Horror movies in the late â90s were defined by Scream. Everything followed on its heels and tried to imitate that movie. I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend, Valentine, Cherry Falls, it spawned dozens of imitators. Not just slashers, either. The Faculty, Disturbing Behavior, An American Werewolf in Paris, all different sub-genres of horror tried to apply the Scream formula with varying degrees of success.
Because of that, itâs gotten to the point where, when people talk abouthorror in the 1990s, thatâs what they talk about. They talk about the slashers and the horror comedies and the things that defined the latter half of the decade. People donât really talk about the first half, primarily because it was so radically different.
Scream didnât just find a way to comment on slashers in a new way, it brought horror back to teenagers. Because the genre in the early â90s was horror for adults. That was the way it was advertised, that was the way it was marketed. These were classy productions with big studio budgets and A-list casts. We had rich, lavish, artistic productions like Bram Stokerâs Dracula, Candyman, Wolf and so on and so forth.
The only problem is that youâre probably screaming at me right now âBut itâs not a horror movie!â Yes, I know. Nobody wants to admit itâs horror because everyone and their motherâespecially their motherâstill wants to enjoy it. The reason we donât think about horror in the early â90s is because the studios kept trying to insist that there was no such thing as horror during that time.
They didnât just want to make money, they wanted to win awards. They wanted to bask in the critical limelight and the best way to do that was to advertise films like Silence of the Lambs, Bram Stokerâs Dracula, Seven and Interview With the Vampire as anything but horror, so thatâs what they did.
But I think when you look at the film on its own, Interview With the Vampire is firmly rooted within the genre. For one thing, itâs about vampires. But itâs not a high-flying fantasy or an action-adventure piece that happens to have vampires in it, itâs about looking at vampirism from every angle and what the struggle to survive and the descent into becoming comfortable with being a killer actually looks like. Itâs very romantic, but very dark at the same time.
Tom Cruiseâs Lestat is a monster. Heâs a thrill killer. He defines himself by the taking of lives. Lestat is about pleasure, wherever and however he can get it. Heâs as vain as any antagonistic love interest youâd see in a feature of this type, regardless of vampires, but heâll go to horrific lengths to prove a point. Or to keep control over the people he deems to be âhis.â
Itâs also an extremely gory film. People tend to forget about that, mostly because they tend to remember it as a drama. But itâs incredibly violent. The scene in which Claudia slits Lestatâs throat still has me cringing to think about. Iâve always had an issue with throat scenes in horror, especially when I was younger. This one was the ultimate. It felt designed to assault me with the one thing I couldnât handle. The blood just keeps flowing out of his throat until it floods the entire room. Itâs so over-the-top. It made me so squeamish to event attempt to watch it for the first time, and I still have a bit of trouble with it now.
Thereâs a massacre toward the end of the feature thatâs as gorier than almost anything shown in mainstream cinemas during the entire decade. Itâs complete carnage and it just keeps building and building until youâre almost in disbelief at what youâre seeing.
Overall, the effects by Stan Winston are stunning. Definitely some of his most underrated work. Most of FX scenes are very subtle, but in something like this, subtlety is key. The vampires rely on more or less glamour makeup, but things like the gore and the husk of Lestat as he returns from apparent death are superbly crafted.
Interview With the Vampire deserves the praise it gets, but it also deserves a place in the horror pantheon. The performances are amazing, especially Cruise and Kirsten Dunst as Claudia, the child vampire who easily steals the entire film out from under her older co-stars. Itâs full of fancy flourishes and overly artistic style, with a script thatâs honestly just as good as the novel itâs based on. The stylistic choices and heightened drama make it the movie that defined American horror in the â90s before Scream came along and defined it in an entirely different way.
