Anne Rice passed away one year ago this coming Sunday, leaving behind her a fascinating legacy of fantasy, fear, filth, and, interestingly, fanfiction phobia. Best known for her Vampire Chronicles novels, one part of her Immortal Universe which features the characters of Louis de Pointe du Lac and Lestat de Lioncourt, Rice was a prolific writer, publishing more than 42 novels and short stories in her lifetime. And though many of her works were based on pre-existing pop-culture concepts and characters, Rice abhorred the idea of anyone else writing stories based on her books and was infamous for taking legal action against fans who dared to share their own stories about her characters on the internet.
Rice’s anti-fanfiction stance has left a lasting impact on fandom etiquette and culture. Fearing Rice’s wrath but unwilling to adhere to her demands, many fanfiction authors began prefacing their works with statements like, “I don’t own these characters; they belong to Anne Rice. This story was written for my own entertainment, and I do not profit from its presence on the internet.” This practice was successful outside the Vampire Chronicles fandom and can still be found in the authors’ notes of some fanworks today, despite the protections which some fanfiction host sites, such as Archive of Our Own, offer. This is likely because Rice proved that these protections are not absolute when, in April 2000, she released a statement disallowing the creation of fanworks based on her characters on the basis of copyright infringement, and asked that FanFiction.Net remove all stories featuring her characters. Respectful of Rice’s wishes and fearful of legal action, they complied, and fanfiction about Rice’s characters is still banned more than twenty years later.
Since the 1990s, Rice has adapted several of her works for film, theatre, and television, often with complete creative control. These adaptations, though mostly satisfactory by Rice’s standards, have almost all been met with disappointment by at least some fans and critics. Even the 1994 film adaptation of Interview with the Vampire, despite its box-office success and all-star cast, received criticism for sloppy casting choices and the deliberate removal of crucial character nuances by Rice, who also wrote the screenplay.
In the last ten years, Rice has shown a somewhat more lenient view of fanfiction, and loosened her grip on her characters. Though she never viewed fanfiction as a valid creative outlet, she revealed in 2012 that she no longer felt as strongly about preventing fans from writing about her characters. Then, in 2016, she announced that she hoped to see a “television series of the highest quality” based on The Vampire Chronicles. Rice sold the rights to these stories, and over the following five years, they bounced around from company to company and showrunner to showrunner, until finally the project was passed to Rolin Jones in June 2021. Rice passed away six months later, but her name remained attached to the project, which listed her as an executive producer alongside Jones, her son Christopher Rice, Alan Taylor, and Mark Johnson, and the series itself is officially billed as Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.
The first season of Jones’s Interview premiered this October and recently concluded in mid-November. Since then, it has been met with overwhelmingly positive reviews from fans and critics alike. The series remains true to the plot and premise of Rice’s story, chronicling—thus far—the life, death, and afterlife of Louis de Pointe du Lac, and his relationships with his vampire maker, Lestat de Lioncourt, their adopted “daughter” Claudia, and interviewer Daniel Molloy. The ways the series diverts from the books are significant, but rather than detract from the story, they add depth: this interview is Louis and Daniel’s second, set fifty years after the first; Louis and Lestat’s relationship is explicitly homosexual, something which is more implicit in the books and absent from the 1994 film; and, most notably, Louis and Claudia are African American, and their story begins in the 20th century, rather than the 18th.
The term “death of the author,” coined by French literary theorist Roland Barthe, refers not to a literal death, but to the act of divorcing the author from their work and not allowing the author or their experiences to influence the way readers interpret their work. According to this theory, it is crucial to view a piece of literature as its own entity separate from the person who created it. During her lifetime, Anne Rice didn’t allow this. She refused to allow individual interpretations of her stories and maintained complete creative control over nearly every adaptation. In executing her own control, Rice unfortunately stifled the creativity of others and limited her stories and characters’ potential. It was only after her death that this potential was or could be realized. But the story wasn’t taken from her; it wasn’t altered to unrecognizability. Instead, the things which she was seemingly afraid or unable to highlight in past interpretations were highlighted, and tasteful changes were made to tell a story which would be meaningful for a modern audience. Making Interview’s protagonist a wealthy queer Black man in the Jim Crow South does not contradict Rice’s vision but adds further nuance to her Immortal Universe and simultaneously provides the audience with various lessons on the intersections of sexuality, race, and class in our society’s history, something which, unfortunately, wouldn’t have been possible a few years ago.
Interview with the Vampire by