Starring Stuart Townsend, Marguerite Moreau, Aaliyah, Vincent Perez, Paul McGann, Lena Olin.

Unlike the earlier movie Interview With A Vampire based on Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles, Queen of the Damned deviates quite markedly from the original story. Nevertheless it makes up enormously for this in spectacular visual effects and heart-stopping (so to speak) music.

The effect of the sounds of alternative/rap metal music reverberating through his tomb on the vampire Lestat is to waken him after hundreds of years. Played with jaded intensity by Stuart Townsend and reminiscent of the doomed Brandon Lee in The Crow, he is intrigued out of his long sleep in which he has been attempting 'a kind of death' in preference to the absolute loneliness and disconnection of an immortal who must kill all he loves. His thoughts are voiced by Alec Baldwin as he decides to return to his house of centuries before, with the intention of adopting the band whose wild resonance has invoked him. He appears suddenly while they are rehearsing and through his desire for connection and companionship, introduces himself as the vampire Lestat, thereby shocking both them and himself, and betraying the ancient law forbidding a vampire from revealing himself openly to humans. The band becomes known as The Vampire Lestat and quickly attracts a world cult following of post-grunge and gothic fans. The soundtrack (aptly described on the All Music Guide as nihilistic, bleak and threatening) employs the songwriting talents of Korn guitarist Jonathan Davis and keyboardist Richard Gibbs with Shankar on vocals and the amazing double violin.

Deft humorous touches from director Michael Rymer and screenwriters Scott Abbott and Michael Petroni include a laconic interchange between Lestat and his ancient creator Marius (Vincent Perez), reuniting after an estrangement lasting centuries.

“I see you’re still wearing the ancient fashions. How on earth did you survive the fifties in red velvet?” Letstat says.

“I slept.”

”You didn’t miss much – just Elvis.”

“Now you’re bigger than him,” Marius comments.

Clearly his music has the magnetic power to attract the adoration Lestat craves and makes him, in his own eyes and those of his fans at least, into a god.

Much of the tone of this movie rests on the grinding dissonance of the heavy metal music and on the sublimely wild flights of Shankar’s violin but also on visual effects that are beautiful, startling, with a sense of enormity and impact on the senses through lighting, contrast and colour. Building-size posters and enormous multimedia screens depict gigantic presences. Red and black predominate. The vampires’ complexions are airbrush flawless and bloodless, their eyes kohled and hooded, their fangs teasingly visible when they laugh. Their attacks are viciously swift and merciless, blood drips thickly in their post-orgasmic satiety.

Lestat’s history is portrayed substantially enough in the movie to show his close relationship to his creator Marius (not, as in the original, Magnus) and his awakening into unbounded pleasure-seeking which leads him through gypsy music to the violin. Exploring extremes at the edge of the possible for a mortal man, Lestat’s frenetic violin-playing dislodges his bow which flies straight from his hand to the trapdoor of the hidden crypt of the petrified (in white marble) bodies of Enkil and Akasha, vampire progenitors and King and Queen of the Damned. Irresistibly drawn to the goddess, he plays for her. She awakens and he drinks from the darkening veins in her marble wrist, thus forging an eternal bond with her. On discovering this sacrilege, Marius explains that the world is not safe from an awakened Akasha, that in her native Egypt she and Enkil had all but ‘emptied the world’ with their insatiable blood lust. In disgust, Marius abandons Lestat to centuries of loneliness.

There is a hint of politics and the theme of guardianship. Some vampires, represented by Marius, protecting the world if only from threats to their own existence by maintaining a status quo of co-existence with humans rather than the annihilation demanded by the goddess Akasha. (In the original Chronicles, Marius, most human and Good of all vampires, is guardian of Akasha and her consort because she is the progenitor and her existence ensures the survival of all vampires and their history. Akasha herself however, has other ideas.)

Marius reconnects with Lestat when he is at the peak of his music-and-power sexiness, with a warning.  Lestat has issued an invitation to come out to other vampires, while they, furious that he has betrayed their secrets, are intending his destruction at a forthcoming mega-event concert at (where else) Death Valley. Not only this, but Akasha is looking for him and will destroy him. Marius reminds him that they were once mortal, while Akasha is a goddess and all-powerful. It’s a superb scene, set at night on a gantry dangling strategically over the leatherclad loins of a gigantic poster of Lestat overlooking the bright lights of the City of ‘Lost Angels’.  After Lestat flies off, Marius is left sitting alone, legs dangling, on the gantry, pensively evocative of Wimmer’s Wings of Desire in another touch of stylish visual humour to which a post-Buffy-and-Angel as well as cult-audiences of an earlier erudition can respond.

Intertwining with this story is the thread of the Talamasca, from A.D. 758 guardians of occult lore. The Talamasca (‘Animal Mask’ in Latin) have from the beginning observed people who possess paranormal abilities. During the Middle Ages they saved many people from being burned at the stake as witches and their vaults are full of occult treasures. The Talamascans in London include a young woman librarian named Jessie (Marguerite Moreau), an orphan who has ‘dreams’ of a strange childhood family.  Jessie falls in love with Lestat after reading his journal, kept by the Talamascan David Talbot (Pail McGann), who has a similar fascination for Marius and a collection of Marius’ self-portraits through the centuries. When Jessie travels to LA Lestat is drawn to her ‘fragility and heart’ and refuses her request to make her a vampire. Jessie persists however, arriving at the concert in Death Valley before the arrival of vampire assassins and Akasha, who has been demonstrating her power by indiscriminately decimating covens of vampires.

The late R&B-singer Aaliyah, who died in a helicopter crash shortly after making the film, plays Aaliyah with a presence that is not particularly menacing in itself, though compellingly serpent-like. An air of supreme arrogance and total self-sufficiency creates Akasha as deceptively alluring, coldly vicious and unredeemably bloodthirsty. Her abduction of Lestat gives thousands of drug-and-blood-crazed heavy-metal fans good value as never before had in rock concert light-and-sound special effects.

© Avril Carruthers      22nd March 2002