Building a Better Vampire
A Fan’s suggestions for improving the film version of
Anne Rice’s “The Queen of the Damned”
I can’t decide which of these categories I fall into more: Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles Fan, or Generic Vampire Fan. The recent film adaptation of the third volume in Rice’s aforementioned series, “The Queen of the Damned” has me asking myself several questions. After watching it I’m positive that as an Anne Rice fan, I should absolutely hate this movie. As a vampire fan, I should like it because at the very very least, it does have vampires in it. I’ve found that most people who consider themselves fans of the vampire genre will watch pretty much anything that has anything to do with vampires (at least that’s been my experience).
As far as “The Queen of the Damned” is concerned, I think ultimately whether or not one enjoys the film has to do with one’s ability to separate being a vampire fan from being an Anne Rice fan. That might seem like a gross generalization because I’ve actually come across quite a few vampire fans who consider Anne Rice to be the anti-christ and her Vampire Chronicles pure and utter trash. Still, I think you have to consider the fact that in addition to being a horribly inadequate adaptation of Anne Rice’s eponymous novel (and this is not my opinion…read the book and you’ll know it’s a fact), “The Queen of the Damned” is in many ways lacking just on a basic cinematic level.
I’ve come to this conclusion since purchasing the film on DVD. You heard it right, I bought a film I really don’t like…but I am a collector of all things vampiric, and as such I own a lot of stuff I really don’t need. My initial viewing in the theater left me sorely disappointed; reading internet reviews afterwards had the angry Anne Rice loyalist in me coming out to play; my first home DVD viewing (with all the extra scenes and documentaries) had me considering that with a few fairly simple changes, “The Queen of the Damned” movie could have actually been a good adaptation of an Anne Rice book in addition to just a good movie in general. The following is one fan’s suggestions on improving the movie. It’s a moot point I know, but one that I feel needs to be made.
The “Queen of the Damned” DVD contains more than the average DVD’s share of deleted scenes. That should be your first tip off that something is really sort of wrong with this movie; that the producers felt it so necessary to include so much stuff on the DVD after they’d gone to so much trouble to cut it out of the original movie in the first place. Recent films like “Harry Potter” and “The Fellowship of the Ring” (and even “Titanic”) have taught us that audiences are more than willing to sit in a theater for a long time, provided you make it worth their while. I’m not suggesting that the producers of QotD make the film a 3-hour-plus opus, but they seem to have been overly concerned with pacing, to the point that they sacrificed coherence for just keeping things moving and moving fast. The result is a movie that’s essentially over before you even realize it’s started. I found that the film moved so fast in fact that you’re often left wondering what in God’s name is going on.
This is especially true for people who are not already familiar with Anne Rice’s books. If you want to make a movie that appeals to everyone (and I’m assuming that the producers did), you have to make something that Anne Rice fan and non-fans alike can understand. As a Rice fan, I was able to assume a lot about stuff that was left out, but when I had my mother watch the movie, she had no idea what was going on. This is not a good thing if you want to make a movie and have people watch it more than once.
Viewing all the deleted scenes concerning the ancients in the film convinces me that cutting them out was probably one of the biggest mistakes the producers made. The scene by the Hollywood sign, in which the ancients establish their relationship with each other in addition to their purpose in waking and coming together at that particular point in time, establishes so much about the plot of the movie that is otherwise left hanging, most important being who the characters actually are. I’m no expert but it doesn’t seem very intelligent to me to make a movie, have a bunch of characters in it, and then do nothing to explain who they are and why they’re there. You might as well make them extras, because if you don’t explain their presence, they’re tantamount to background scenery.
The scene in question is not long at all, and contrary to what the note introducing the scene on the DVD would have you think, I really don’t think it hurts the pace of the movie or makes it seem overlong (in its entirety the movie is still only 101 minutes long…for many people that’s not even enough time to finish drinking your soda). Upon watching all of the deleted scenes on the DVD, I’m utterly convinced that “Queen of the Damned” would have improved by leaps and bounds if most of the stuff cut out of it would have just been left as is.
As stated previously, one of the many things at fault with the QotD movie is the fact that the producers seem to jump from situation to situation, assuming that they can do so because the audience must know what’s going on, right? Wrong. Unfortunately, humans aren’t the most perceptive of species, and often you have to spell things out in order for them to completely understand something. In other words, just because something seems obvious doesn’t mean it is. In my opinion, “Queen of the Damned” is tragically flawed when it comes to character motivation; the movie is really dragged down by the fact that it often has characters up on screen, doing lots of stuff and generally looking good while they’re doing it, but not explaining why they’re doing it.
Now I’m not just suggesting this because I’m a huge fan of Anne Rice’s book, but I think this problem could have been rectified simply by hewing closer to Anne’s original text. It’s logical, really: because Anne Rice wrote a novel and she had lots of space to work with, she was able to take the time to explain why things are going in the direction they’re going in. I understand movies don’t always have that luxury, but to ignore it to the point that the QotD movie seems to have ignored it just results in a movie that doesn’t make much sense. If the script people had just taken some basic ideas from Rice’s original book and used them in the movie, I think we would have wound up with a much better movie.
Case in point: Why is Akasha so mad? The QotD movie would have you believe it’s not only because she’s a bitch and a villain, but because she’s a monster, and monsters always have problems with anger management. What we have in this movie is just a woman causing a lot of carnage, which certainly looks cool if you like that sort of thing, but if you want at least some substance with your entertainment like I do, then it just doesn’t gel. If the producers had used Rice’s idea, being that Akasha is angry at the world and so destructive because she seeks to cleanse it of violence and suffering through the near-annihilation of the male sex (what she considers to be the source of all suffering and pain), the audience might have felt more for her than normally would have. It also would have provided for one hell of a thought-provoking concept, being the achievement of peace through acts of mass destruction and bloodshed.
Just having Akasha crawling around
killing stuff has her fall into the old movie cliché of
angry-villain/bitch-goddess, and one of the great things about Anne Rice is
that she took a classic cliché and turned it on its ear. To omit that from the movie is to lose the
magic and the innovation that Rice brought to the vampire genre in the first
place, and that just makes your film less special and more typical. All it would have taken was a simple bit of
explication; Akasha herself could have said it in passing, Marius could have
explained it to the ancients during the
This particular point is just the tip of the explanation iceberg, really, but it’s a big tip, and if it was fixed I think it would have improved the movie significantly.
I’ve always felt that one of “Queen of the Damned”’s strong points was its set and costume design. If the QotD movie is spot-on in anything, I think the sets are it. The shrine of Akasha and Enkil is just as I pictured it, and Maharet’s compound is no exception. In fact, the producers seem to have spent so much time on the visual aspects of the movie that they often forgot that people are up there talking, instead of just standing around looking pretty. In short, it’s obvious where most of the budget went, and unfortunately that makes for a crappy movie.
Quite a bit of the dialogue in the movie is completely inane (i.e. Jesse: “Boo.” Lestat: “Boo back.”). Personally, I’d rather have a movie that’s poignant and meaningful rather than one that just looks good. That’s just me though. If you look at a movie like “The Fellowship of the Ring” it’s obvious that it is possible to have the best of both worlds. Of course, those movies had a significantly larger budget than the QotD film, but if you want a lesser example, try looking at the film version of “Interview With the Vampire.” That movie was nominated for an Academy Award for production design, yet I found the script and the dialog to both intelligent, interesting, and in places genuinely moving. That’s due in no large part, I think, to the fact that it is very closely adapted from the original source material. “Queen of the Damned” is one of the most thought provoking of the Vampire Chronicles, and I think if the script people had kept more of Anne’s original dialogue, or at least hewed more closely to it, they would have had an infinitely more engrossing film. Anne’s books, which contain no pictures, weren’t huge best-sellers because they looked nice. So yes kiddies, words do matter sometimes.
Chalk this one up to Matrix fever. Just because one movie has some kick-ass, gravity defying fight scenes in it and is subsequently hugely massively successful, doesn’t mean that in order for a movie to be hugely and massively successful, one must include similar kick-ass, gravity defying fight scenes. Having Lestat and Marius break out into some inane vampire kung-fu fight during the concert scene not only looks silly, it smacks of insincerity. Originality is a good thing. Keeping your material fresh, and not ripping-off “The Matrix” (like so many other post-Matrix movies have), can only let the audience know that you consider them intelligent beings that don’t want to see the same thing over and over and over. Besides, the whole Matrix fight scenario is so three years ago. Let’s try something new.
Technology is certainly growing by leaps and bounds these days, but just because something is there doesn’t mean we should use it; like the atom bomb, or the “flying vampire” effect used in the “Queen of the Damned” movie. Special effects are good, and I think they can be used to enhance a movie, but to overuse them is to distract viewers from the actual content of the film, presuming that there is actual content to the film.
The newest installments of the Star Wars trilogy are perfect examples of this “too much of a good thing” concept, as one of the things that people loved so much about the originals were their blend of (then) innovative special effects with truly thought provoking dialogue; that is something that many modern critics would argue that Episodes I and II lack. The QotD movie is no exception. I found that when the special effects in QotD aimed lower they were much more effective.
Maharet’s blood tears are a perfect example of this. It is to the effects people’s credit that they were able to pull off the blood tears and do so convincingly, as the people behind “Interview With the Vampire” cut out the blood tears altogether because the technology to make it look convincing just wasn’t there yet. However, the horrible blurry/fading effect used in QotD to illustrate the speed of vampire movement is not only annoying but completely distracting. Vampires move too fast for the human eye to see, I get it, but does that mean that every freaking time a vampire moves I have to witness it? At times I found myself utterly distracted, and sometimes nauseated, by this “enhanced movement” thing. If you’re going to go for flashy special effects, try using something that’s a little more updated than these 70’s era, “Six-million Dollar Man”-type effects. I think some simple and clever editing would have been much more effective, realistic, and brought an air of mystery and eeriness to the film, not to mention being far less aggravating. “Interview With the Vampire” used such low-tech methods and was no worse for wear as far as atmosphere and overall coolness is concerned.
One of my biggest complaints, if not the biggest complaint, about the QotD movie was the transformation of the character of Jesse into Lestat’s love interest. From what I gleaned from conversations with producer Jorge Saralegui on the official movie board, the reason Jesse takes such a center-stage position is because she’s one of the only human characters in the story and since humans are the ones that are going to be watching the movie, we need her to draw us into the film and to have someone to identify with. I take serious issue with this because one of the most innovative and important changes Anne Rice brought to the vampire genre was the humanization of essentially inhuman creatures.
Prior to Rice, vampires were mostly single-minded, one-dimensional, blood-hungry monsters. What makes Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series so interesting is not that it’s about vampires and that vampires are by nature interesting, but that they are monsters with human feelings. They are inhuman creatures who by their very nature have to do inhuman things to survive; yet in losing their physical and biological humanity, they lose none of their psychological humanity. They feel guilty just like we do, they get sad just like we do, they fall in love like we do, yet they are in so many ways nothing like us. That is the paradox that lies at the heart of Rice’s work and that is what I think makes her vampires so truly engaging. We are able to sympathize and empathize with inhuman creatures to the point that not only do we not care that we’re doing so, but also that many of us actually want to be like these monsters. Because that’s what vampires are really: monsters. You can pretty it up all you want, but they’re monsters, pure and simple.
My point in explaining all this is that because Rice’s vampires are monsters with human feelings, we have no need of a human character to draw us into the story and/or to identify with. The vampires themselves do that, and in fact it’s more interesting coming from them because of the juxtaposition of their inhumanity with their very human feelings. I found Jesse to be not so much a tool to “humanize” a monster movie as a way to get little girls to go into the theaters and come out swooning because they wish a cool mysterious guy like Lestat would fall for a run-of-the-mill human like them, just as he did with Jesse. It’s a classic movie ploy that’s been used countless times in order to draw a female element into a genre of film (in this case, horror) that is largely considered male-dominated. Consider this an undead Cinderella tale, if you will, with a vampiric Prince Charming taking away his mortal beloved to live in gothic bliss.
You can’t get much more moving and original than that. If there’s one thing I hate, I hate being talked down to, and having Jesse running around, fawning over Lestat, indeed throwing herself at him, and then having him actually fall for all that bullshit is just so condescending. I find it insulting as a woman and insulting on a basic human level. The producers didn’t even take enough care in developing the Lestat/Jesse romance. One minute he finds her irritating, and the next minute he loves her for her humanity. You would think that after living for 200 hundred years a guy would know enough to be less fickle than that.
This plot-point drops even further down the believability-meter when you consider that there is absolutely no explanation as to why Lestat finds Jesse, above all other human girls out there, so damned interesting. From what I can discern, the Jesse of the movie ain’t all that special; there must be a million girls out there just like her. Akasha, on the other hand, I get. She is mysterious, she is exotic, and she is powerful. She is a woman with immense power and she’s not afraid to let the world know it. She’s like an undead dominatrix, and I can understand why a guy like Lestat would go for that.
Building on that, I think movie time would have been more well spent developing and exploring the romance between Lestat and Akasha, and dropping the pairing with Jesse altogether. Not to mention being more interesting, that relationship would have improved on several themes found in the movie, such as Lestat’s choice between good and evil. It would have made the finale more interesting and poignant. We would have sympathized more with both Akasha and Lestat. At the very least we would have been more mournful of her passing.
I guess the movie’s explanation of why Lestat chooses Jesse (good) over Akasha (evil) is that Lestat just can’t participate in the acts of mindless murder that Akasha seems to enjoy so much. This doesn’t really make much sense since we are earlier shown him taunting and brutally slaying two seemingly innocent, albeit slightly stupid, groupies. So Lestat is willing to taunt and torture a couple of girls, but he draws the line at littering entire beaches with corpses? Oh, I guess that’s what ultimately makes him a “good vampire” and not a naughty one. File that one under lack of explanation as well.
To have Lestat fall in love with a woman like Akasha because she is powerful, but then have to choose to stand against her because she craves too much of what he finds so attractive about her in the first place, is a much more gripping choice than the stark “you’re good, so I like you better than the evil bitch over there” thing. The ending of this movie suffered because it was over so quickly, and having Lestat make what should be a harrowing decision so damn quickly does nothing to add to the tension the audience should be feeling by this point. There was no real sense of conflict or danger; as an audience I felt more as if we were just watching stuff happen instead of anticipating some grand event. The movie made Lestat’s choice far too simplistic. Lestat chooses Jesse over Akasha because Jesse is the good girl, and Akasha isn’t…two seconds later the movie is over.
In the book Jesse’s main purpose was to introduce, explore, and finally bring full circle the Legend of the Twins. Since that aspect of the book was understandably omitted from the film, Jesse isn’t left with much to do. I think she would have been more effective as a tool used to further develop the Maharet/Akasha connection that what she was seemingly intended for here.
I’ve addressed my major points of complaint here in great detail, but there are a lot of little things that need addressing. I’ll just touch upon them briefly:
a). The Ancients as Statues: Why-oh-why are their clothes stone in addition to their actual bodies? It defies explanation, not to mention looking really stupid. I’m all for suspension of disbelief, but this is stretching it. One of the fun things about movies is to enter into a fantasy world that is realistic enough to actually seem, well, real. This whole statue thing just stretches the boundaries though. I think it would have been better to have Akasha and Enkil in a catatonic state, just sort of sitting there, staring blankly into space. It would have been more visually arresting, more visually jarring, and just creepier than the statue thing.
b). Lestat’s Music: I can understand updating the style of music to suit the times. That’s fine. What I hate is how the movie people changed the content of Lestat’s music, from book to film. It’s unnecessary and winds up becoming yet another way this film is sucked into the Hollywood-cliché vortex. Boohoo, Lestat is lonely and he’s a misfit, and so he becomes a Goth rocker! Talk about reinventing the wheel. Lestat became a rock star because his out-in-the-open personality clashed with the secretive nature of vampires (which is something the movie actually got right). However, he wrote his songs to reveal secrets about the vampire community that he’s absolutely not supposed to be revealing (because he has this self-destructive streak, and because he was looking for some fun, I guess)….not because he is sad and upset that his life was “fucked up” by becoming a vampire.
In fact, Lestat revels in his new vampire nature, once he overcomes the initial shock of it all. It took some getting used to, sure, but one of the great things about Lestat as a character is that he is not mired in constant despair and depression (like Louis was). He’s an active and vibrant sort of guy, and we love him for it. Jonathan Davis, who penned Lestat’s lyrics for the film, completely missed the boat on this one. In an interview on the DVD he said that in writing the songs he tried to enter the mindset of a vampire and just go from there. He felt that being a vampire would be a very depressing and lonely existence, which I’m sure it would be and actually is for many of Rice’s characters…but not Lestat. That’s what makes him so interesting. Lestat wrote his songs in order to bait the vampire community into an ultimate showdown; he did it just because he wanted to see what would happen if one vampire dared to go where no other vampire had gone before. Why the hell should a bunch of vampires care that he was made one of the undead against his will and that that makes him really sad? Tell them something they don’t know.
c). Akasha’s Costumes: I’m sorry, but I just don’t think Ancient Egyptian Queens wore metal pasties. Making Akasha’s costumes more authentically Egyptian, and less overtly gaudy, would have heightened the realism of the film and just plain looked better.
d). Lestat’s Hair: This is a big point of contention for the Rice loyalists. Lestat should have blond hair. He did in the books, and you are basing a film on those books. Stuart Townsend did not have blond hair because he didn’t look good with it, according to the producers. I think if Mr. Hollywood Tom Cruise can play Lestat and dye his hair blond and look okay, than Stuey can as well. I know this movie was not being made for Anne Rice purists, but come on, throw us a bone here.
As you can see I’ve found a lot of
stuff wrong with the “Queen of the Damned.”
Please don’t take this as a sign of my utter contempt for the film. I essentially dislike it not because all of
this stuff is wrong with it, but because there are faults where there really
shouldn’t have been. All of the problems
I’ve discussed here are not major things.
Their conflicts that can be easily resolved by a little extra time, a
tiny extra bit of ingenuity, some camera tweaking, and maybe a little thought
and consideration. Perhaps I’m getting
ahead of myself though. I am not a
film-maker, nor an author, and in the end all of the suggestions made here are
suggestions on making a movie that would appeal more to me, and not fandom as a whole.
Therefore, please don’t assume that I’m speaking for all Rice/vampire
fans. If you like, or even love this
movie, more power to you. I wish I had
enjoyed it as much as I thought I would.
What truly pains me most about the
QotD film is not that it’s disloyal to the Rice books, but because it doesn’t
seem to have strived to be more than a visual orgy. I find the lack of effort and inventiveness
really disheartening, and that is why I’m more disappointed with the film than
I am disgusted by it. This movie had
every reason to be a good vampire movie, given the source material, even if it
didn’t follow said source material to the letter. I just get the overall impression that “Queen
of the Damned” was something slapped together to appeal to that segment of the
population that craves pure visual stimulation over any other sort. I guess I am being naïve in a way,
considering that we are talking about
If anything, this movie tells me that