'Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire' Remaking Louis de Pointe du Lac
Warning: This article contains spoilers for episode 1 of 'Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire.'In 1973, when Anne Rice wrote The Interview with the Vampire, she was an atheist, who based her universe off of the idea that magic and gods were nothing more than myths; instead, she explained, there were things humans simply didn't understand.She went about creating her own pantheon of bloodthirsty, vampiric deities, each a living archetype of human nature. There was Marius, the traditionalist, who worshipped the first of their kind; Lestat de Lioncourt, the god of pride and the hunt, who celebrated his immortal existence; then Louis de Pointe du Lac, an enigma whose forlorn sympathy for humans made him impossible to hate. Louis rejected his own nature. He was a vampire who carried around the burden of guilt, like a cross he refused to lay down. For years he struggled with his own instincts, often surviving off of rodents and vermin instead of the human blood he needed to nourish himself. He would defer to his Catholic upbringing, calling himself damned and undeserving of salvation. He cursed his companion Lestat for making him, saying that they would one day end up in hell for the things they had done. He was unique. No other character in Anne Rice's universe felt the way he did. Many of them experienced guilt. There was anger, grief, and a visceral disgust behind the act. But they all came to accept what they were. They didn't torture themselves the way Louis did. That was his fight.
