Oprah Winfrey Hated A Tom Cruise Horror Movie So Much That She Walked Out Of It

In the 1990s, few people had more sway over popular culture in the United States than Oprah Winfrey. She was the ultimate tastemaker whose book club and television series appearances had the ability to launch careers, but one horror movie was just a bit too bloody to get her blessing. 

The year was 1994. Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt were both hot young superstars at the top of their game, starring in Neil Jordan's "Interview with the Vampire," based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Anne Rice. The movie was mostly a hit with critics, but definitely not Oprah, who said that she walked out of a Los Angeles screening of the movie and even reconsidered having Cruise on her talk show! That's pretty wild — given that Tom Cruise would eventually almost implode his entire career by jumping up and down on Oprah's couch a decade later while promoting Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" — and it almost didn't happen because the talk show host got freaked out by what is now recognized as a gothic vampire classic. 

While speaking with Tom Cruise on her talk show (via The Orlando Sentinel), Oprah revealed her reasoning for leaving the theater during "Interview with the Vampire," saying: 

"I believe there are forces of light and darkness in the world, and I don't want to be a contributor to the force of darkness."

That original report suggests Oprah was simply grossed out by the blood and gore, but that's certainly a pretty heavy reaction to a fairly tame horror movie (at least by the standards of the genre). However, she doubled down over 20 years later when Cruise (promoting his ill-fated 2017 horror reboot "The Mummy") recalled her reaction in a red carpet interview. When asked about Cruise's remembrance by Mario Lopez in a separate interview (a true game of a movie promo telephone here), Oprah emphasized that she doesn't like "scary" or "dark" movies and left it at that.

It would be pretty easy to make fun of Oprah for calling a movie about vampires "a force of darkness," but there are some elements of "Interview with the Vampire" that could be significantly more upsetting for certain audiences. Thankfully, AMC changed the story in big ways for their "Interview with the Vampire" television series, removing the elements that make certain characters impossible to root for in the novel and movie.

 Whatever the case, she really hated "Interview with the Vampire" (although probably not nearly as much as Brad Pitt hated filming it), a movie now considered a classic by movie fans all over the world. Then again, this is the woman who unleashed Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz on all of us, so how much can we trust her taste in things anyway?