My Favourite Movies: Queen of the Damned

Surprisingly, taking into account my love of vampire movies and the fact that Queen of the Damned is my favourite Ann Rice book, I never saw this at the movies. I had read that the movie was so bad as hardly to be believed – so I decided to save some money and give it a miss. Big mistake.

Months later I saw it in the cheap bin at one of my local video stores and chanced a few pound thinking if it was as bad as people had said I could pass it on to a friend. I was rather surprised, therefore, at just how good this movie was. Cobbled together from pieces of the books The Vampire Lestat and the sequel Queen of the Damned this told the story of Lestat (who we met in Interview with the Vampire played by Tom Cruise) - in this version played by the rather odd Stuart Townsend – who is awakened from a long sleep by the sound of rock music. Deciding on a whim to become a global rock star he takes over the band and hits the big time. This predictably annoys his fellow nightwalkers who decide to make him permanently dead rather than simply un-dead. Enter the vampire Queen Akasha (played by Aaliyah) who decides to come back from a very long sleep indeed in order to recreate her hell on Earth she had left behind in Ancient Egypt. In the middle of all of this is Jessie, descendent of generations looked after by her ‘Aunt’. Jessie is a new member of a shadowy group of academics called The Talamasca who monitor supernatural activities without interfering in them. Jessie become fascinated with Lestat and wants him to ‘make’ her.

I honestly love this film. Townsend is suitably weird, other-worldly and massively egotistical as Lestat should be. Aaliyah is even more off the reservation as the millennia old queen of all the vampires. There are interesting flash backs telling how Lestat was ‘made’ by Marius which filled in some interesting back-story and there was, of course, a lot of pretty good music. The icing on the cake for me was the beautiful Marguerite Moreau who played the vampire wannabe Jessie. Of course much of why I liked the book so much failed to appear in the movie – the centuries long activity of The Talamasca and the definitive history of vampire kind (except in the book the origin of the first vampire Akasha seemed shrouded in a fair degree of mysticism). Nevertheless, this was a creditable stab at a difficult book to film and is, I think, an important addition to vampire cinema. If you haven’t seen it or haven’t seen it for a while I can recommend spending 100 minutes of your life doing so. Oh, and if you like the music as much as I do you should find that the MTV style videos are on the DVD too which I thought was a very nice touch.