'Queen of the Damned' Is Both Terrible and Perfect

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Here at Men’s Health, we’re all about feeling alive. And is there any genre of entertainment that helps anyone feel more alive than the one where the threat of someone being knocked off is always right in front of you? We love horror, and we’re celebrating it this year with MH Horror Week. The following story is part of a collection we’ve curated celebrating some of our favorite films, TV shows, filmmakers, and performers in the genre. We hope you enjoy—and maybe find a few new scares along the way too.

You can find all of our MH Horror Week 2022 coverage right here.

20 YEARS AGO, an R&B superstar took the title role in a big screen adaptation of a bestselling phenomenon. The project was Queen of the Damned, the second adaptation of Anne Rice's hugely popular Vampire Chronicles book series after 1994's Interview With the Vampire. The star was Aaliyah, who tragically died just months after completing filming.

The end result should have been a box office hit. Instead it was a catastrophic flop, eventually becoming something of a joke among fans of both Rice's books and the horror genre as a whole. But none of that stopped me from falling in love with it when it came out in theaters in 2002. I was 15 years old and obsessed with the novel on which it was based, not to mention the overwhelming homoeroticism present in so much of Rice's oeuvre. I saw it at least twice in the cinema, then many times more on DVD.

As spooky season approached this year, I started spending more and more time thinking about Anne Rice's legacy. The author passed away last year, shortly before AMC injected new blood into the Vampire Chronicles, re-adapting Interview With the Vampire as a critically acclaimed show. What better time, I thought, to dust Queen of the Damned off and try again?

A quick plot summary, for those who haven't ever seen it (and I cannot in good conscience say you should). The vampire Lestat (Stuart Townsend), having grown bored of eternal life, goes to sleep for a hundred years, but is stirred from his rest by the music of a new era. Ever the brat prince, the spirit of rock'n'roll speaks to Lestat's rebellious spirit, and he establishes himself as the frontman of a band, going public with his vampiric identity. While most of the world thinks this is a rockstar gimmick, his flagrancy irks the other undead, who plot to kill him. At the same time, his music awakens Akasha (Aaliyah), the mother of all vampires.

A dozen or so other important characters from the books are crammed into a handful of scenes, including paranormal archivist Jesse Reeves (Marguerite Moreau) who becomes enamored of Lestat, her mentor David Talbot (Paul McGann), and her mysterious aunt, Maharet (Lena Olin), whose origin story is linked to that of Akasha. Hardly any of that matters, however, because their histories and motivations are nonexistent. One gets the impression that this was a four-hour epic edited down to a polite 100 minutes.

I recognized, even at the time, that this wasn't what you might call a "good" film. Its pacing and structure are wildly uneven, a symptom of the screenwriters trying to shoehorn in the life story of Lestat from the novel The Vampire Lestat, which means we get a lot of monologuing from a charismatically challenged Townsend, leaving little room for the fantasy horror saga of The Queen of the Damned itself, which gets relegated to the final act. It is also an aggressively straight movie following on from Neil Jordan's lushly homoerotic Interview film, which gave us Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Kirsten Dunst as a dysfunctional queer family unit. The visual effects were also incredulously bad, even for 2002, and have only worsened with time.

But still, there was just enough for my adolescent heart to latch onto, and I found myself responding to the same elements as a far snobbier adult. The soundtrack, firstly, remains an opus of nu-metal (written by Korn frontman Jonathan Davis) which gives the story a stylistic sensibility onto which it can cling. Queen of the Damned also understands at least a small part of what makes Rice's vampires so enduringly appealing: they are enormous drama queens. Sure, Townsend's Lestat is a cardboard cutout with cheekbones for days, but then there is Vincent Perez, who is clearly having a camp old time playing the ancient bloodsucker Marius as a kind of fussy gay uncle with a penchant for fine art. Where's his movie?

Most importantly, though, is the Aaliyah of it all. Fresh off her debut in the action movie Romeo Must Die, Akasha was a role the singer could really sink her teeth into. Literally. And she ate.

Rewatching Queen of the Damned 20 years later, every scene that features Aaliyah vibrates with her presence, and it's impossible when watching the film to not mourn her loss—she was just 22 years old when she passed—but also question what the hell director Michael Rymer was thinking by not using her more. This is the title character around whom the entire marketing campaign was planned, played by a performer with buckets more charisma than the woefully miscast leading man... and she is in the movie for a total of maybe ten minutes. The body of work Aaliyah left behind hints at the exceptional talent she would have gone on to develop even further given the chance: that her gifts weren't utilized to greater effect here feels like a waste.

Maybe that's the thing I love the most about Queen of the Damned. The film it could have been, had the filmmakers known what a precious opportunity they had to let Aaliyah shine in this role, and had they delved into the rich backstory of the character. This is an Anne Rice adaptation, remember, so there is no shortage of deep lore. Had we been given Akasha's origin, then the character of witch-turned-vampire Maharet would also make more sense, as would romantic heroine Jesse, whose connection to the supernatural world is explored in great detail in the book. As it goes, Jesse is flattened into yet another swooning groupie who exists to reassure viewers who saw Interview With the Vampire that they needn't worry, Lestat likes women in this movie.

When it does lean into the Gothic imagery and baroque sensibilities that permeate Rice's work, you get a sense of the film the Queen of the Damned team thought they were making: equal parts Dracula (the Francis Ford Coppola one) and Dracula 2000 (the Gerard Butler one). Sadly, the movie was so critically reviled that it put studios off the idea of revisiting the Vampire Chronicles. Rice herself said that the filmmakers had "mutilated" her source material, and proclaimed that her work simply wasn't a fit for the big screen.

The success of AMC's resurrected Interview With the Vampire has since proven her correct: the long, long lives of these immortal beings are better suited for serialized television than standalone films. There's also another series based on Rice's Mayfair Witches novels on the way, starring Alexandra Daddario (The White Lotus), so it's safe to say there will be no shortage of Anne Rice content in our future.

Perhaps the Queen of the Damned curse is finally lifted. It's just a shame that Anne Rice didn't live long enough to see another genuinely good interpretation of her life's work—and that we never got to see the heights to which Aaliyah might have soared.

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