Grief, fatherhood, and tragedy in AMC's Interview With the Vampire
thoughts on Claudia and her relationship with her vampire fathers
Anne Rice’s novel, Interview With the Vampire, has been adapted once for the big screen in 1994 with Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise in the roles of Louis de Pointe du Lac and Lestat de Lioncourt, respectively. Nearly two decades later, the story has been readapted for TV by AMC, this time with Jacob Anderson as Louis and Sam Reid as Lestat. The entire story is reimagined to portray Louis as a Black queer man in the early 20th century, and his relationship with Lestat, besides being explicitly queer in this rendition, becomes an interracial relationship, with all the problems that arise from that. Claudia, their immortal child, is also cast as a Black girl, portrayed in the first season by Bailey Bass and by Delainey Hayes in the second, and her character suffers both from being trapped in a child’s body forever and from the ways that Black girls specifically are mistreated by society.
I believe it’s important to discuss how race informs the narrative, but that is not the purpose of this essay, since I recognize my limitations when talking about this topic. For more on this, please read Armand, colonialism, and the weaponisation of Anti-Blackness, which focuses on season 2 and Armand, Louis new lover who’s also a man of color, but it also briefly talks about Lestat and his relationship with both Louis and Armand.
Here, I want to talk about one of the main themes in the series, grief. It’s well known that Claudia, the vampire child of Louis and Lestat, was created by Anne Rice after the loss of her own daughter. This pain is at the core of Interview With the Vampire, and I think it’s one of the most compelling aspects of the story. I’m interested in exploring how grief is portrayed in the series, particularly in relation to Claudia’s death, and I also want to talk a bit about Claudia and her character arc.
Part 1: “My light, my Claudia”
Louis is the subject of the interview, and most of the events are seen through his biased and sometimes faulty perspective. In the first episode of the show, Louis talks about his mortal life in New Orleans at the start of the 20th century—in the original novel, he was a slave owner, here he owns brothels and operates in the dark underground of the city, the only way a Black man could get the level of success he’s looking for. He has a brother, Paul, who’s deeply religious and very concerned with Louis’s spiritual wellbeing; because of this, the relationship between the two is strained. Louis still loves his brother, and his ambitious nature is paired with a desire to give his family a comfortable life, despite Paul and his mother judging him for how he makes money.
While talking with Louis after their sister’s wedding, Paul commits suicide. This comes seemingly out of nowhere, and it’s hinted that Lestat, the charming vampire that has been following Louis around, may have something to do with Paul’s death. This is the first of many losses that Louis is faced with in his life, and the aftermath of Paul’s death sets the stage for Louis’s relationship with grief going forward.
“Disenfranchised grieving”, as described in Adult Surviving Siblings: The Disenfranchised Grievers1, is what happens when the grieving person is not allowed the time and space to mourn, and the loss is not acknowledged or deemed important. This is what happens to Louis after Paul’s death. His mother blames him for it, and so offers no support and doesn’t take Louis’s pain seriously; his sister is busy with forming a new family unit, and she wasn’t as close to Paul as Louis was, so we don’t really see her share Louis’s pain. The only other important person in Louis’s life at the moment is Lestat, and he shows no respect at all for Paul, going as far as interrupting the funeral. The fact that Louis secretly thinks he was involved with Paul’s death only makes matters worse.
Lestat doesn’t care about Louis’s grief, his interest in Louis is entirely focused on what he represents for himself—a companion. Right after Paul’s death, Louis himself dies and gets turned into a vampire, which further isolates him. After losing a family member, the family has to readjust and form new relationships with one another, but Louis can’t do that because he can’t be near them, he’s now forever trapped in his role as the distant benefactor of the family. He didn’t get enough time to mourn his brother before he had to mourn his humanity as well, and these two losses are closely intertwined.
Turning Claudia into a vampire is more than just a way to repair a broken marriage, but a direct response to Louis’s situation with his family. He also makes the choice to “save” Claudia right after the third big loss of his life—the Azalea, the work of his life. Avoidant coping is a common result of disenfranchised grieving, and Claudia clearly serves as a distraction from and a replacement for the things Louis has lost.
The family composed of Louis, Lestat and Claudia quickly goes wrong, and it culminates in Claudia orchestrating Lestat’s murder at the end of the first season. Unfortunately, despite how abusive Lestat was to both Louis and Claudia, her plans are foiled by Louis, who can’t go through with killing Lestat. This causes a lot of damage to his relationship with Claudia, something that he will try to remedy during season 2.
Louis feels a lot of guilt over Claudia’s pain and ultimate fate. First, for making her a vampire (we find out in s2e7 that he knew turning a child would lead to suffering); second, for saving Lestat against her wishes; and third, for trusting Armand over her.
Claudia’s death towards the end of season 2 is a foregone conclusion, it’s the event that has been looming over the viewer from the moment she’s introduced.
She’s the ghost that haunts Louis and the reason the interview is even happening.
Ever since Paul died, Louis hasn’t been allowed to grieve properly. In order to process grief, the mourner needs their pain to be acknowledged, and they need support from others. After Claudia’s death, Louis got revenge on her killers, but in order to punish Lestat, whom he’s unable to kill (this time, not because he wouldn’t do it, but because he’s not powerful enough), he decides to leave with his new lover Armand. Lestat deserves to be punished for his role in Claudia’s murder, but he’s also the only other person in the world who could share Louis’s pain. Now, with Armand, Louis has no way to express his feelings over Claudia because, as Assad Zaman said in an interview, Armand doesn’t care about her2. For the next 77 years, Armand makes him think that Claudia never loved him like he does, and directly tampers with Louis’s mind to make him numb and detached.
[…] the bereaved person is expected ro resume his or her life as though nothing has happened (Zampitella, 2011)
Armand calls the interview a suicide attempt, and that may be part of it, but mostly it’s about Claudia. By doing this, he’s finally able to talk about her with someone who can sympathize with him, and this has a clearly positive result for Louis: he starts remembering more about Claudia, and because of that, he starts breaking free from Armand’s manipulations.
Once he leaves Armand, Louis goes to New Orleans to find Lestat, not to rekindle their romantic relationship but to finally talk about Claudia with him, the only other person who actually knew her. Talking with Daniel helped, but Daniel didn’t know her, he couldn’t share his pain like Lestat could. I think it’s really important not to make their reunion about their romantic relationship, as that is not the focus, the scene is about Claudia first and foremost, and that distintion matters because Louis has always put others before her. After their reunion, Louis goes back to Dubai, and we see two big changes in the decoration of the apartment: there’s a portrait of Paul, and Claudia’s yellow dress hangs from the wall. Louis no longer avoids his pain, he’s able to face it and process it, and he finally gives himself the time and space to mourn and get closure.
Part 2: “She looked at me, in the end”
We don’t know all of Lestat’s backstory yet, but we know that his mortal father was abusive and unsupportive of his interests, and that he was kidnapped and turned by a vampire named Marius, who killed himself without teaching Lestat anything about the vampire world. While he may try to underplay how much he was affected by both his “fathers”, it’s clear that both left him with some deep-seated trauma around fatherhood, and this directly leads into his own parenting of Claudia, his infant death.
A lot of people try to frame the relationship between Lestat and Claudia as a “mother-daughter” relationship, but I (and the show) strongly disagree. Their family unit serves as an example of the ways that the nuclear family facilitates abusive relationships: Lestat is the patriarch, the owner and “protector” of the other two, and even in-universe Louis is constantly being put in the “abused wife” role. This is even more obvious during the trial, which weaponizes Lestat’s position as the father/husband to frame Louis and Claudia as ingrates who betrayed him, the good-intentioned but sometimes violent man of the house. The trial also, of course, presents an extremely racist narrative, portraying Louis as a forceful Black man, and Claudia as a savage child.
Besides the fact that he “birthed” Claudia by turning her, Lestat never played a motherly role in Claudia’s upbringing. Lestat is unflinchingly masculine. He teaches Claudia to hunt and drive, he’s the one who punishes her, and he never offers comfort of any kind. Perhaps people are more comfortable feminizing Lestat because it allows them to look away from the obvious way that the show sets out to criticize the nuclear family and because abusive mother-daughter relationships are seen as less “bad” than abusive father-daughter relationships (lots to unpack there). There’s also a layer of homophobia—Lestat is openly queer, and simply being a White queer man is enough for people to see him as effeminate, while Black queer men like Louis are seen as the “masculine” one in the relationship by default. It’s kind of incredible how badly some people missed the point.
Lestat reminds me of another terrible father in Gothic literature, perhaps the most famous example—Victor Frankenstein. The relationship between Frankenstein and the monster can be seen as a direct response to Frankenstein’s relationship with his own father3. In both cases, there’s a feeling of parental disapproval that colors their interactions. Frankenstein can’t seem to please his father, and he subtly blames him for his shortcomings, and this is then replicated with his creature, just like Lestat’s abuse under his mortal and vampire fathers is replicated in his relationship with Claudia. He thinks she can’t be as cunning and strong as him, he rejects his duty as her parent time and time again, and then punishes her for seeking the companionship of others (similar to Frankenstein’s refusal to make the monster a bride).
Just like Frankenstein, Lestat sees himself as the victim in the situation, and sees his child as an enemy not worthy of compassion.
[…] it is not, then, the monster’s nature that makes him so vengeful, as his creator deludes himself into thinking, but rather his overwhelming sense of isolation and despair at lacking human connections that in fact his father should have first provided (Claridge, 1985).
There’s a key difference between Frankenstein and Lestat. Frankenstein, all the way to the end of the story, is unable to feel anything but hatred for his creature, not even when the creature appeals to his reason or shares his pityful tale with him. Lestat, on the other hand, does suffer a terrible realization at the last second—that despite everything, Claudia did see him as her father, and she needed him. This realization utterly breaks him.
Next time we see Lestat, he’s at Marius lair, the place where his own vampire father turned him and left him to figure out his new life on his own. What is he thinking about? Of Louis and what his fate could be? Of the past they shared in New Orleans as a family? Of the way that he failed their daughter, just like his fathers failed him?
We don’t see him again until 77 years later, as a shell of his former self. He’s small, pathetic, without the confidence he always had before. He’s been mourning, alone with himself and his failures, for decades. He can’t stop thinking about Claudia, who has been dead longer than he knew her. He’s been humbled by her. No longer the mighty Lestat, now he’s only the man that couldn’t save his child when she needed him most.
Part 3: “You and Me, Me and You”
The phrase “haunting the narrative” is a little overused, but no one has haunted the narrative like Claudia haunts seasons 1 and 2 of Interview With the Vampire. Dreamstat tried, but he could never be on her level.
Claudia’s character is inherently tragic. Even before getting turned into a vampire, her mortal life was one of rejection and abandonment. Afterward, not only was she trapped in her child's body forever, she was an unwanted child again. Going back to the Frankenstein parallels, Claudia’s story is about trying to find companionship. She finds a mortal lover, and he dies because she couldn’t control herself. She tries to turn someone, but she’s not able to. She asks Lestat to give her a companion, since Lestat and Louis have each other, and he refuses. She leaves New Orleans to find other vampires, she gets assaulted, and then Lestat taunts her with it. She and Louis go to Europe, and the first vampire they find kills herself in front of her rather than joining them. Over and over, the world seems to punish her, as if she were cursed to be alone forever.
At the start of season 2, we see her relationship with Louis in a terrible state. As he says, she no longer thinks that he’s a worthy companion. He proved to her that he would never choose her first, and he tries to make up for it, but in the end, he doesn’t take her seriously when she warns him about Armand. Once more, Louis fails her.
But despite everything, there’s a bright spot at the end of Claudia’s story: Madeleine.
In the original version, Madeleine is an older woman who has lost her daughter, and so Claudia serves as a replacement for her. I think the changes to Madeleine and Claudia’s relationship are brilliant; as I said before, Claudia was already a replacement sister for Louis, so she would still be trapped in the same dynamic she’s so tired of. Likewise, Claudia in the show is not a child mentally, only physically, and her entire story in season 2 is about being forced into performing the role of a little baby. Madeleine sees Claudia for the grown woman that she is, and they have an equal relationship. Furthermore, Madeleine is drawn to Claudia not out of grief, but because they are both pariahs. They understand and respect each other, they are both proud women who have been unjustly punished by those around them.
It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another. 4
The scene of Madeleine choosing to die with Claudia is my favorite scene in the entire show. She’s the answer to Claudia’s journey, and it makes Claudia’s final moments, while still tragic, somewhat triumphant. There’s a moment when Madeleine is given the option to turn her back on Claudia, and you can see that Claudia expects her to do it, she truly believes that no one would choose dying with her. Seeing Madeleine choose Claudia is the final rebuttal to what Lestat and the universe have been telling her for decades.
Louis says that Claudia and Madeleine were the only ones to ever do the vampire bond correctly. That’s Claudia’s final victory.
Part 4: And That’s the End of It…?
Seasons 1 and 2 have been defined by grief, how it affects people, and how to make peace with it. Going forward, I hope that this theme is not abandoned, as I think there’s still much to be explored, especially from Lestat’s side. Next season seems to focus on him, and I’d be disappointed if we don’t get at least some scenes of him thinking about Claudia. She was my favorite character in the show, and I don’t want her to be completely gone. I’d understand if she doesn’t get more appearances, but there’s still a lot that can be done with her, in my opinion. We will have to wait and see!
Interview With the Vampire is my favorite show of the year and, honestly, one of my favorite shows of all time. The thing I love the most about the show is how it encourages discussion and analysis, how it’s not afraid to juggle many different ideas and themes, and how it manages to make all these things work at the same time. This show is a Gothic romance; it has gory, over-the-top violence and psychological torture; it’s about grief, trauma, love and shame; it’s a queer narrative that isn’t soft or comfy; it’s a critique of the nuclear family; it’s about the intersection of race, gender and sexuality. It’s a story about stories, about the relationship between the narrator, the story and the audience. I decided to focus on only one of the many things that I love about the show, but there’s always more, and who knows, I may write another post about this show in the future. I can’t wait to see what other people have to say and what video essays, Substack posts and even academic articles are published about Interview With the Vampire. What are your thoughts on the show?
Zampitella, Christina. “Adult Surviving Siblings: The Disenfranchised Grievers.” Group, vol. 35, no. 4, 2011, pp. 333–47. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41719337. Accessed 13 July 2024.
CLARIDGE, LAURA P. “PARENT-CHILD TENSIONS IN ‘FRANKENSTEIN: THE SEARCH FOR COMMUNION.’” Studies in the Novel, vol. 17, no. 1, 1985, pp. 14–26. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/29532322. Accessed 13 July 2024.
Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley.