Anna Sibilia

David Steiling

August 23, 2015

Fangs and Fascination

Why These Parasites Are Perfect

Throughout history, vampires have a consistent record of dominating the fictional world, for better or for worse. These leeches have latched onto minds innumerable and thus have been passed on as a tradition from generation to generation. They are one of the most popularized form of demons to exist in mainstream horror, fiction, and other genres of media. Often aloof and sultry, vampires are commonly portrayed as masters of seduction and temptation; they lure in both the audience and their victim with mysterious charms, working into the cracks of the human facade with a practiced grace and smooth precision. Vampires are the royalty of the underworld as they have the uncanny ability to control and manipulate seemingly anyone and anything, and the characters in Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice are no different.

Louis de Pointe du Lac was a man born into a plantation owning family in New Orleans who’d become a broken man after the death of his brother, Paul, whom had passed after fight between them. Having been left with self-loathing and guilt, Louis had made it his personal mission to find death as quickly as he could to be freed from this miserable existence. Enter Lestat de Lioncourt, a suave vampire hailing from the Auvergne region of France. Noticing Louis’s misery, he decided to trick the many into becoming his immortal company. From then on, Louis has to struggle with keeping his humanity untainted from the corruptive influence of Lestat, while his new natural urges compel him to act in a similar, bloodthirsty manner. 

As a story-telling tool, these men demonstrate the concept of temptation and virtue extremely well, which is a common theme of vampiric works. The undead immortals are constantly used to display how fragile man is, be it in a moral, physical, or mental sense. Lestat uses a mind games and his knowledge of predatory instincts in order to guide Louis down a darker, more destructive path that fits his new, supernatural role more appropriately. Louis is meant to champion the strength of men and his devotion to all that is right and pure, a telling theme from Gothic Literature as it implements the grace of the divine as a way of helping the characters fend off the other who has ‘fallen from grace’. 

Vampires have always been representative of the devil, and there reaches a point in Interview with the Vampire in which this is painful apparent: the taking of Claudia. During this scene the audience is witness to the quarreling thoughts and savage desires within Louis’s mind; we see him rent over his wants of nothing want to kill and save the sickly child whom he’d almost killed before. His ‘tainted’ side wants to devour her, to drink her dry so that he might live longer:

“…I couldn't bear it, looking at her, wanting her not to die and wanting her; and the more I 

looked at her, the more I could taste her skin, feel my arm sliding under her back and pulling her up to me, feeling her soft neck. Soft, soft, that's what she was, so soft…”

And all the while his moral conscience is revolting and demanding that he spare her, to not commit such an evil act, yet he give in to his urges, only to let another, worse fate overcome the girl. With her wrenched away from him, Lestat ensures that the girl is turned into a vampire instead of killed, now cursed and used as a tool of extortion for Louis. 

With this type of personification and attitude, it is no wonder that the myth of these man-eaters has survived for so long; they are a perfect parallel for the devil in terms coercion and lies. While this particular story does evoke sympathy for the crumbling of Louis’s humanity, it also exemplifies man’s resilience when brought to the gates of hell; though he make break and falter through the fiery maze, he will succeed and triumph when his mettle is tested. Vampires are a cruel, oppressing monster, though they are one of the best ways to highlight the inner strength of the very thing they aim to destroy and consume.