vampposting

I don't have proof of this, someone on the writing team could disprove this, I am saying what I saw in the season:

The framing device of "The Failures" was probably written in late 2025 after initial negative feedback on the season from producers or the network, who did not understand what was happening in the show and demanded a fix. It required limited reshoots to incorporate, allowed the editors to heavily recut previously written sequences to incorporate it, cut down on elements they thought weren't working, and increase the elements they thought were working.

This is value-neutral on whether or not you liked the season or the voiceover. You'll probably pick up on my feelings on both along the way.

(I tried to spoiler tag this correctly, but fyi, this spoils E7)

Point One: So much stock footage.

The overwhelming majority of the voiceover in The Vampire Lestat is played over stock footage, clips from prior seasons, or b-roll. This is not the way a voiceover is traditionally written into a script; for a good example of a traditional voiceover, see the first two seasons of Interview with the Vampire. The voiceover transitions us between scenes or is given actual sequences, longer shots, directly related to what we are hearing, to play over.

"He was in love with my city." We see them in New Orleans. "Lestat had disappeared," and we see the start of a scene of him trying to apologize. This isn't random footage, this is filmed intentionally.

There is an absurd amount of stock footage and season one and two footage being played over voiceover in this season. Several voiceover sequences include no footage we have a reason to think was specifically for this season at all.

Look at the lead in to the strip club scene in episode two: greenscreen + stock footage (likely filmed for the original scene transition), stock footage, b-roll insert:

The opening of episode four: stock footage, b-roll, footage from a prior episode that is unrelated to this sequence:

Is using stock footage or b-roll or reusing footage from prior episodes inherently bad or inherently a sign that the voiceover was added later? I'm not saying that, and don't accuse me of saying that. Stock footage is a normal tool, you film b-roll to use it.

But when a giant proportion of the voiceover is only over sequences like this, I wonder if the editors are having to create visuals for something that wasn't planned when the show was filmed, especially because:

Point Two: The transitions in and out of the flashbacks are filmed as if there wasn't originally a voiceover there.

Here is an extremely common piece of film grammar for a flashback with no voiceover, demonstrated in season one: a character goes to sleep, crossfade into a flashback, wakes up. We don't need a voiceover here because the language is easy to understand. He's falling asleep? People dream about the past sometimes. He's waking up? He was dreaming about the past and is now awake. They're both common transitions between flashbacks and a frame story.

You actually only need one of the two: the transition out in this example is just an additional moment for the Armand reveal to sink in. Especially if it's a natural edit break, (or, let's say, the beginning of an episode?) you only need one device to justify a flashback.

So it's really interesting that The Vampire Lestat, which has a voiceover as a conceit throughout, uses so many other traditional flashback transitions for scenes from Lestat's POV, almost as though the writers needed to justify why we are seeing the flashbacks in a version of the script that didn't have a voiceover framing device for Lestat.

Why does he need to tell us he's going into a flashback in a voiceover (over stock footage) if we're going to see him wake up from having remembered this in a dream afterwards?

Why do we have multiple framing devices to allow him to give us voiceover within the tour framing device? Why is he telling us that he told someone else a story as a pretext to tell it?

There is nothing wrong with using multiple ways to get in and out of flashbacks- but this season uses a lot. In my example from season one, there is a simple reason we can't use the main one we've been using: Daniel is not a POV character, so to see inside of his POV, we need a different device.

All of these flashbacks are meant to be Lestat. If you think about what he is telling us on The Failures, he... needs to explain his mom and then he woke up? He talked to Daniel about Nicki and then told the listener, about Nicki in a fragmented way at that time? He's telling us about how he was attacked by Akasha, but really needed to get back to how his band was bad, and then remembered he needed to tell us the rest of that story when he was telling it to the band? Huh?

To be honest: there isn't really a flashback I can identify where the voiceover is required at all.

Point Three: Style and substance.

If the voiceover was always intended, you would expect it to serve a function within the show, give us information we can't get anywhere else, motivate editing choices, etc. Here is a challenge: watch any sequence with significant voiceover and think about the information you got from it. Then, within the next ten minutes of the same episode, see if there is anything the voiceover told you that they didn't almost immediately tell you again with either visuals or dialogue giving you identical information.

Almost all of the voiceover could be removed and leave the audience with the exact same amount of understanding or confusion as they would have with it.

Example from episode four:

The Voiceover: "It can grind you down or deliver you home. And which would it be for our Marginal Mystery Tour back in the bosom of the nifty 50 United States? Digitally, there was some optimism, as somewhere between the P Diddler and Chipotle's new Adobo Ranch sauce, The Vampire Lestat found itself momentarily trending. Cell phone footage of yours truly went viral as both irrefutable proof of the cloud gift and deepfake Antichrist."

In the framing device, Lestat is told by Christine that a major investor wants to talk to him. In the next scene where the band's popularity is relevant, twenty minutes later, the investor says to Lestat:

Andrew: "I didn't know you were alive three days ago. I watched the video. Did a deep dive on the band, the Beautiful Unwell, flew here to Albany, playing "Long Face,". "Plastic Fiends," and "Loneliness" in a loop on my Beats. Saw the show. It's impossible. Saw the fans waiting outside the hotel. Impossible. I saw the protesters outside the hotel. Impossible."

Seems like we'd have been able to figure out the band went viral from a levitation video that seems impossible.

If it's not giving us a lot of new information, then it could be mostly a stylistic choice: It is a stylistic choice. It's one they likely added afterwards. Deciding on the season was chaotic, and making it more stylistically chaotic by including the voiceover and re-edit made it easier to fix the problem they were trying to fix.

It's especially obvious because the episode that feels the most like the prior seasons, episode six, is the one with the least voiceover. Probably because we are watching something pretty similar to what they thought the episode was when they filmed it.

And I just got to put this out there: re-cutting your project to stylize it to make room for a voiceover you need to include because no one understands the narrative as you filmed it with the footage you have was a literal running joke among my cohort in film school.

It doesn't say anything about how the original scripts looked. I used to put a lot of badly color-balanced footage in black-and-white as a "stylistic choice" in high school, too.

Point Four: The voiceover ruins plot points that were meant to be shocking.

Why do you behead a character at the end of an episode? So the audience is shocked and has to wait until next week to see what the outcome of that character being beheaded is.

That really doesn't work if that character is doing an omniscient voiceover we know is in the future.

"Do you think we're really meant to think they're dead?" No, I don't think the users of Tumblr.com the website are meant to think he's dead; I think a random person who doesn't use Tumblr is supposed to argue with their spouse after the episode ends about whether or not he's dead. That's why you do things like this!

You don't fakeout kill a character we know from earlier this same episode isn't dead, because it doesn't mean anything.

This one is more of a broad swing of a theory and assumes they did some fairly significant re-edits to move reveals around, but I also don't think we're supposed to know that Gabriella is his mom by the end of episode one, because they even lampshade how this isn't a good reveal.

If this is true, I don't know when we would have learned about who Gabriella is. I assume it would have been in episode two, because we have to know she's his mother from the flashbacks.

A plausible idea is that the actual kiss there was either from a re-shoot or filmed as an option they could use or not use: after this makeout scene, there is a lot of dialogue in the next episode which could have been planned as a "are they?? are they not??" about the nature of their relationship.

Given this conversation in episode two, it still wouldn't have been ambiguous at all, so it would have been a bad writing choice to assume the audience had any doubt here. Then again, we're talking about fucking Gabriella on The Vampire Lestat, so I'm not assuming a choice being really stupid rules it out as something they were trying to do.

They spent so much of this season on the shocking reveal that Lestat is fucking his mom; it's information we get in the form of a reveal like four times, and then the voiceover adds even more.

Guys... I think there might be incest in this show? Not sure.

It's such a huge element that keeps giving us the same information at the same level of detail, without a twist, without a recontextualization, that I have to entertain the possibility that they decided to make it... more significant later in the process? That's a terrible thought.

Point Five: The way book references are used is really weird.

This adaptation is not made for people with an encyclopedic knowledge of The Vampire Chronicles. As one of those people, I feel comfortable saying this, but also because that's not a market you can sell a show to, because it's too small. Seasons one and two mostly knew that, the Armand reveal being the big exception. The scenes we are watching that aren't voiceover mostly know that.

The way the show deploys book references in the voiceover is really weird.

We know there was a writer's assistant (if you see this: congrats, holy shit, that's a hell of a break, genuinely; also, if I am 100% wrong here and you know, that's hilarious) checking the books for information. I'm not naming her because people are being rude to her about the season (don't do that), but she mentioned this being something she did:

That's a real detail the show gets right: in episode six, at least a lot of the fake names we see are real aliases from the books! It stands out to me, then, that one of the biggest total book-niche fun fact blunders is in the voiceover:

"Picture my five dead siblings, Aristide, Marie, Jules, unbaptized, and Faustin, garden gnomes guarding the undulating domestic bliss of our great hall."

People have mentioned this a lot already, but if you don't know, from Blackwood Farm, Lestat's brother's initials are L-E-S-T-A-T:

"The name [Lestat is] compounded of the first letter of each of my six older brothers’ names."

That isn't proof of anything; it's just interesting to me. It's almost like the voiceover was written after the writers' room was dismissed, when there wasn't someone whose job it was to look up these things anymore. Huh.

It's also very strange to me what level the voiceover thinks you are supposed to be familiar with the books, in comparison to how much they are changing from them.

The show starts with a voiceover that assumes you are familiar with the plot of The Queen of the Damned.

"And I am not saying that the attempted extinction of the Y chromosome across the continents was all my fault."

And in one of the two scenes actually shot in the framing device, we get a shot that assumes you've read The Tale of the Body Thief?

These aren't Easter Eggs- well, they're not good Easter Eggs. Eh, I'll give you the Raglan one if you argue with me.

These are real pieces of information that it's extremely odd to expect some of the audience to know nothing whatsoever about, and others to understand completely. Usually, an adaptation is a different experience if you know the source material or don't, but not on the level of making or not making sense. It's kind of like they want you, when you Google what is happening, to find out the plots of these books via something like The Vampire Chronicles Wiki.

What these references all do is serve an extremely specific function: telling a general audience, if they Google it, that a plot is coming.

I wonder why they felt the need to add a voiceover to clarify that.

Point Six: Episode Seven, The Failures.

I suspected a lot of what I said above from episode one on, and was basically certain from the flashbacks in episode two. I didn't know why they did this exactly, but it explained a lot of what felt odd about the editing.

I figured it was probably a logic issue: something about the show was too vague, and people didn't understand what was happening, so they added the voiceover. It would make sense since a lot of it felt vague even with the voiceover. Maybe the logic issue was caused by something else: maybe something experimental they tried in the script, like more of the "long table," really didn't come across at all on screen; maybe a story element looked or just came across really bad, and they had to cut down on the amount it was shown and fill in the gaps; maybe a block of filming got cut or rushed and they didn't get enough footage.

I don't think I guessed that the logic issue of the season was going to be that the last episode just randomly ends mid-scene with no resolution of any storyline whatsover?

I would love to know what on earth was originally scripted to be the end of season three. Did they write the ending from the book and find out late in the game they couldn't afford to film it? Did they film it, and something was horribly wrong with it? Did they write an eighth episode, only get greenlit for seven, and not rearrange the season at all?

I mean, I can't imagine someone was like, "yep, that's a good way to end a season of television. The people will love that!" Genuinely. For real. I don't think someone said that!

People who know the truth can prove me wrong: send me the teleplays and I'll believe you. Otherwise:

The Vampire Lestat's framing device The Failures, and potentially other significant elements of the season, are a result of significant rework because the season as originally intended was not deemed acceptable to air, possibly because they didn't actually film the originally intended conclusion.

AMC wants Anne Rice's vampires to be a Marvel movie for them so fucking bad. This is ridiculous, especially paired with how often I found the camera less immersive and more leering at Lestat in the early episode of TVL. This is GOTHIC HORROR. No wonder Sam Reid went back home and did some theatre STAT.

"Get A Babadook Body." "How Doug Jones Keeps It Tight." "Get Ethan Hawke's Grabber Grip."

"Rolin says basically that maybe it felt nothing happened but that’s only because Lestat has such a strong “armor” and doesn’t want to look inside himself and that they need another season to actually explore him as a character"

Ok. So I really didn’t like the finale. It honestly made me re-evaluate even the things I did like earlier in the season, which is a difficult thing to process. Having the cognitive dissonance around having loved the first two season, having devoted so much thought to the characters, and having defended the season up until the reframing of the finale episode is really difficult. There are still things I enjoyed and maybe I’ll come back to them. But for now I need to process my feelings, and I do best in writing. So here are my thoughts.

To me, Armand has never actually been a schemer. He’s a manipulator, but he moves out of fear. When he chose the coven in Paris, it was to ensure his own survival. (And also to eliminate the reflection of himself that he saw in Claudia, perhaps. More on that in a bit).  When he erased Louis’s memory, it was to preserve his companionship. These are all game-time decisions made to preserve himself. And sure, maybe he took some pleasure in the aesthetic art of the trial. That doesn’t change the fact that he was and always is grasping for security.

Because of that, I find the idea that he would use facial recognition software, track Regina down, blackmail and cajole her into following Louis around the world in order to bait him into… what? Reliving the misery he spent seven decades trying to erase out of Louis’s head? Pretty out of character. I can see Armand wanting revenge. I cannot see him carrying out a three year detailed multi-step scheme to get it. I also don’t understand logistically what this was supposed to accomplish—Regina didn’t actually lure Louis back to Armand, because Regina was in NYC and the butcher shop is in Montreal.

I also feel like that whole thing being designed by Armand really lowers the emotional impact of the weird emotional incest between Louis and Regina. It cheapens a thing that felt really emotionally complex to me. It was actually just a part of an evil plan. A puzzle box all along.

Speaking of Regina. It is wild to me that the episode critiqued Louis as a pimp so much without pointing out that Armand was basically doing the same thing with Regina- paying her to pursue a client. @bluedalahorse I talked a lot about how the scene would have been way more impactful if Regina hadn’t been an Armand plant, but had accidentally stumbled into the scene in the butcher shop while searching for Louis to get him to give her the money he owed her. That could have created a moment where Armand was suddenly confronted with her resemblance to Claudia as well. Armand could have reckoned with why he did what he did to Claudia. He could have acknowledged some of the parallels between himself and Claudia, and that would segued into the way that Louis genuinely understands his pain and creates that moment of empathy between them. Armand letting Regina go because he realizes some of the mistakes he made with Claudia would have been an actual moment of growth for his character.

I did like that moment. Assad’s acting in that moment especially was wonderful. But the fact that it had to literally be tortured out of Louis did make it feel cheap to me. I did not like that two South Asian men were portrayed to be conducting non-consensual medical experiments on two Black people, one of whom resembles Claudia who was a disabled Black woman. There are too many examples of very real medical experiments unethically conducted on Black people for me to be comfortable about that. There are too many instances in fiction of Muslim coded characters being maniacal villains for me to be comfortable with that. And the fact that they made such a big deal about it being in a Jewish deli?? Why??? That was so weird and uncalled for.

I think people are going to justify Armand’s apology/revenge tour as him reverting back to his Children of Darkness days, but I actually find it kind of hard to square with that. Armand’s actions are rooted in a search for survival, but also, always in self-denial. That’s what being a part of the cult taught him: pleasure and beauty is barred to him. He must carry out Satan’s wishes. So he’s violent, and he’s cruel, but those things are based in self-flagellation more than they are based in animus against the outside world. There’s a world where in this season we saw Armand sink deeper and deeper into self-harm as no one accepted his apology, where he denied himself food and happiness, and only arrived at these horrible acts at the end of that journey. I could even see a world where they put his end-of-Memnoch suicide attempt in this season. Maybe we still will see some of that if we rewind and see some of Armand’s point of view of the events. But that does not square with Armand birthing this horrible plot from the moment he was thrown into the wall in Dubai, and meditating on it for three years.

It also doesn’t really square with Armand turning Daniel three weeks after Dubai in my mind. If Armand was already occupied developing this evil plan—why stop to turn Daniel along the way? Maybe he really was turned out of spite, and to spite Louis specifically and not Daniel. I will hold out hope until we see otherwise that that is not the case, and that there was tenderness in the act. In general, I don’t really see how Armand being so hung up on revenge against Louis squares with him realizing that his love for Daniel was so present in Dubai. Maybe this is me woobifying devil’s minion too much, but the thing that is so special about them to me both in the text of the book and meta narrative of Anne’s writing is that loving Daniel is Armand’s redemption. The devil’s minion chapter prevented Armand from ever becoming the revenge-seeking person we’re seeing here. So what does it mean for Armand to be doing this with Daniel by his side? How can their love ever have that tenderness and that redemptive quality to it?

I can think of some answers and places the show might go. I can see that Daniel was initially able to surprise a true moment of emotional vulnerability out of Armand, and that Armand then clamped down by revealing the stalking and nothing more about a past relationship (and I do still believe that there is more; the lack of information in this season just feels like there’s more to come). Daniel is won over by the promise of vampiric power and revenge against Lestat and also a sexual attraction to Armand he can’t control. He goes along with the plan and gets swept up in the sex they’re having. But maybe he’s also there to get answers. Maybe he’s not so in the fog that he isn’t also investigating Armand still. He loves him but he can’t trust him. And that would honestly square more with what I know of Daniel. Daniel is mean and vicious but not without a point. It doesn’t seem in character to me for him to be chopping heads for the sake of chopping heads. (But he’s the minion! I hear you say. Well yes. But the whole point of devil’s minion is actually Armand granting Daniel’s every wish. Not Daniel being a henchman for revenge plots). But if there’s a story at the other end of it, then I believe he’d be there at Armand’s side. And maybe it’s in that reveal that they will find real honesty with each other, and that’s when that true and redemptive love can start. But will the show do this? I have no idea.

(I also can’t imagine that Daniel would have co-signed Armand torturing Louis like that. Louis and Daniel are made at each other, but they still have a profound connection, and Daniel starts the season out hoping for Louis’s approval. I wonder if Armand lied to him about what he planned to do with Louis’s head, and why he needed to separate Lestat and Louis.)

I also really hated the cracks that Daniel made about autism. That felt especially wild considering how autistic coded Armand is. I also wonder if Alex refusing to talk is a nod to book Daniel going mad after being around Armand, and if so I doubly dislike the comments. I’ve always loved Daniel as a disabled fan, and to have the one-two punch of him being magically cured and then to have him say those things felt really bad.

Everything in Lestat’s mind palace was pretty fine I think. I liked him having to confront all of his failed loves and his kills. I liked it culminating in Lestat refusing to perform for Gabriella. That’s the answer to the dramatic question of the season—will Lestat shake off Gabriella’s control, and be able to reconcile with his past? And the answer is yes. But it feels so overshadowed by the B plot (btw I’m so sorry y’all for this post, I was wrong, Armand was not the C plot protagonist but simply the extremely villainous B plot antagonist, once again) that it didn’t really have the punch I feel like it should have. Why were we spending so much time in a horror movie when we should have been building up to this moment of emotional catharsis? Why were we bogged down by puzzle box reveals when we should have been letting Lestat’s emotions soar? The engine of this show has always been relationships, especially the romance between Lestat and Louis, and I felt like this episode barely touched on it.

The other thing that this finale left completely unaddressed was the trial. Since there was no “Armand was keeping Lestat hostage” reveal, I have to assume that Lestat really was there of his own free will to get revenge. I don’t think we’re going to dip back into the past of Paris again, or at least I hope not, because at this point I cannot survive another “Armand is secretly evil” reveal. In another better finale, Armand would be torturing Lestat’s dismembered head, not Louis’s. We could have focused more in on the Lesmand relationship, and about how desperate Armand always was for Lestat’s love that he never got. We connect that back to a flashback in the 18th century with Lestat being cruelly dismissive of a desperate Armand, and then to the trial as well, with Armand keeping Lestat in Magnus’s tower. Then it’s up to Lestat to extend understanding to Armand, and it becomes about him recognizing the ways in which he and Armand are similar and have both fallen into the role of abusers to people they claim to love. It becomes more about Lestat reckoning with his failures (the theme of the series!), rather than a Black man being mutilated and then convinced to apologize to his abuser.  But since none of this actually happened, it’s very weird that Lestat’s dream sequence doesn’t touch on his role at the trial at all. Paul tells Lestat that he “loved Louis the way he should be loved” or whatever, but no one’s addressing that he went to Paris to seek revenge (after dropping Louis from the sky). (I also did not enjoy another Black character arriving simply to sanctify Lestat. In another episode with less going wrong I would be 100% caught up on that. But as it is it barely enters my list of most egregious sins).

I honestly wish that they had completely cut Armand out of the present day in this season and let him just be in flashbacks. Save devil’s minion and his emotional arc for season 4 if this was the alternative. I think a season 4 that actually does some Armand pov and develops devil’s minion could go a long way to putting the Armand we just saw in context. But at this point I don’t really trust the writers to necessarily deliver on that. And there’s no way for me to erase the image of him torturing two Black characters in a moment that feels deeply out of character from my mind.

I haven’t even really written in depth about my feelings about the séance scene yet, but I also felt really frustrated by that and the way it throws so much of the first two seasons into question. I feel like the writers really felt excused from having to think seriously about questions of race (and disability and queerness, to a lesser degree) now that they have “proven” themselves in the first two seasons and now that the show has changed title. Things that I think really needed an adaptational deft hand like the séance were ported over unchanged from the books, uncomfortable implications about abuse victims intact, while other things that I did not think needed to be reinvented or made up whole cloth, like Armand’s revenge tour, where given their own spin by the writers. It really felt like the things they picked to bring over were highlighting the worst elements of Anne’s writing rather than the best. I really, desperately hope that can change moving forward.

I also have no idea how much we’re supposed to trust Lestat’s recounting of events. Does Daniel really know the word yaoi? Or is that something Lestat is putting into his mouth? Did Claudia really say she hated Louis more than Lestat, her primary abuser? Or is that Lestat’s spin on the séance? Does it matter, if the show runners are implying that Lestat is inherently more trustworthy than Louis?

They have bought into Lestat supremacy woobification ideals bc Rolin has self inserted himself into Lestat and probably rewarded that behavior.

This post I saw (couldn’t find the original someone plz tell me if they know so I can credit them) resonates so well with me

Hannah Moscovitch don’t think I’m letting you off the hook!! You were not only a writer but an Executive producers this season.

Shame on YOU!!

You were the one who mainly wrote Louis being abused, and a domestic violence survivor. You exploit black bodies, write them being harmed, abused and tortured over and over. All for your own creative success!! No care for survivors, black history, or racism!!

I know this was insincere and exploitation because you then have the audacity to do the DARVO Louis show?!?!?!!!?

A SEASON WHERE LOUIS IS BEING LYNCHED AGAIN. TORTURED AGAIN. VIOLENCE DONE TO HIM ON SCREEN THAT NO NON BLACK CHARACTER GETS PUT THROUGH ON SCREEN.

ALL WHILE LOUIS IS BEING TREATED AS THE ACTUAL PROBLEM. ALL WHILE ENDURING RACIST ANTI BLACK SLURS ALL SEASON. DONT GET ME STARTED ON THE CLAUDIA STUFF.

All while Ryan Kattners wears an awful hip hop sucks shirt - I see you. You don’t deserve to mention hip hop. Hell you don’t even deserve to mention music.

TVL team - I see you. You want to earn success, fame and fortune on the exploitation of black pain and racism. I see all of you.

Ending it with some love @coldeveryseason posts and critiques are very well made, and better than mine. Let’s praise and support the black creators who built Iwtv to what it was.