When you sit down to watch a movie like Interview with the Vampire, you realize almost immediately that they really don’t make them like they used to. The movie, which is now available to stream on Hulu, is a gothic horror movie about how sad it is to be a vampire, and it’s appearance on Hulu is perfectly timed for the Halloween season.
Interview with the Vampire is not an incredibly scary movie, but it definitely evokes fall in a couple of crucial ways. Now that it’s available to stream, here are three reasons you should check it out:
It features an all-star cast
Most of Interview with the Vampire focuses on the story of Brad Pitt’s Louis, a vampire who sees his life as a curse, and spends his days wandering the Earth trying to find happiness. Along the way, Louis encounters Tom Cruise’s Lestat, a mentor figure and sociopathic vampire who loves the thrill of the hunt. Lestat remains one of Cruise’s best and most deeply unhinged performances.
In addition to a standout supporting turn from Cruise, though, the movie also features great work from a young, but effervescent Kirsten Dunst, as well as Antonio Banderas, Christian Slater, and Thandiwe Newton. It’s a great cast that also screams 1990s.
It’s filled with lush sets
Because much of Interview with the Vampire is a period piece, the movie also features some incredible sets, especially in its earliest sequences set in New Orleans. The movie spares no expense as it unveils its secret world of vampires, and these sets are the kind of thing that you rarely see in Hollywood movies today.
There’s also plenty of on-location shooting, another important reminder that there’s often no substitute for how things actually look in the real world. Louis may inhabit a world that is entirely unfamiliar to the humans he hunts, but Interview with the Vampire makes his world look and feel like the real one.
It has possibly unintentional queer undertones
One of the great joys of this movie, which many were aware of at the time and has only become more apparent in recent years, is the homoeroticism laced through it. The seductive power of becoming a vampire is almost always communicated as happening from man to man, and Lestat, in particular, seems like someone who is in love with Louis and is overcompensating.
Really, though, Louis seems to have a mutual attraction with basically every male character in the movie, and it’s unclear whether that was something the filmmakers understood or not. Regardless, it makes for some genuinely gripping, tense scenes, particularly between this movie’s many male characters.
