Movies - TV
Hannibal And Interview With The Vampire Make The Same Brilliant Adaptation Choice
By DANIELLE RYAN
AMC's "Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire" and NBC's "Hannibal" use the soul of the original stories to create compelling and contemporary television series. With diverse casts and distinctly queer storylines, the reimagined material successfully works in conversation with the original work.
Each story is about a toxic romance between two deadly men, and the adopted daughter that ends up stuck between them. Will and Hannibal’s relationship was never explicitly romantic or sexual in the TV series, but the AMC series explicitly shows the complicated queer romance between Lestat and Louis.
One thing that both "Hannibal" and "Interview With the Vampire" understand well is that love is messy. The queer romances at the heart of these shows are deeply human stories of control and desire between complicated people, which makes them tragic and compelling.
Both couples’ greatest crimes are against their surrogate daughters, Abigail and Claudia. The women are able to see the toxicity between their two father figures, but are ultimately pawns for their disturbed dads — and they both pay dearly for that toxic love.
Accuracy isn’t everything, and recreating beloved works of fiction beat for beat can be a cause for failure. “Hannibal” and “Interview with the Vampire” are successful in their TV adaptations because they know that the twisted souls of the original texts are the most important things to preserve.