Awww, I’m sure it wasn’t his intention to be your nightmare material! He’s very apologetic, both to you, and to anyone else he’s frightened. He says Tom’s portrayal was actually much kinder than the truth and he’s grateful certain things were toned down or left out entirely. 

He’s not responding to this message directly himself bc he’s feeling a little defensive about it. Lestat takes issue w/ the adults who let you watch that movie at such a young age, like the adults who made him go on that fun field trip to the witches’ place where innocent people were burned to death. Adults sometimes don’t get how impressionable children are, or they don’t care. Lestat’s guilty of terrifying his own fledglings, but there was usually a good reason for it. Like knocking some sense into them!

Lestat’s also reminding me that Louis told that story to Daniel, who was an adult (at least legally) at the time, and Louis intended that story to get to Lestat, to provoke him and raise him from wherever he was hiding. It was intended to portray Lestat as both a sweet dream and a beautiful nightmare, anything less might not have pissed him off enough to resurrect him ;]

When I was a kid, I sought out scary stories, bc even though I got nightmares from them, the stories themselves gave me a path through the terror and provided the catharsis of the resolution at the end. Even if it was an unhappy ending, the book/movie ended, and the monster had no more story to tell. It was empowering for me, and I think the way I see monsters like Lestat (bc he IS a monster, let’s not forget that) now is through radical empathy, asking again and again what made him as nasty as he was in IWTV? So many things. Knowing where that kind of behavior comes from is insightful and can give you the keys to dealing with difficult ppl in real life, bc they are EVERYWHERE and they come in endless variations!