An adaptation is vampiric: The romance and horror of adapting in AMC’s Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire

This article regards the television series Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire as an example of how the practice of adaptation can shed light on its process. Using the work of Eckart Voigts and Christine Geraghty, it looks at the series as a queer ‘metadaptation’ which foregrounds its own adaptive processes and status as adaptation. It considers how, in this series, adaptation of media (including a prior version of the interview within the series and Shakespeare) is presented through the lens of vampirism, and adaptation is portrayed as a process which is both romantic and horrific. In particular, this article looks at the way that AMC’s Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire plays with the discourses of adaptation studies itself, especially with regard to ‘fidelity’, and at how the series makes apparent the gendered and racialized connotations of this kind of discourse. It uses this analysis to suggest that, instead of moving on from clichés such as fidelity and infidelity, adaptation studies might look at the ways its own discourses inform adaptations themselves.