Blood Relations: The Gothic Perversion of the Nuclear Family in Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire.

In 1976, Anne Rice published her first novel, "Interview with the Vampire", and turned the vampire paradigm on its head. This breakthrough novel focused not on vampire hunters, but on the vampires themselves and what a different breed they were. In the vast, dark landscape of Gothic fiction in late twentieth century America, the seminal figure of the vampire wanders in ever-increasing numbers. Louis, Lestat, and Claudia slept in coffins and drank blood, but throughout Interview with the Vampire, they preyed with impunity, they gave themselves over to introspection, and they sought and found an entire subculture based on their own peculiar existence. They existed in a different world, and the old models no longer applied. Anne Rice, makes the nuclear family of vampires a major theme in her novel "Interview with the Vampire." In 1994, director Neil Jordan filmed Interview with the Vampire from a screenplay by Anne Rice. The film, while remarkably faithful to its source material, does provide some visual shortcuts in establishing the familial nature of the relationship between the three main characters.