Good Example Of Gothic Elements In Interview With The Vampire Movie Review

One of the key differences in the film Interview with the Vampire and some of the other films in the vampire genre is that Neil Jordan’s adaptation of the Anne Rice novel is about what life for a vampire would be like. Through the experiences of the ancient Lestat, his novice Louis, and through the poignant eyes of Claudia, one sees both the joys and the frustrations of life inside a body that is immortal – without aging – but also without many of the consolations, particularly emotional in nature, that humans get to experience but are beyond the reach of vampires. As the story moves forward, the director incorporates a number of different Gothic elements to move the plot forward and keep the audience rapt with attention at what is happening to the vampires, as they wear out from the inside but, at least outwardly, never seem to change.
The juxtaposition of the crammed bustier, heaving breasts and blood so gently pouring out of bite marks delivers a look that is both erotic and macabre at the same time. There is a sensuality at work in every touch that the vampires bestow, whether it is a finger lingering in a candle flame or the ingress that their teeth make into the necks of their victim. The blood never sprays; instead, it runs like syrup from a maple tree, indicating the same sort of sweet savor.
There is even a point at which the scene shifts to Paris, which is a nod to the 1960s European horror films. Claudia and Louis have fled Lestat whom they thought they managed to kill, and they not only feel like they have a dark, dank life, but they reside in a network of catacombs that are appropriately shadowy for the amount of light that a vampire can absorb. However, once Claudia is found to be guilty of treason to other vampires, she is shoved through a portal into the bottom of a shaft with a woman who had been made to be her ersatz mother. As the sun moves overhead and it becomes clear that the sun is going to turn both of these vampires into ashes, the bathos at work in their expressions and even their snuggling is yet another element of the Gothic. The wrath that Louis brings down on that entire dwelling of vampires, bringing in gasoline and fire when he knows that they will be sleeping, shows repeated images of jumping flames, a sense of reflection that also evokes the Gothic.
A final element of the Gothic in this film has to do with the way that Tom Cruise plays Lestat. Brad Pitt, who plays Louis, comes across as petulant now and then, but both Lestat and Claudia (for a twelve-year-old) are fairly cool customers. Lestat has come to love his own malice, and he takes a sensual pleasure out of his killings, showing an alluring charm and a nodding awareness of his own depravity, as though he were channeling Matthew McConaughey. Claudia takes a voyeuristic delight in what her life has become, at least when she is not riveted in horror about never growing up physically to match her mind. But it is Cruise’s old-soul rendition of his part, in which he seems to have plumbed all depths and still comes up smiling, ready for the next excursion into the dark, that stamps the Gothic firmly on this film.