Vampires never go completely out of style, but they do go through phases. For the past decade and change, the best-known vampires have been the day-walking YA warriors from Twilight, a series that inspired tonally similar shows like The Vampire Diaries. The funny bloodsuckers in FX’s What We Do In the Shadows were a satirical throwback to an older kind of vampire: the haunted members of the nobility who had been parting victims with their blood since the time of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
But in between those two phases, we got vampires as seen by Anne Rice, author of The Vampire Chronicles books. Rice’s vampires are tortured, hungry souls who wander the endless oceans of time alone and melancholy. AMC is trying to bring them back into style with its show Interview With The Vampire, which returns for its third season this June. The first two seasons are currently on Netflix, which gives you a few weeks to catch up on one of the best shows currently on TV.
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Interview With The Vampire starts strong and gets stronger
The first two seasons are scintillating
Interview With The Vampire revolves around Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson), a brothel owner and businessman in New Orleans in the early 20th century. The first season of the show details he meets the vampire Lestat (Sam Reid), a French aristocrat with a flair for the dramatic and an almost complete disregard for the human beings he sucks dry by the score. Lestat turns Louis into a vampire, which sets Louis on a journey of discovery he’s still stumbling through.
Interview With The Vampire will appeal to fans of horror on a couple of levels. For one, the show glories in brutality. In the first episode, Lestat turns Louis after cornering him in a church and then punching a priest’s face out through the back of his head. In this show, the main characters are the monsters.
But they’re not all made alike. Eventually, Louis and Lestat take in a child vampire named Claudia (Bailey Bass) and form a kind of makeshift family, but it’s not a functional one. Lestat is a cruel patriarch, much more powerful than either of his “children,” and not always in his right mind. The threat of violence he represents is terrifying in an intimate way that recalls great psychological horror movies. So there’s more on offer than just blood and guts, although there’s plenty of that too.
The second season of the show takes Louis and Claudia to Europe, where they’ll meet some of their decaying brethren, confront their pasts, and at one point run afoul of a group of vampires in a way that gets Louis buried alive, an especially terrifying prospect if you have eternal life.
Interview With The Vampire Season 3 will be like a whole new show
Complete with title change
For its first two seasons, Interview With The Vampire covers a lot of ground. It is a horror show. It’s also a twisted domestic drama. It plays with memory in an interesting way, as Louis relates the story of his life (and un-life) to a reporter named Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian), and he doesn’t always get it right. It’s also occasionally hilarious, since Daniel is not shy about calling Louis out when he’s bulls*itting.
Interview With The Vampire is a bold series that isn’t afraid to change itself episode to episode, scene to scene. The upcoming third season is proof positive of that: after finishing up the adaptation of Anne Rice’s book Interview With The Vampire in Season 2, the show is moving onto her next two books in Season 3: 1985’s The Vampire Lestat and 1988’s Queen of the Damned. The first book explores Lestat’s past, starting with his time as a human in the 18th century, and the latter gets into his life as a literal rock star in modern times, when he sings out vampire secrets to the world and ticks off the undead community.
The show is really leaning into the rock star aspect, with the trailers featuring lots of concert footage. They’ve even written a bunch of original songs, and the whole thing looks like it’s going to be a rock opera. The shift is going to be so big that they’re even changing the name of the show for this third season, to The Vampire Lestat.
That kind of ambition could cripple a show not prepared to see it through, but this show has more than earned the benefit of the doubt.
There’s only one bad thing about The Vampire Lestat
It won’t be as easy to stream as it should be
Of course, Lestat will still be a bloodthirsty fiend come the new season, so we should expect lots of horrific imagery as well. It’s hard to know exactly what to expect, which is exciting. The Vampire Lestat, or Interview With The Vampire Season 3, or whatever we’d like to call it, premieres on Sunday, June 7, 2026.
Unfortunately, it will not premiere on Netflix. AMC has lent the first two seasons to Netflix to try and drum up interest in the show, but it will premiere new episodes linearly on AMC and on streaming at AMC+, which is one of the lesser-known streaming services. Eventually, the third season will probably make its way to Netflix, but if my suspicions are correct, it will be worth watching during its maiden voyage, if people are willing to find a way.
Interview(s) with the Vampire
If you’re not willing to travel beyond the bounds of your Netflix subscription (and who could blame you?), there are other options. To me, the TV show version of Interview With The Vampire is the swiftly becoming the definitive adaptation, but The Crying Game director Neil Jordan did make a pretty solid movie version in 1994, starring Brad Pitt as Louis, Tom Cruise as Lestat, and a Kirsten Dunst as Claudia. Best of all, it’s available to stream in its entirely for free on YouTube, one of many great movies you can watch for free online if you know where to look.
- Release Date
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October 2, 2022
- Network
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AMC
- Showrunner
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Mark Johnson
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Jacob Anderson
Louis de Pointe du Lac
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Sam Reid
Lestat de Lioncourt
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Eric Bogosian
Daniel Molloy
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