A Spoiler-Free Review
After about two years of waiting, the highly anticipated continuation of AMC’s adaptation of The Vampire Chronicles is nearly here. Amari and I had the opportunity to attend the advance screening at ATX Fest in Austin, Texas and are very excited to bring you this spoiler-free review.
To address the obvious, the tone has definitely shifted from the elegant existentialism of Jacob Anderson’s Louis de Pointe du Lac to the maximalist, at times overstimulating, barrage of music and narration by Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid). Said narration embraces the exuberant, vain, and disorienting tone of the original novel, updated to reflect the fickle algorithmically stunted attention spans of 2025. The music takes center stage in this first episode, bouncing around from grimy venue to grimy venue as the story jumps back and forth in time to explain how we got here.
The story begins in media res after the events of this season have apparently already taken place and the aftermath has significantly affected several key characters from the previous seasons. Namely, the episode opens on Armand (Assad Zaman), Louis de Pointe du Lac, and Raglan James (Justin Kirk) attending an auction for the estate of the allegedly “deceased” Lestat de Lioncourt. The lot in question is a collection of vinyl disks that contain his entire story that he has titled “Failure”.
As the first disk plays, Lestat begins to weave his tale and reveals a zealous adoption of the sex, drugs, and rock and roll doctrine one would expect from a rockstar. In fact, a lot of this episode explores the idea of persona and kayfabe, both Lestat’s fastidious maintaining of his own mythmaking endeavour as well as the cracks that begin to reveal that taking Lestat’s word at face value may not be wise. Investigative journalist turned vampiric documentarian, Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian), asks Lestat the same two questions every night and receives a different answer every time: was Lestat a stutterer as a child and why has he decided to start a rock band at this point in his life?
This first episode has a daunting task to perform: handling the shift in tone inherent to changing the primary narrator, seeding the overarching storylines and character arcs for this season, and reassuring fans of the previous two seasons that what they’ve grown to love about this show is still there. Overall, I would say this episode achieved most of these objectives and has left me very interested to see where this all goes.
Two Goths and a Coffin 