The Extraordinary Fandom of The Vampire Lestat

AMC’s TV adaptation of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles is an all-consuming spectacle.

It’s easy to feel that you’ve arrived at The Vampire Lestat both a little early and a little late. Lestat is the third season of AMC’s TV adaptation of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series of novels, the first of which was famously the source text for the cult classic 1994 film starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. The novel tracks the on-again, off-again relationship between a flamboyant French vampire named Lestat and Louis, the man he turns into a vampire in late-eighteenth-century Louisiana. Transforming from mentor and mentee to frenemies to foes over the course of centuries, Lestat and Louis are an enigmatic couple. In adapting the book for TV, creator Rolin Jones remained largely faithful, with a couple of key exceptions: He converted Louis from a white slave owner to a Black brothel owner, and he made Louis and Lestat lovers.

There was always a quiet, and sometimes not-so-quiet, queer subtext to Rice’s novels, but the show—which was called Interview With the Vampire for its first two seasons, after the title of the first novel, and is now called The Vampire Lestat, after the title of the sequel—brings that same-sex eroticism to the surface. The series is bloody and horny, devastatingly sad and riotously funny, deadpan and melodramatic. It can take new viewers a moment to adjust to the fact that every dial on this show is turned up to 11. It’s an immersive experience of excess, a feast for and an attack on the senses.

In the murky, endless swamp of the streaming landscape, you might happen upon a program as singular as this one and be tempted to say you’ve discovered a hidden gem. You wouldn’t be all that wrong, at least about the “hidden” part. Lestat airs on AMC and on its subscription streaming app AMC , a service dwarfed by juggernauts like Netflix and Prime Video. And the series isn’t even the biggest draw for its own service, which is anchored by the Walking Dead franchise. From a marketing standpoint, it can’t be a great idea to change your title two seasons in. Regardless, not a lot of people had access to the show, and, of those who did, not a lot watched it.

But what’s special about this drama is the intensity of its niche. Spend any time on social media talking or reading about TV, and you’re likely to encounter the show’s committed fans, nearly feral in their advocacy for this under-watched treasure. TV critics love it, too—the second season appeared on over 20 year-end best-of lists in 2024.........

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