Interview With the Vampire recap: Bad romance
The latest Interview With the Vampire is a bloody one. The episode, "A Vile Hunger for Your Hammering Heart," opens with Louis (Jacob Anderson) noisily feeding on Rashid (Assad Zaman), who's looking awfully smug for an ambulatory blood bag. Daniel (Eric Bogosian) cautions Louis that the other vampires of the world will be out for blood once this book hits the press, but Louis' unconcerned about the slow-moving suicide he's embarking on.
And we're back in the past, where Louis worries that Claudia (Bailey Bass), who's been beyond erratic since the death of Charlie (Xavier Mills), is on a hunger strike. But her coffin is empty; she's hunting as prodigiously as ever.
Lestat (Sam Reid) helps himself to her journals, which, among other fears and furies, chronicle her concern that her hymen will regrow just like her hair does. Ah yes, the Jessica Hamby Paradox. I love that Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicle walked so True Blood could run and the Interview With the Vampire series could fly (and drop its lover from a great height — ah, but we're not there yet).
When Claudia returns home, the fight that's been simmering boils over, with Lestat saying her journals are "inked with ungratefulness" and that she's killing recklessly.
Uncle Les is right; the next storm to hit the gulf unearths 56 bodies, all of which are missing a body part. A finger here, a foot. A left breast.
The men learn this news from a local politico at the speakeasy and race home to find that Claudia, tipsy from the alcohol in the blood of her latest victim, has let the local constabulary in to search. (Hilariously, nobody has a convincing explanation for the incinerator in the yard.)
Alfonso Bresciani/AMC
Claudia races to get rid of the rotting body parts hidden all over her room. But here's a pickle: what to do with the almost-dead, fly-ridden man in her wardrobe? Also, how did neither of the adult vampires in the house smell all the decomp, because GROSS.
The police leave, but not before dropping a warning about the five-year prison term that awaits men sharing a bedroom who commit "crimes against nature."
Lestat is incensed that Claudia brought souvenirs back to the house and fumes that she's an anvil tied to their ankles, but Louis says what we're all thinking: the two of them weren't happy even before her arrival.
Claudia, meanwhile, is in a full-blown crisis, asking who'll be her great love and admitting that she's failed to turn any of her victims into a vampire companion. She even asks which of her guardians is going to f--- her, stuck as she is at 14. It's a jarring, desperate request, and the toxicity continues to escalate. Lestat calls Claudia a mistake, Louis jumps to defend her, and Claudia complains that Louis tolerates Lestat's cruelty.
Then she drops the tidbit that Lestat's still seeing the singer Antoinette (Maura Grace Athari). "He's gotten tired of us, Daddy Lou," she declares. "The housewife and the mistake." Lestat quietly promises Louis that he'll kill Antoinette soon enough. How… romantic.
But Claudia's done and packs to leave, asking why Louis stole her life instead of taking her to a hospital after the fire.
In the present, although Louis expresses his regrets, Daniel isn't impressed with mini-Charles Manson's eternal emotional storm of puberty. Louis suggests the book can contextualize her actions, Daniel drops a little encoding and decoding theory: you can present the message however you want, but audiences will ultimately decide how to interpret it.
Back in the past, Louis and Lestat spend a miserable seven years avoiding police scrutiny by laying low in their increasingly nightmarish hoarder home — peep that raccoon wandering through their piles of trash!
They have nothing to do but snipe at each other. Louis' reading is pretentious. Lestat only makes it through the first 10 pages of any book. And a tourist carriage rolls past, telling stories of the weird brothers camping inside. Yep, brothers. Roommates. Just good pals!
When Louis does leave the house, he wanders the city and broadcasts his telepathic calls for Claudia to come back home.
But Claudia's busy trolling college campuses for prey. And one night, she's approached by a smiling young man on a motorcycle (Damon Daunno). One of her kind. A vampire.
Bruce (LOL perfect) heard Louis calling for her from across the miles and is excited to find out that there are three of them. He doesn't offer many details about his own maker, but he does rudely hand Claudia a book of etiquette
When she tells him to back off, Bruce knocks her to the ground and — and here, Daniel realizes that Louis has torn four pages out of her journal.
Writers of Hollywood, an earnest suggestion: women don't need sexual assault trauma to add tragedy to their backstories. It's been the go-to trope for years, and honestly, Claudia's got plenty of wrinkles in her troubled psyche already.
Anyway, Daniel insists Louis share details on this section of Claudia's story, but talking about her is straining Louis' calm veneer. When Daniel keeps pushing, his hand starts to shake.
It's Louis' punishment for demanding to know what Bruce did to Claudia, and when the tremors subside, Daniel stands and SLAPS LOUIS IN THE FACE. It may be the bravest, dumbest thing I've seen anyone do, and good for Daniel for refusing to buckle to this cruel intimidation. Louis returns to his story. He's obsessed, dining on rats and reading about a murderer making their way through universities across the country.
Lestat, frustrated and hurt and angry, reminds Louis that he's standing right there, an adult with all the parts Louis likes best. But Louis can only think about Claudia, so Lestat exits to meet Antoinette.
Alfonso Bresciani/AMC
Louis eventually leaves the house too, when Grace (Kalyne Coleman) summons him. Her family is leaving for Boston, having lost their wealth in the crash of 1929, and she's commissioned a tombstone for the beloved brother she's leaving behind with a plea for him not to contact her again.
From a distance, Claudia watches Louis break down in front of his own grave after Grace leaves, and she realizes Lestat made her to be a replacement sister for Louis.
Then, finally, she comes home. When Louis tearfully embraces her, Lestat interrupts the moment with a record scratch. For real, this drama llama literally scratches a needle across a record to get their attention.
Claudia calmly apologizes and explains that she wants to travel to the far-flung locations she's been reading about in the vampire folklore, and she wants Louis to come with her.
Lestat mocks her, intuits that the other vampire she met wasn't so kind, and gloats that she'll never know love. Honestly, Claudia's more mature in this moment than Lestat, and the two attempt to call Louis to their sides like a puppy.
Then comes a sequence that's incredibly hard to watch. Lestat strikes out at Claudia, Louis jumps to protect her, and we see — and then only hear — a ferocious fight that includes Lestat screaming, "I am trying to restrain myself."
Alfonso Bresciani/AMC
It's chilling, and it only gets worse. Yes, we've seen countless vampire battles in pop culture, but when it's two men who've loved each other and despair of staying together, who live together and sleep side by side in their coffins, and who've come to this point because of the fracturing of their relationship, there's a whole new layer to the brutality. We've always recognized Lestat's amorality, knew he relished tormenting his victims. But to turn all his grief and fury on Louis like this is painful, unforgivable.
The fight tears apart their already crumbling home before continuing upstairs. Louis begs Claudia to stay back, promising that they're done fighting. Then there's more sounds of destruction, and Lestat emerges, dragging Louis by a bloody new hole in his jaw.
Lestat sinks his fangs into Louis's neck and launches them both into the sky. In midair, Lestat says he's waited in vain for Louis to love him, and now he's begging Louis to say that he's never going to. "It would help me a great deal to hear that from your lips. Your quivering, hateful lips."
Instead, Louis gasps for Lestat to let him go. So he does, dropping him from such a height that he lands in a broken pile, face battered and body bent like his brother Paul's once was. As his vampire daughter/sister sobs over him, Lestat watches impassively, and we cut to upbeat credit music.
Encoding and decoding. The writers' room may have intended this final scene to be a metaphor for a hateful breakup, or a stomach-turning action piece, or a play on the unreliable narrator that the show's been toying with all along. But for some viewers, this scene will steer into domestic violence so savagely that it'll make it difficult to reckon with Lestat moving forward.
Lest we forget, though, Louis is only the narrator in the first of Rice's novels; after that, brat prince Lestat takes center stage. Will future episodes overcome this gut-punch of a reminder that Lestat has always been a charming, vicious killer, and that he lashed out most violently against the person who didn't return his tainted love? It's impossible to predict, and I can't wait to find out.
Blood droplets
Lots of juicy character tidbits tonight. For one thing, Claudia filling 42 pages with the final words of her victims is… something. (The schoolteacher saying "Guard your heart" is an entire universe unto itself.) And if you're wondering, Rashid stuffs himself with honey and pineapple for days so his blood tastes sweet for Louis.
It's also interesting to get a peek at Daniel's journalistic techniques. This week, it's him explaining that since Louisiana's a closed public records state, he can't corroborate Claudia's kill rates from 1923. But it's nice to know he would've tried.
Whatever happens next, I'm going to miss those side-by-side coffins.
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