vampires Santiago and Armand. Louis and Claudia are invited by Armand to his coven, the Théâtre des Vampires, where vampires perform theatrical horror productions for the general public. As they leave the theater, Santiago reads Louis’s thoughts and surmises that Lestat was slain by Louis and Claudia.
For Claudia’s own safety, Armand advises Louis to send her away. Louis stays with Armand to discover what it means to be a vampire. Reluctantly, Louis acquiesces to Claudia’s demands that he transform Madeleine, a human woman, into a vampire so that she might have companionship and protection.
Soon after, the three of them are kidnapped by the Parisian vampires as retaliation for Lestat’s murder. Louis is locked in a coffin, while Claudia and Madeleine are trapped in a room where sunlight eventually burns them to ashes. Though Armand does nothing to stop it, he frees Louis the following day. Louis returns to the theater at daybreak with the intention of exacting revenge.
He sets it on fire, killing all the vampires—including Santiago. Louis is able to flee before the sun rises thanks to Armand, who also extends an invitation to stay by his side. Unable to embrace Armand’s way of life, which entails forgetting the past and accepting that Armand permitted Claudia’s death, Louis rejects Armand and departs.
Interview With The Vampire Ending Explained
Decades later, Louis is still grieving for Claudia and wanders the world by himself in a forlorn manner. When he returns to New Orleans in 1988, he finds Lestat, who has deteriorated and decayed, living alone in an abandoned mansion and subsisting on rat blood, just like Louis did. Louis turns down Lestat’s invitation to return after he apologizes for turning Claudia into a vampire and walks away.
After Louis ends his conversation with Molloy, Molloy begs Louis to take him on as his new vampire friend. Louis attacks Molloy in an attempt to intimidate him into giving up the notion because he is furious that Molloy has not grasped the story of misery he has told.
Playing the cassette tapes of Louis’s interview, Molloy dashes to his car and drives away. Lestat shows up on the Golden Gate Bridge, assaults Molloy, and seizes control of the vehicle. Lestat, who has been given life by Molloy’s blood, gives him the option he “never had”—choosing to become a vampire or not—and, grinning, drives on.
“Interview With The Vampire” builds to a startling and moving conclusion. The tense alliance between Lestat, Claudia, and Louis finally comes to an end. As Claudia comes to terms with the fact that Lestat will never be able to provide her with the life she wants, her hatred for him grows. Louis and Claudia manage to kill Lestat in a pivotal encounter and flee to Europe, but their newfound freedom is fleeting.
During their travels through Europe, they come across the Theatre des Vampires, an underground society of vampires who pretend to be actors and perform macabre, ritualistic plays for gullible spectators. They meet Armand here, an attractive old vampire who falls in love with Louis. Claudia, on the other hand, grows frustrated with her ongoing captivity in a child’s body.
Louis has to choose and that choice is a really f-ed up one because Claudia is defying her vampiric instincts. What’s the choice? Well, it’s one that determines everyone’s fate.
Because Armand and Louis trying to save Claudia from her never-ending suffering, the movie ends, leaving viewers to consider the consequences of their decisions and the weight of immortality.
By the end, the film smash cuts back to the present day, where Louis tells Daniel his story. Interview with The Vampire concludes with a few disturbing things like the fact that being immortal means you’ll be forever alone and suffering.
