Hernan Migoya
Updated Wednesday, January 17, 2024-9:30 p.m.
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Let's imagine the
pitch
of a producer trying to sell a series based on the literary saga
The Mayfair Witches
by Anne Rice
to an audiovisual platform : "It's about a clan of witches from New Orleans, almost all of them born from incestuous relationships between fathers and daughters and even between grandparents and granddaughters.
The last witch of the saga, Rowan, is attacked while pregnant by a diabolical ghost that enters her body,
kills her fetus and is reborn as a humanoid
, a specter made flesh that will immediately nurse from her when she is not there. violating
At the same time, that demon rapes several women of the Mayfair clan to force them to give birth to a new breed of bugs, but they
all die from hemorrhagic losses before childbirth
.
And to confront this devil from beyond the grave and free Rowan from his clutches we have none other than her partner, Michael, a house restorer imbued with noble intentions who would go to rescue her right away if it weren't for the fact that he spends the day doing love with his wife's cousin, a cousin who, by the way, is only 13 years old.
Exciting, isn't it?
Or as a stunned reader on the specialized website Goodreads says about the second book of the trilogy: "It has everything:
rape, child porn, incestuous pedophilia, paranormal pedophilia, abortions
and a multitude of strange fetishes related to breastfeeding."
No, Anne Rice's books are not easy to adapt to film.
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TOO WILD FOR THEM
The exciting and also disheartening thing about Anne Rice, who died on December 11, 2021 at the age of 80, is that her work was excessive in form and substance.
Starting from an extreme and, at times, captivating romanticism (and, at times, very well written in its incontinence of thousands of pages), he managed to cram his fables with
such quantities of sex, gore and nonsense
that, in comparison, the novels of
Stephen King
or Clive Barker seem like they were written by altar boys.
Never premises so typical of sentimental Gothic or pink fantasy (a couple of vampire men who assume the guardianship of a century-old vampire imprisoned in the body of a girl; a saga of witches in danger because the last of her clan prefers to dedicate herself to philanthropy and living her love affair with a handsome decorator with wise hands) welcomed
such obscene and virulent ideas and passages
, to the point of leaving the adult novels of their male colleagues in diapers.
And he relegated his crudest fantasies to the
Tetralogy of Sleeping Beauty
, signed under the pseudonym AN Roquelaure (and published in Spain, like all of his main production, by B de Bolsillo), where
he indulges in lustful images. and sadistic
, like that of young princes impaled on the erect sex of a statue.
'VAMP' AND 'CAMP'
Everything has a previous origin and so does the famous
Vampire Chronicles
: for its preparation, Anne Rice would borrow the romantic model of
The Vampire
(1819), the seminal novel by Polidori who in turn took Lord Byron as a model for his beautiful
Nosferatu
.
She converted him into the bloodsucker stereotype of the modern Gothic genre in her elegant and excessive
Interview with the Vampire
(1976), a narrative undertaken to fight the depression left by the loss of her daughter Michelle, who died of leukemia at the age of five. .
His Lestat relapses into the magnetic attraction that a Dracula gives off, but Rice's undead also enjoys the company of men.
The imagery of
European decadent romanticism and gay hedonism
thus renewed its aesthetics in the heart of the United States in the 70s and 80s, quickly catching on in the imagination of millions of readers... and especially of female readers, especially adolescents, identified with the escape towards ahead of violence and enjoyment of the senses that the novel proposes: they metaphorically identify with
those amoral rules that women could never incur
, not even in fiction.
And thus the craze for Anne Rice's literature exploded, beginning with those
Vampire Chronicles
, which she would continue with the extremely successful
Lestat the Vampire
(1985) and
The Queen of the Damned
(1988), and which she would continue with ten more titles, not counting the crossover of characters in other sagas.
Faced with such a festival of gay sex and unbridled gore, seasoned with the relevant detail that the third protagonist of the story is an old vampire with the body of a five-year-old girl (the same age at which Rice's daughter died) frustrated by her inability of erogenous development, it is not difficult to imagine
Hollywood's reluctance to adapt his novels to film
.
They finally dared in 1994: directed by a Neil Jordan still in a state of grace and with a script by Rice herself, the film
Interview with the Vampire
is forced to reduce the homoerotic vibration
and raise Claudia's age to 10 years, opting for a formal classicism reasonably suitable for fans of its leading stars,
Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt
.
Even so, it is a great film, whose international success quintupled the initial investment of 60 million dollars.
Despite this, there was no direct sequel and it would take eight years for the
Vampire Chronicles
to return to the big screen with
The Queen of the Damned
(2002) by Michael Rymer, a plot combination of the next two books in the saga, with nice results - but closer aesthetically to British
glam
than to Rice—and a B-series visual bill. The box office did not support it and there Anne died for Hollywood... until her "resurrection" twenty years later.
What can we say about the new
Interview with the Vampire
,
the series released by the AMC channel
in 2022?
The bad: Claudia is now 14 years old and the actors who play "her parents" Louis and Lestat do not have the appearance of big movie stars.
The good: it treats the audience as if it were an adult, the
gay romance is absolutely overwhelming and explicit
, the offal sequences too, and in general the innovations of the plot in favor of greater ethnic representation (Louis and Claudia are black) are fine carried, without betraying the original spirit.
Finally, Anne Rice's fantastic universe is getting proper treatment in the audiovisual industry.
SERIAL NIGHTMARE
The recent The Witches of Mayfair
(2023), also created for AMC,
does not suffer the same fate .
To be honest, the only way to faithfully translate Rice's trilogy would be to create an
explicitly bloody and sexual serial for those over 18
, something like a porn
Lady Oscar
or a new
Caligula
by Tinto Brass.
Therefore, it is not surprising that those responsible have decided to play it safe and not include in the series neither nudity nor the two main male characters: Michael Curry, Rowan's zascandil husband, and Aaron Lightner, an elderly British man in the service of the secret order. of Talamasca paranormal studies.
More controversial is the choice of John Huston's grandson in the role of the seductive and demonic Lasher: a role that demanded
the murky elegance of a young Jeremy Irons
or the narcissistic beauty of a Matthew McConaughey.
According to
YouTuber
Amanda Thee, Jack Huston interprets it as if he were "a musician from Las Vegas trying to pick you up at two in the morning at the bar."
The series has aroused the ire of fans of Anne Rice, who is no longer alive to see it: despite appearing as executive producer with her son Christopher in the initial phase of the project, we suspect that the author would not have been satisfied with
the watered-down content either.
and the politically correct patina of this television version
, if we remember the fiery passion with which he lately defended on social networks the freedom of the writer to create any type of characters in terms of ethnicity, sexual tendency or immorality... and to fearlessly capture all the demons that we carry inside.