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A movie about attractive vampires in love with plenty of bloodshed? Maybe 1994 pop culture isn’t so different from ours today. With Twilight (blech), True Blood (summer can’t come soon enough!), The Vampire Diaries (no opinion), and countless movies cashing in on the vamp craze, Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles would fit in perfectly with today’s release slate. However, the supernatural monsters might have been less of a draw compared to the pairing of Tom Cruise and (burgeoning star at the time) Brad Pitt.

I never saw Interview with the Vampire before, expecting the film to be more or less a gothic horror picture. However, I was surprised by how much of a dark, epic drama the film was, spanning over roughly 200 years.

Based off of the titular 350-some-page book by Anne Rice (who also wrote the screenplay alongside director Neil Jordan (whose writing remained without credit)), Interview tells a lot, but shows a little. Pitt acts as the film’s narrator, Louis de Pointe du Lac, a New Orleans plantation owner turned vampire, spilling out his life story to a reporter (Christian Slater) in the present day. Director Jordan (The Crying Game, The Brave One) manages to cut corners by intercutting the interview scenes to speed up the storytelling process for better (in terms of background history) and worse (in terms of skimming over plot points that are sometimes more interesting than what is shown expansively).

Grieving the death of his wife and infant, Louis allows the seductive vampire Lestat (Tom Cruise) to give him immortality and become a vampire. Little does he know what a sad life nightwalkers lead (or at least the ones who don’t have a penchant for killing).

With the interesting dilemma if it is better to kill or to die, Interview with the Vampire waxes too much philosophy to be subtle. Rice writes her screenplay in poetry over prose, which further removed the characters from reality in an already outlandish tale. I was immediately engrossed into the world of the vampire, but felt emotionally distant.

The sets are stunning and elegant and frequently changing to the time period. The costumes are also ornate and the make-up is detailed (the actors were reportedly hung upside down so the blood could rush to their head so they could make their blood vessels pop through their vampire translucent skin). However, unlike a Tim Burton movie, the Gothicism doesn’t overtake the actors and become the central focus of the film.

Anne Rice was vocal about her distaste for having Tom Cruise cast as Lestat (who I was surprised to see had a much smaller role than advertised). She later ate her words, commending him on a wonderful performance. I agree. Cruise plays Lestat with a carnivore versus prey mentality, swooping in and then pouncing on his victims. Gleefully manic, Cruise makes the film pop. Unfortunately, he is not in it nearly enough time.

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