Based on the 1976 Anne Rice novel, the 1994 movie adaptation of Interview With A Vampire helped reinvent the cape-wearing bloodsuckers for a new generation with its mix of classic gothica, superstar pulling power and a contemporary setting.
“This was one of the first horror films that I ever watched,” Bury Tomorrow bassist Davyd Winter-Bates tells Metal Hammer. “I wasn’t actually allowed to watch scary films when I was young, but I used to get the TV Guide magazine and look at what was on late at night to plan what I was going to sneak down and see. I worked out which floorboards in my house didn’t creak and watched it on my own after my parents had gone to bed, but I got so scared that I soon woke them up.
“It was the first vampire movie that I ever saw, and I had actually read the book beforehand. I thought ‘This can’t be any scarier than what I can imagine in my mind,’ but it genuinely disturbed me.”
Even though the casting of stars like Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Christian Slater made Interview With A Vampire a box office smash, Davyd was so young at the time he didn’t even realise his screen was full of A-listers, instead being more taken aback by the first role of a young Kirsten Dunst.
“I was lucky enough to see it before I even knew what movie stars were,” he laughs. “I didn’t see Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, I just saw these terrifying creatures, and I think that helped me accept it for what they were trying to make. There’s this scene where Kirsten Dunst is just munching on this guy and it fucked me up so much. I think it’s the idea that with vampires, they just don’t care, it’s so indiscriminate. That’s what makes them sexy and scary and cool, this little child is feasting on this grown man and they couldn’t give a fuck.
“Horror works really well when it puts the idea in your mind that this could happen, and Interview… says this could happen in your town, in your street, in the darkness of the corner of your room. This creature has been living there undetected for thousands of years and we have no knowledge of it – that’s true horror. I honestly don’t think you could see a truer reflection of what it would be like to live this ageless, callous, cold-blooded life than you do in this movie. It’s almost like a documentary crew followed them for hundreds of years; they get the characterisation and the motives so right.
“It basically made me completely obsessed with vampire movies, I went back and watched everything from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to the old Hammer Horror to the original Nosferatu, and they all still stand up because the character of the vampire plays on so many of our fears. Is there something in the dark waiting for us? Yeah, maybe!”
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