As the possibly pandemic-fueled horror boom coincides this month with the strong tidal pull of Halloween, television is experiencing a 100-year flood of fright-night programming. Witness this week’s pileup of vampire shows: three noteworthy new series premiering in a stretch of six days.
“Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire,” which premiered Sunday on AMC; “Reginald the Vampire,” Wednesday on Syfy; and “Let the Right One In,” Friday on Showtime’s streaming platforms, have more in common than retractable fangs. They pay heed to the basics — blood nourishes, sunlight burns — but none of them are primarily concerned with vampire arcana, the thicket of abilities and limitations that preoccupied an earlier generation of shows.
What the new series are focused on, instead, is the vampire as outsider. In each show, vampires are small in number; they are endangered and alienated outcasts. They’re not threatening to take over the world — if anything, they should be lobbying Congress for designation as a protected class.
“Interview,” the first show in what AMC hopes will be a franchise based on Anne Rice’s vampire novels, tweaks the author’s fictional world in several ways to make her vampire heroes even more threatened than they already were. Louis (Jacob Anderson), the human turned by the vampire Lestat (Sam Reid), is now a Black man in the Jim Crow South rather than a slave owner. And Louis and Lestat are partners in love and sex at a time when that could have landed them in jail.
The changes fit well enough with the existing dramatic arc — the two godlike aesthetes (played by Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise in the 1994 film) now seek transcendence of a fuller range of American prejudices and small-mindedness. Transcendence, in this case, mostly taking the form of a period-costumed Eurotrashy debauch in the brothels and speakeasies of 1910s New Orleans.
The TV “Interview,” created by Rolin Jones, has the virtue of taking all the gothic folderol less seriously than it was taken by the fussy and pretentious film, a low point in the career of its prodigiously talented director, Neil Jordan. The show’s first few episodes have energy and a sense of humor, which can be rococo, as in a scene where Louis and Lestat have sex for the first time and float toward the ceiling to the sound of violins, or ripe, as in a prostitute’s surprisingly graphic description of where a client went wrong.
That momentum fades quickly, however. (Five of seven episodes were available for review.) In later episodes, sex and bloodsucking take a back seat to talk — some of it in the present, where the journalist played by Eric Bogosian interviews Louis, but most of it in the past, where Louis and Lestat discourse endlessly and boringly on family, race, sexuality, power and the ethics of vampirism. The problem with the film was that it made you giggle; the problem with the series, as it goes along, is that it increasingly makes you think about checking your email.
The estrangement felt by the hero of “Reginald the Vampire” is of a very different variety than the existential ennui of Louis and Lestat, and one of the go-to moves of this frequently charming series is poking fun at those sexy-vampire clichés. “Reginald” is based on books by Johnny B. Truant known as the Fat Vampire novels, and its hero is doubly alienated: from humans, and from his sleek fellow vampires.
“Being a fat vampire?” says Reginald’s catwalk-ready maker, Maurice (Mandela Van Peebles). “That’s going to cause some problems within the vampire community.”
Reginald, an amiable, geeky fast-food worker who’s both horrified and turned on by his new undead status, calls to mind Guillermo, the familiar played by Harvey Guillén in the great comedy “What We Do in the Shadows” on FX. And in its depiction of a deadly vampire feud involving the Ohio branch of something called the Vampire Council, “Reginald” also invokes — by way of satirizing — the HBO vampire melodrama “True Blood.” But it hews to the disarmingly casual, B-picture aesthetic of Syfy channel dramedy; it shares a vibe with, but isn’t quite as entertaining as, Syfy’s other current fish-out-of-water series, “Resident Alien.”
It helps that Reginald is played by Jacob Batalon, who is as endearingly puppy-doggish and spunky here as he is playing second banana in the most recent “Spider-Man” movies. Much of the show’s humor comes from the nice guy’s bumbling, apologetic attempts to use his new powers to romance a co-worker, Sarah (Em Haine, who’s adorable in a quietly off-kilter way), and Batalon can telegraph embarrassment in every shift of his face and quiver of his body. When being in the presence of Sarah makes Reginald’s fangs pop out, Batalon’s eyebrows do their own gymnastics routine.
Like “Interview,” unfortunately, “Reginald” starts out strong and then starts to bog down. (Five of 10 episodes were available.) The show was created by Harley Peyton, who has the notable distinction of having written a dozen episodes of the original “Twin Peaks” (including two in the first season). He wrote the first two episodes of “Reginald,” which maintain a jaunty comic mood. But as the season moves on, Reginald’s romantic and workplace misadventures cede space to Maurice’s vendetta against his own maker, Angela (Savannah Basley), a story line that is formulaic, lugubrious and much less engaging. Perhaps the balance will shift back before the season ends, but melodrama has a way of winning out.
“Let the Right One In,” which was developed by Andrew Hinderaker (Netflix’s “Away”) from the novel by the Swedish writer John Ajvide Lindqvist, has a cinematic lineage that’s less high-profile but more distinguished than that of “Interview.” The series follows two very well-made movies: the 2008 Swedish film “Let the Right One In” by Tomas Alfredson and the 2010 American one “Let Me In” by Matt Reeves.
The films were notable for the way in which they distilled the vampire narrative: Tightly focused on a bullied 12-year-old boy and the undead girl who moved in next door, they used vampirism’s physical and emotional extremes to complicate and enrich a fable-like story of first love.
For a 10-episode season and counting, Hinderaker has opened the story up and reworked it in numerous ways. In addition to a not-quite-teenage romance, it is now a procedural mystery (with Anika Noni Rose as the boy’s mother, a New York homicide detective) and a medical drama (with Grace Gummer as a scientist trying to find a cure for what appears to be an epidemic of vampirism).
It pulls in references to the Covid-19 pandemic and to opioid abuse — Gummer’s character is the daughter of a pharmaceutical executive, played by Zeljko Ivanek, who is a thinly disguised stand-in for the Sacklers of Purdue Pharma.
And the move to TV also means some softening and sentimentalization. The girl’s father, a cryptic, unsettling presence in the films, is humanized and ennobled (though still capable of ruthless killing to protect and feed her). Not just a guardian, he’s now a nurturer who used to be an accomplished chef. The girl herself has been a vampire for 10 years rather than hundreds, and the boy is an unbearably cute moppet who does magic tricks.
That might all sound like must-not-see TV, but “Let the Right One In” is actually the winner among this vampire trifecta. Through five episodes, its familiar elements are ordered and executed with above-average intelligence and polish, enough that you can overlook a couple of gaping coincidences that keep the plot moving. Most important is its strong cast, including Rose, Demián Bichir as the father, Kevin Carroll as a family friend, and Ian Foreman and Madison Taylor Baez as the children.
Like the other vampire shows, “Let the Right One In” is finally an allegory about finding your family, and its strong ensemble gives it the edge.
