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It’s Halloween again, but this year the night feels different.
October 31, 2025 doesn’t just belong to ghosts and ghouls. It also marks forty years since the publication of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat, the book that turned one vampire’s confession into an operatic declaration of life, death, and everything in between.
First published on October 31, 1985 (because of course it was), The Vampire Lestat wasn’t just a sequel. It was an act of resurrection. In its pages, Lestat de Lioncourt seized the microphone and rewrote his own legend. Interview with the Vampire gave us the heart — the ache and the poetry — of immortality while The Vampire Lestat provided the pulse and the audacity to live with it. Together, they form the spine of Anne Rice’s immortal mythology.
Forty years later, that same pulse is about to beat again, this time on screen, as AMC’s Interview with the Vampire transforms into The Vampire Lestat. Filming officially wrapped this month in Toronto, as iHorror previously reported in ‘Interview with the Vampire’ Season 3: ‘The Vampire Lestat’ Wraps Filming in Toronto, closing the coffin on one chapter of production and opening another on legacy.
From Interview to Immortality
When Anne Rice published Interview with the Vampire in 1976, she cracked something open. The vampire, once a shadowed predator, became a philosopher, a lover, a witness to immeasurable grief. The novel’s frame narrative, a recorded confession between Louis and an ambitious interviewer (later discovered to be named Daniel Molloy), transformed horror into confession, destruction, and all-consuming love.
In Celebrating Season 2 of ‘Interview with the Vampire’: A Spoiler-Free Review, I wrote that AMC’s adaptation captures this exact combination — “…what makes Season 2 truly unforgettable is its emotional truth. This is a story about love. Not tidy, not safe, but all-consuming love, the only thing that cuts through eternity. It’s about hunger, survival, and memory; it’s about the way we are destroyed by love and the way we are remade by it.”
Louis’ pain gave the series its soul, but that impossible, ruinous love between him and Lestat gave it its heart.
Because Interview, for all its power, is a story about perspective. It’s about how memory distorts, and how love refuses to die, even when everything else does.
Rice herself once said she never planned for a sequel, but the character of Lestat wouldn’t rest. He demanded to be seen from within. And when The Vampire Lestat arrived, it didn’t just continue the story; it pulled the curtain back on the man behind the monster.
The Book That Changed Everything
The Vampire Lestat isn’t happy to simply be read. It was a story written to be seen. It’s an audacious act of reclamation, where the so-called villain takes the stage and dares readers to look again.
Lestat’s voice is theatrical, impulsive, and wildly human. He isn’t apologizing for his existence, but celebrating it. His story stretches from the rural gloom of 18th-century France to the rock stages of 1980s America, turning eternal life into an existential album.
The book deepened Rice’s ever-expanding universe, introducing Gabrielle de Lioncourt, Marius de Romanus, Akasha, and many others, and layered her world with something new. If Interview turned grief into art, then Lestat turned art into rebellion. Both were acts of creation, one born of loss and the other of defiance.
And forty years later, that same spirit seems to breathe in AMC’s adaptation.
The Vampire Lestat Rises Again
When AMC announced at San Diego Comic-Con 2025 that its Interview with the Vampire series would officially rebrand as The Vampire Lestat, it felt like fate. As I wrote in AMC’s Vampire Epic Has a New Name and a Bloody Future: SDCC 2025 Recap, the decision was symbolic. It marked a passing of the torch, the moment when the story’s focus would shift from haunted memory to living icon.
Since then, fans have been treated to chaos, glamor, and ego all in delicious excess. The first extended trailer — debuted (sort of) at New York Comic Con — showed us the next phase in the Immortal Universe’s evolution. As I wrote in “Bang Bang”: First Extended Look at ‘The Vampire Lestat’ Blasts into Chaos at NYCC 2025, the footage promised a season that will be like “a fever dream of fame, guilt, immortality, and art,” filled with a story “bolder, stranger, and far more drug-fueled.”
It’s fitting, then, that The Vampire Lestat — both book and show — begins where the first story ends. In the AMC universe, Lestat is no longer a memory, but the storyteller now.
As the cast and creators told us earlier this month in “Keep Asking That Question”: ‘The Vampire Lestat’ Cast and Creators Reflect on Ego, Love, and Legacy, Season 3 is Lestat discovering exactly who and what he is — man and monster both. The line between human and monster has always haunted Rice’s world. It’s the heartbeat of Interview with the Vampire, and it bleeds just as fiercely into this new chapter.
A Legacy of Reinvention
From the velvet darkness of the 1994 film to AMC’s lush, boundary-pushing television adaptation, Rice’s world continues to evolve, expanding on emotional depth, queer visibility, and racial consciousness without losing its Gothic pulse.
Rice passed away in 2021, but her influence is still very much alive. As I noted in More Than Fangs and Fear: AMC’s ‘Interview with the Vampire’ Is Elevating Horror Television, “The intentional changes made from page to screen aren’t just justified; they’re essential. They add a richness, a beauty, and a terror that even the source material couldn’t fully explore. It’s still Rice’s world, but it breathes, bleeds, and burns in thrilling new ways.”
And with The Vampire Lestat entering post-production, the next act feels both inevitable and radical. The show isn’t just adapting a book — it’s adapting an entire mythology.
Ego, Love, and the Endless Night
What makes The Vampire Lestat endure isn’t just its story, but the revelation it offers. For every reader, and now every viewer, Lestat remains both monster and man, sinner and saint. He’s the vampire who believes beauty and damnation can coexist, and the one who shows us that eternity is worth living if you can still feel.
It’s a reminder that The Vampire Chronicles were always a story about inheritance: about what we pass down, what we corrupt, what we save. And in that sense, AMC’s creative evolution mirrors the books’ own heartbeat, each story feeding into the next, never truly ending.
An Immortal Anniversary
Forty years later, The Vampire Lestat still burns with the same restless fire that defined Anne Rice’s imagination. It’s a novel that refuses to age because it was never about time. It was about voice.
And now, in 2025, that voice is louder than ever.
As production wraps and fans await the return of Sam Reid’s luminous and volatile Lestat, along with his romance and the new story of Jacob Anderson’s ethereal and melancholic Louis, there’s something beautifully full-circle about this moment. A vampire who opened his story with a bold declaration of self — “I am the vampire Lestat.” — is once again stepping into the light, ready to sing.
What makes this anniversary so special is its synchronicity: almost forty years to the day after Rice gave Lestat his voice, the novel turns forty just as AMC prepares to hand it back to him on screen.
It’s a resurrection timed with precision, and, most importantly, a reminder that immortality, at least in stories, is very real.
Forty years later, The Vampire Lestat returns to the light, defiant as ever. And this time, the whole world is watching.
‘The Vampire Lestat’ will be premiering on AMC and AMC+ in 2026. Keep your eyes on iHorror for all updates!
