Interview with the Vampire

On the one hand, one regrets the recent, Twilight-era trend towards making cinematic vampires moody and emo, instead of soulless monsters of the terrifying dark. On the other hand, it’s possible to lean a little too hard into the horrible – ‘Interview with the Vampire’ is a seriously dark movie. Way darker than you’d expect a mid-90s Hollywood blockbuster starring the likes of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt to be.

In the previous Tom Cruise movies we’ve watched this season the Last Great American Movie Star has been in his usual mode: the confident, handsome leading man righting wrongs and battling evildoers. Here, though, he plays a melodramatic, campy vampire in a bad wig who has a thing for Brad Pitt. And he’s not even the lead!

Hemal and Brian agreed that this wasn’t necessarily a movie we enjoyed watching, but has a certain weight to it. It’s weird, genuinely horrifying in many (many) places and campy in others, but it has a sort of integrity – these fellas set out to make a for-real old-school vampire movie, that’s for sure.