Watch It Like a Girl: Interview with the Vampire

Anne Rice wrote a version where the little girl lives.

That was the first draft, finished sometime in 1973, and in it Claudia does not burn in a courtyard. She joins a band of vampire children running loose through Paris and she goes on forever, which is the only thing Rice actually wanted, because she had spent the previous year watching her five-year-old daughter die of leukemia. Michele had been diagnosed at four. She died in August 1972, a few weeks short of six. Rice started writing in the months after. She has said she nearly came apart doing it. She saw germs on every surface and washed her hands fifty times a day.

Then she went back and killed the child.

She has explained this in interviews, and she explains it the way you would explain a rule you were obeying. If someone is meant to die and you do not let them, you are risking your own well-being by the end of the book. So she surrendered to it, and the book got finished, and Claudia dies at the hands of a coven for a crime she did not commit and could not have committed, and that version is the one that got published in 1976 and sold forever.

A woman wrote her dead daughter immortal and then decided she had to take it back.

Everybody knows the wrong thing about this movie.

The received file on the 1994 Neil Jordan adaptation is: sexy gothic, Tom Cruise miscast and then vindicated, Brad Pitt sulking beautifully in a lot of lace, and about thirty years of extremely fun discourse concerning whether Louis and Lestat are a couple, which, yes, obviously, next question. It lives on the shelf marked homoerotic vampire romance and every anniversary piece asks the same two questions about the casting and the subtext.

Wrong shelf again. This is not a movie about two men.

Before I take it apart I want to be honest that it works on me completely. Tom Cruise in that blond wig, backlit, in a coat that costs more than my education, is doing something I have decided not to examine. Brad Pitt spends two hours being beautiful and morose in a townhouse full of candles and I have never once wanted him to cheer up. The production design is a fever. Somebody should have told the art department to calm down and nobody did, thank God. It is a horny movie about immortality set in New Orleans and I have watched it more times than is defensible.

That is the delivery mechanism. Everything I am about to say gets past you because the movie is beautiful enough that you stop checking.

What it smuggles is a child who cannot grow, written by a mother whose child stopped growing, and the reason nobody files it there is that the film worked extremely hard to make sure you would not.