I'm bloody excited that AMC is producing a Vampire Chronicles series by Anne Rice scheduled to air in 2022.

I found out this weekend that AMC is ordering an Interview with the Vampire show. Or, more appropriately, a "Vampire Chronicles" show made after the books: Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and The Queen of the Damned. I read these books many years ago, and I felt that the movie adaptations were actually quite terrible despite having cast the best looking men to be found in the world at the time to fill the titular roles of Armand, Louis, and Lestat. Also, Kirsten Dunst was good in the role of Claudia.

Interview, which was the book that started it all for Anne Rice, was lightning in a bottle. It is a legitimate classic of gothic/horror and dark fantasy. The other books serve to build on the mythology that she started with Interview, and I love that she traced the vampires, their power, and their lineage back to a primal source that had its beginnings in ancient Egypt (you see this in Lestat and in Queen of the Damned). A series is going to have a lot of time to explore this kind of mythology, and we will get to spend time with fascinating characters like Marius, who were crucial to the entire storyline but hardly touched upon at all within the context of the now old films.

I wouldn't want them to explore too much beyond Queen of the Damned. My reasons for this is that I think Rice ended up hitting the hard boundaries of her own imagination. Unlike a lot of modern fantasy and horror writers, she doesn't seem to have much of a capacity for synthesizing new concepts. For a long time, she was a genre unto herself. But now, fantasy and horror tropes are everywhere and the Vampire Chronicles are just one franchise among many.

Rice also had this thing about weird and uncomfortable types of love. Sometimes it seemed to work in the novels, but then there were obvious times when it just came across as creepy. I guess we shall see, because the first episodes are scheduled to appear in 2022. Anyway, color me bloody excited.