Me: [still in the bar, sobbing brokenly on the bartender’s shoulder while he
awkwardly
pats me on the back] No, no, you don’t understand you don’t understand because there’s gunna be this Moment, right, where someone is going to be rude to Hannibal again, and his eyes his Eyes will do The Thing™ where they go all black and murdery, and Will is going to be on the other side of the room, watching the rude person too, from behind the rude person, all predator-y, and Hannibal will suddenly become *physically aware* of him like from balls to bones and his eyes will drift past the rude person and he’ll look up at Will just as Will deliberately flicks his eyes up at him with those stupid scalpel sharp fuckingfUCKING eyelashes and we’ll know that they’re both thinking the same thing and realising that the other one is watching him thinking the Thing and both of them are gunna get such a charge off knowing that the air in the room between them is going to fucking siZZLE*hiccups and slides off barstool*
You’re in charge of assigning every child on Earth the monster under their bed. One child in particular has caused every monster assigned to him/her to quit. You decide to assign yourself.
Case: #273402 Status: Disastrous.
I stare at the file and realize I have no options, over the last 2 years every monster assigned to Charlotte Dower has quit, every last one. Her first monster; a giant goldfish-faced humanoid named Bubba, had been with her for four years, and then she wasn’t scared of him anymore. After that it was a string of different common, uncommon, and rare monsters… I even assigned a sentient sock monster to her. He came back crying! I look on my tablet, only one assignable monster left; myself. Field work has never been my cup of tea, but desperate times call for desperate measures. So at 8:03 pm, after Mrs. Gideon tucks in Charlotte and her little brother Daniel; I slither into the space beneath Charlotte’s bed. Across the room underneath Daniel’s crib is a rookie, Chico, a standard Creep kind of monster. I turn my attention to the bed above me, Charlotte is still awake but barely, I reach up over the bed and run an ice cold finger over her cheek, silence, so I do it again. “I’m not afraid of you monster!” She whispers, but her voice is shaking. I can see a small clock on the wall 8:14, a door somewhere in the house slams and there is an audible hitch of breath from above me. A few minutes go by I can hear Francis Gideon yelling at his wife. There are heavy footsteps on the stairs, and loud panting breaths, Charlotte scrambles off the bed and… She. CRAWLS. Under. The. Bed. With. Me. “Move. Over!” Charlotte hisses at me. I do. The door to the bedroom slams open and I smell the stench of human intoxicants before the man even steps inside. I know why Charlotte isn’t afraid of any of my monsters; she’s afraid of her own. Francis reaches a hand under the bed and I thrust my wrist into it, he starts to pull, I slither out. “What the…” I cut Francis’s next words off by unfolding to my full 12 foot height. Looming over the drunken man I caress my cold fingers down his face. “If you ever touch, scare, or harm my child again, I will find you, and I will do the same to you, for all eternity.” I promise to him. As Francis runs from the room he soils himself. I pull Charlotte from under the bed, tuck her back under her covers and kiss her forehead goodnight. “I’ll be back tomorrow night, sleep well darling.” Charlotte Dower is my child, I am the monster under her bed.
I ranted about this at length once, and realized it might be worth excising that particular section from my recaps and letting it stand on its own.
SO LET ME TELL YOU A THING.
“Not only does Banderas give one hell of a performance, clearly entranced by Louis and convinced his ruthlessness is an acceptable means to an end (and then Louis dumps him immediately and Banderas’ crushed look that WHOOPS OVERESTIMATED just destroyed me). It’s really genuine, maybe the movie’s best after Cruise and Dunst, and at least half his dialogue is lifted without change from the books. But all that gets overlooked, because he doesn’t look like a teenager. And there’s a certain fairness to that – Armand’s body adds a dimension to his interactions with others as much as Claudia’s does. But now let me give you a hot dose of context.
In 1994, it was still a pretty common argument to conflate homosexuality with pedophilia, particularly with gay men. THINK OF THE CHILDREN, Y’ALL. The movie already had to deal with the Claudia/Louis relationship, which only tenuously steps the worst landmines of creepiness, as we discussed, by avoiding physicality and giving mentally grown Claudia all the power. So, the filmmakers maybe didn’t want to stack, on top of that stack of gunpowder, a relationship with yet another underage character, particularly one that so played into existing stereotypes.
Then there’s the fact that, by virtue of the script, Louis’ feelings for Armand are a lot more explicitly tender and obvious than his relationship with Lestat. Back then, it was a big deal if you asked an actor to, gasp, play gay. Heavens forfend. But Banderas, in addition to being a handsome fellow and a marketable star, had also appeared in Philadelphia in 1993 (aka the movie where the Noble Gay dying nobly from AIDS is nice enough to teach A Straight to be a better person before he croaks). While their scenes were scrubbed of basically any intimacy, he was playing Tom Hanks’ lover, and apparently that was proximal enough to The Gay that he was an okay dude to ask. And then he fucking killed it with the material he was given it, in spite of the fact that the majority of his scenes were opposite the totally catatonic Pitt (who has made no bones about how much he haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaated being in this movie). He’s a champ, and a treasure, come at me.
The part of me that loves this movie as its own movie is so into Antonio, too. The reasons you stated are part of it, but as an aesthetic decision as well I really love him as this like Dark Exotic European Vampire. It works as a jarring contrast to the world Louis had lived in with Lestat, and even as a movie ploy it’s such a dynamic visual. And goddamnit his gold eyes flashing in the firelight. He’s just a real VAMPIREY VAMPIRE. It’s obviously a departure from the novel but it works so well on its own.
I also think it works because the movie was never a series. If we’d gotten into the other stories it would’ve started mangling Armand’s character too much, but we don’t get to know him very personally here so it’s fine.
The scenes with Armand are my favorite in the whole movie. They feel so magnetic to me, and I appreciate more than I can ever explain that they gave that much screen time to these conversations. It nails the tone of the novels so well and is so so so important to keep.
I’m gonna cry! Thank you @vraik, for articulating this so thoroughly and adding so much more to my dusty old #Defending Antonio tag. It was most likely a deliberate choice to diverge from canon on Armand’s appearance, but much of the character is still preserved and shines through Antonio’s performance.
And @monstersinthecosmos makes an excellent point about how great his scenes are and what Antonio does bring to the table physically. His Tall Dark Exotic European look is in direct contrast with Lestat, who looks like Blonde Ambition Barbie in comparison.
Can we all keep this in mind for the upcoming adaptations? Whoever is cast, please give them a chance to do their jobs, which is ACTING. Even if the character does not fit your headcanon remotely. Let’s be considerate and keep in mind that some things are possible to explore in fiction that cannot yet, if ever, be shown in film/TV.
So I’m going to assume you mean the kind of stuff me and friends draw that will most likely never be held in the same regard as Millais because it’s niche outsider art made by amateur women and teens? Even though the art we make is more relevant as a commentary on our culture than anything a dead white guy painted?
I think we’re intelligent enough that we can decide what’s worth looking at if we want to. If dead white guys want to keep up, they should learn how to text.
Imagine one of those vampires that spent a few decades napping and now they’re trying to catch up as best they can so they’re in a library looking through years of old magazines and overhear some middle-schooler discussing her project about the moon-landing and they’re like “WHAT!!!”
“You have to tell me everything about this!!!”
A confused but enthusiastic sixth-grader unfolds her trifold poster board and tells an absolutely captivated 3000 year old man-eater about the space race.
More like “I LITERALLY HAVENT EVEN GOTTEN THROUGH THE RECONSTRUCTION ERA PLEASE TAG SPOILERS”
I’M!!
“Have you gotten to Franz Ferdinand being shot yet?” An Austrian Vampire, angrily looking up from a ninth-grade history book: “are you FUCKING KIDDING ME??”
“yeah you know…lincoln doesnt get reelected” Vampire: “well why NOT he seems perfectly capable and oooh…oh…”
FRICK
I LOVE THIS SO MUCH
“So, you know pluto isn’t a planet, right?”
*Vampire chucks astronomy book written in 1994 at the person*
Imagine the vampire asking people who killed JFK and they’re all like ‘no one knows’ and the vampire just sighs and says ‘ok I know I said no spoilers but this is just getting ridiculous. someone tell me.”
imagine a vampire who’s absolutely mad about having missed a very specific moment and not really caring about the big picture searching for the one history nerd who might know when that outrageous lipstick they loved was put out of commerce, what happened to that minor theatre company debut, a forgetten artist’s they loved fate, if their friends ever did marry, what happened to that family lineage/where are the heirs now, /what happened to that one small hungarian village who was basically only some houses and mud where the heck did my village go/
god i can never stop thinking about certain sculptures used in modern art and how they can be used to elicit the beautiful and terrible feeling of true and genuine horror in ways that a lot of horror movies can never do
like when you ask people “what is horror?” they’ll tend to give examples of monsters, of killers, of dark places, of sharp teeth and too many legs and lots and lots of blood. which is true, that can be used as horror! but i’d like to call that “the horror of being eaten/hurt/killed” or more succinctly “the horror of vulnerability”. it’s a horror that something, whether it’s a killer or a monster or some phenomenon, has the ability to cause us harm. we see large amounts of teeth and we think “that thing is going to tear us to pieces with those teeth” or we see spilled blood and we think “someone has been hurt, there’s a chance we can be hurt too by whatever spilled this blood”.
but what certain modern sculptures can do is elicit a very physical visceral reaction of a completely different kind of horror.
it’s “the horror that something is a thing that SHOULD not exist, and you are absolutely powerless to understand what it is, but it is existing in your space, right now, it is real and you cannot make it unreal no matter what you do”
or perhaps, in a shorter fashion, it’s “the horror of wrongness”
like one of the sculptures that made me feel this way is this sculpture here, named “Monekana” located in the American Art Museum in Washington D.C:
“okay,” you say, with a shrug. “it’s a horse made of wood? what’s so scary about that?”. but this is the lie of the photograph! a photograph of a sculpture rarely grasps the experience of standing next to a sculpture. you have to picture yourself walking into this room, practically devoid of people, and coming face to face with this sculpture that is very large and very real.
and your brain screams that “THIS IS WRONG. MAKE IT GO AWAY. THIS IS WRONG”, like at any moment you expect it to move, to twist its head, to follow you with eyes that aren’t simply there. it looks like a horse but it is no horse. you could almost argue that maybe it isn’t even an art piece at all, but it wandered in from god knows what kind of world and it’s blending in with everything else. maybe it’s fooling you. maybe it isn’t.
anyways, i’m not trying to say that this sculpture in particular is SUPPOSED to be scary, it may make other people feel nothing at all (or even positive feelings!), but what i’m trying to say is that feeling i had that day, when i saw this thing, when i felt this fearful instinct to stay away and not stare, it’s THAT feeling that i feel so many writers and makers of horror don’t completely understand. you don’t need teeth. you don’t need blood. you don’t need to make Spooky Scary Skeletons or chainsaw-wielding villains. all you need is to create something wrong in its existence, something to make parts of us fear the fact that we can’t entirely rationalize what we’re seeing.
The experience of sculpture absolutely gets lost in images. I’ve walked into museums and been like WOW THE FUCK even when I knew it was coming.
I love this subject, though. I love “implication horror.” You see something, and the realization of what it means, which often comes a few moments later, is where the real horror lies—not in how splattery or gratuitously shocking it is. The wrongness of a thing in fiction, when done well, is the best. I was watching Melancholia the other day, and what a terrifying example of wrongness horror.
Anyway this is such a great post thanks for putting the whole idea into words so well. ❤
JCB was a somewhat popular FC for Lestat RPers at one time, so your opinion is/was shared by others!
^He already played a vampire in Twilight, but I didn’t see that… Idk if he’d be willing to play another vampire. He looks good in period costume, I’ll admit that, and the makeup/hair team really transformed him. This is 100% better vampiry appearance than QOTD!Lestat (but that’s setting the bar preeeetty low, ROFL).
Personally, I find JCB too thin, so bony, such angular features… but I haven’t seen his acting so it’s unfair to judge him just superficially. He has a lot of theatre experience and he seems quite charming from his quotes on his IMDB page. He might be great! I would definitely screen-test him if I was in charge of things.
[^X I will say that these are some excellent silly faces and our Lestat has to be able to pull of his easy sense of humor, too!]
The fact is, we all have our own ideals of beauty and our own headcanon of these characters. It’s highly unlikely that one actor will satisfy all of our expectations, and @cdf-archive (now @coeur-de-feu) was a Lestat RPer who used JCB as a FC, and they wrote up a great post about JCB as Lestat [X], excerpt below:
“There will always be inconsistencies, everywhere you look. But it’s not really even whether or not I find him perfect. It’s his imperfections that make him perfect, to me. And perhaps that’s what Magnus found in Lestat – his imperfections gave him an indescribable yet authentic beauty and Magnus wanted to immortalize those features by turning Lestat into a vampire, even though Lestat did not want it. It was okay with Magnus that Lestat had a few things here and there that weren’t completely perfect; he found him extraordinarily beautiful, regardless.”
#Eloquent eloquence
Also, check out @cdf-archive’s actual archive to see more pics of JCB, some of them are good promos in a VC-aesthetic which you might like!
“WHAT HUGO DOES WITH EVENTS, ANNE DOES WITH PEOPLE.”
YOU PUT IT IN PERFECT WORDS. That’s exactly it, Victor Hugo’s characters are great and well drawn, but because of the third person narration, they are a little less personal; but his take on the events of Notre Dame and Les Mis (for the two best known examples), feel like actual accounts of history.
Sure, Anne’s got chararacters that are immortal walking between heaven and hell (litereally) but at the same time, they’re talking to you and just feel so real.
#eloquent eloquence #SEE THIS is what I’m talking about when I say I’m picky about other vampire media, these are strong and rich characters first, and they’re vampires secondarily.
I-want-my-IWTV 
