Interview With the Vampire Ruined Twilight For Me
A quick note; this is a work in progress only for you all! I sincerely welcome pushback (I hope I am wrong and can free myself from this growing sense of injustice) and welcome textual additions to the references I have gathered that I would be thrilled to credit as research help!
Over 19 novels and countless interviews make up the breadth of research for this so forgive where I could’ve pulled a better example!
── ⋆⋅𖤓⋅⋆ ──
Early last year I decided to watch Twilight for the first time. I know - the lover of all things gothic that was enthralled with Tumblr coldly avoided an entire cultural moment designed for ‘too-cool-for-pink’ tweens in the stretch of their indie sleaze phase. I was too busy with my thousandth hunger games fanfiction and was already getting my vampire fix from The Chronicles of Vladimir Tod, I guess.
I am a firm believer in enjoying something for what it is. I went in to watching Twilight with the expectation that it would be a tad heavy-handed and geared towards the teenage audience the saga garnered but fun nonetheless. I was not disappointed. It is an infatuating story. The bar is admittedly lower for contemporary “byronic” stories, we as viewers are easily captured by the infatuation at play. Plot becomes secondary, just give me a moody backdrop and two (preferably three) lovers in the throes of obsession and gesture to some musings about love here and there and I will be at the theater tomorrow.
When I mentioned to a friend that I had just finished the entire Twilight saga for the first time (and read all of Midnight Sun in 48 hours!) she urged me to watch AMC’s new adaptation of Interview With The Vampire. The Vampire Lestat was set to debut in a year’s time and I had put off starting it for too long (IWTV truly finds you when you can incur maximum psychic damage from it). So, I binged both seasons of IWTV and briefed her with my naive initial reactions (yes I actually said out loud “why do people even like Lestat” after episode four, suffice to say I quickly ate my words as I finished the series).
Throughout those conversations and a growing love for Anne Rice within me, a common question emerged - how much of The Vampire Chronicles inspired Meyer? Quick google searches revealed nothing but sensationalized remarks between both authors. The question lingered and I began to ruminate for far too long about just how much of Rice’s lore made its way into the Twilight Saga.
I preface this descent into my admittedly overly-justice-sensitive madness to follow to emphasize that my criticism of Meyer does not come from a pretentious, wet-blanket sort of standpoint. I don’t go looking to lay into creatives of any sort, the idea that I may hurt an albeit misguided but well-meaning author, painter, filmmaker, fan of the series, etc., has kept this essay locked away for quite some time. The idea that another author was hurt by a fan-turned-colleague in the context of such a sensitive enterprise has plainly outweighed my hesitancy to share what I have found.
── ⋆⋅𖤓⋅⋆ ──
Stephenie Meyer’s vampires are cold and rigid, with a skin-deep glitter. Anne Rice’s vampires are warm and fluid, with a tendency to wither. The sordid “exchange” of the mythos of the vampire between Rice’s chronicles and Meyer’s saga reveals that the only real vampire between their two universes is Meyer.
What is the function of Rice’s chronicles? To wrestle with her grief, loneliness, trauma, sexuality, existentialist tendencies, and fundamental desire to see and be seen; warts and all. What is the function of Meyer’s saga? To be chaste, pure, and seduced with incidental, contrived barriers.
Both have their place in literature, but when one draws so heavily from another and thoroughly misunderstands the function of what they’re borrowing, the stark difference in their aims irritates.
Meyer is a tad vague on the inspiration for Twilight. I contend that Rice was actually a direct inspiration for Meyer, and Meyer’s pithy remarks, notably “YUCK!” about the Vampire Chronicles in 2007, reveal an unwillingness to give the authors that came before you their due reverence as they relate to your work and a more dubious reason for Meyer’s public avoidance of other vampiric stories. Going as far as to deny Rice’s impact upon her work, even incidentally, is a refusal to look her own desires in the eye or depart publicly from her religious affiliation. Meyer would have to admit that she was compelled by a queer narrative, something she seems wholly unwilling to do. While she has never publicly denounced queerness on religious grounds, Meyer historically deflects very pointed questions about gay rights and endorses authors like Orson Scott Card.
Conservative ideology rears its head in the Twilight saga often too, with Edward refusing to sleep with Bella until they are wed in Eclipse, remarking that sex before marriage would condemn her soul. Meyer still identifies as LDS, and speculatively authored the romance novel Corrine (2022) under the pen name Rebecca Morrow about a girl cast out of her fundamentalist church. The book was reviewed by Jodi Picoult (a notable peer of Meyer’s) and Morrow was noted to be a pen name for a ‘best-selling’ author on the book’s dustjacket. Many readers of Twilight compared the text and remarked that they thought the writing was Meyer’s immediately. If Meyer is, to this day, scared of authoring a work of fiction about religious fundamentalism under her own name, is it a stretch to think positively discussing Anne Rice’s queer chronicles, or even admitting that she read them is out-of-the-question?
Meyer even makes a jab at Rice’s chronicles in Midnight Sun (2020), when Edward bemoans what Bella must think of him because of Bram Stoker and Anne Rice. Whether Meyer was directly or incidentally inspired by Rice’s chronicles (I again, must press that it is quite direct as we venture through this timeline), Rice’s vision of the vampire was a formidable cultural influence with undoubtable sway over the vampiric stories that followed.
Meyer notably said she began writing right around the time Blood Canticle (2003) was released, which Rice intended to be the last addition to the Vampire Chronicles until she returned to the series in 2014 with three more books (2014, 2016, 2018). That reads like an enthusiastic fan, sad to see the series come to a close and invested in its continuation through writing work directly inspired by it.
This influence shows in Meyer’s universe, to name a few lore-specific examples; telepathy between vampires (with notable, similar exceptions), vampires reading all human minds, the idea that vampires all have distinct ‘gifts,’ and the ‘great’ laws (especially forbidding the creation of child vampires), along with the vampire coven-system all concretized in Rice’s lore. Meyer clearly owes what little coherency her lore possesses to Rice. Especially given that the great laws came to be a massive plot point at the end of her saga and the most contentious thing “borrowed” from Rice for me.
This is an especially egregious adoption when you consider that Claudia was constructed whilst Rice processed the death of her 5-year-old daughter Michelle who died of leukemia in 1972. Rice has repeatedly stated that Louis is an emotional portrait of her, and Lestat is an emotional portrait of her husband Stan Rice (nearly dubbed ‘lestan’). “Borrowing” these unique pieces of lore from Rice becomes all the more maddening when you consider their real, lived origin in Rice’s work. If Meyer acknowledged this influence, it wouldn’t be such a slight to Rice that we can problematize as poor author-to-author form. The fact that she may shy away from doing so because of her affiliation with the LDS does not justify it, and the mud slung Rice’s way by Meyer worsens it.
Anne Rice seemingly never read Twilight in full, and for that we can be thankful. Though, she reflected on its meaning in an interview after seeing the film in 2009.
No, I haven’t read any of the Twilight series, but I did see the film. I felt that it reflected the deep desire of young women to have the mystery and protection and wisdom of older men. I think many girls mature much earlier than boys, and they are frustrated when they approach young boys for love or protection. Hence the fantasy of a wise and protective vampire coming into the life of a young girl who, of course, appreciates him in a special way.
It is my speculation that after this interview, Rice learned of Meyer’s 2007 ‘yuck’ remark, which soured her initially polite synopsis. Evidenced by her 2010 interview:
It's based on a really silly premise: that immortals would go to high school. It's a failure of imagination, but at the same time, that silly premise has provided Stephenie Meyer with huge success. It's almost like a stroke of genius to put vampires in high school. They just graduate over and over again.
Meyer’s “failure of imagination” couldn’t ring more true. Rice takes great pains in embodying each character to afford a flow to how everything operates in-universe. No character’s momentous meltdown or move across the world is unjustified, each plot beat follows the sacred “because, then” not “and then”. It is a simple exercise when you’re writing, asking yourself “if I was x, would I do x?”. If I were a vampire, would I go back to high school? Fuck no. As Rice remarks in a very diplomatic 2010 Skype call with Students of Saint Gertrude High School following the backlash from Twilight fans, “to me, the concept of an immortal choosing to go to high school instead of Kathmandu, or Venice, or China, is ridiculous”. The venom directed Rice’s way over pointing to such a basic failure to engage with your own story is maddening.
Rice’s comment was framed in headlines as a low-blow to Meyer. It is seldom contextualized with Meyer’s 2007 remark about IWTV, calling another author's work “Yuck!” is the lowest of the low. Not even bothering to broach any real appraisal of a work, beyond saying she “doesn’t watch R-rated movies” makes me question why she bothered to utter the phrase as someone with a supposed command of language. I find it suspect that the original 2007 entertainment weekly interview where she makes this remark has now been taken down. Only the 2011 synopsis that paints Rice as the instigator remains on The Atlantic’s site, with a broken link to Meyer’s redacted interview, abstracted away from the 2007 publication date as “shortly before the world hit the Twilight saturation point”. I think this is intentional, given that the body of the article goes on to write “Merciful isn't exactly what you'd call Rice's past interviews”. The article goes on to cite Rice’s 2011 Facebook post. Where Rice more explicitly dissed Meyer’s work:
Lestat and Louie feel sorry for vampires that sparkle in the sun. They would never hurt immortals who choose to spend eternity going to high school over and over again in a small town ---- anymore than they would hurt the physically disabled or the mentally challenged. My vampires possess gravitas. They can afford to be merciful.
From reading Meyer’s vampires as a reflection of the “deep desire of young women to have the mystery and protection and wisdom of older men” to “feeling sorry” for Meyer’s sparkling vampires, it seems that Rice began to realize just how much of her painstaking lore-building had made its way into the Twilight saga as she interacted with more of the franchise.
Coupled with the increasing backlash from Meyer’s fans with no interjection from Meyer herself, Rice did stoop lower than the diplomatic character she’d taken in past interviews. To not only be compared to emergent vampiristic stories as an author, but persistently asked about a sanitized vision borrowed from much of your own myth-building is beyond lunacy. Especially when the mythbuilding in her story is done with such weight, sometimes added to explore a kind of grief that many of us are greatly privileged to never know.
It brings on a great sense of injustice for me when I think of Anne Rice seeing her ‘great laws’ make their way into Meyer’s universe with such little purpose beyond sexual repression couched in conservative ideology. Yes, sexual repression. Walk with me.
Edward could not sleep with the human version of Bella because they supposedly needed to be married first, but even when they were wed, they weren’t truly ‘wed’ until Bella was turned. Meyer found a way to make their sex transgressive without violating the human contract of marriage, then punished them for their transgression by making Bella fall to a nearly fatal pregnancy. The child’s existence is then framed as a violation of the vampire’s great laws. Why? Who knows. Meyer doesn’t sufficiently motivate the Volturi’s relentless pursuit of the new Cullen child beyond vaguely asserting that they sometimes have ‘special powers’ (which many of the run-of-the-mill vampires already possess?).
This couldn’t be more opposed to Rice’s expression of sexuality and the narrative purpose of the great laws. Sex is not a sin undertaken in secret or only enjoyed when ordained by a higher power. It is an act of love seated in our identities, or at times, a distraction. Claudia is not an incidental plot beat or manifestation of some unexamined repression either. Claudia’s existence and the great vampire laws demonstrate a tension between our desires and their consequences for others, no matter how noble we may frame them to be. We may also fold at the opportunity to make an immortal out of a dying child, but Claudia’s immortal life is drenched in what the laws intend to reduce, suffering. Claudia is not a punishment, and the dynamic between Louis, Lestat, and Claudia plays off of the all-too-common tensions between motherhood and fatherhood (with Lestat as the ‘mother,’ birthing her, disciplining her, mentoring her, etc. and Louis as the ‘father’ that enjoys all of the benefits of parenthood while the mother emotionally labors, teaches, and disciplines). Everything has its purpose for Rice, she doesn’t shy away from the natural culmination of her own lore and she doesn’t give in to the desire to give her characters a ‘happy ever after’.
I cannot say the same for Meyer. When Bella and Edward find themselves at their own ‘trial’ by the Volturi for their half-human, half-vampire baby, the Volturi walk away and they live peacefully. Happy ever after, all is well! Sometimes people are special exceptions to the rule. God forgives and has favorites. Don’t have sex outside of marriage, and don’t ask why Jacob’s integration into a contrived love triangle has to be justified by being in love with Bella’s unborn child.
We can draw a direct line from Rice’s grief to the conception of Claudia, to the great laws prohibiting vampire children, her subsequent death, then to Meyer’s adoption of Rice’s laws. This feels particularly gross when contextualized this way. The great laws are not a plot beat to move Rice’s story forward, they are a manifestation of struggling with the reality that your child will forever be 5 years old.
In contrast, Meyer found a way to shove all of her repressed desires into an unending sexual fantasy with all of the hallmarks of an unremarkable, unreflective, heteronormative sexuality. A chasted, one-dimensional girl refuses the subject of her desire until she gives in against their relentless pursuit. Bella fits the mold of a ‘mary-sue’ or an at-times self-insert character with few flaws. She spends her time away from Edward thinking about Edward or thinking about how the many novels she so sophisticatedly reads embody Edward. She likes what Edward likes. Edward likes playing piano and listening to Debussy, so Bella likes listening to Edward play piano and of course, Debussy (curiously, a foundational part of Lestat’s character is his love of piano and composing). Edward is a 104-year old vampire that has little to remark about his century-long existence to 17-year-old Bella. He only becomes enraptured by Bella because he cannot hear her thoughts, and was initially so attracted to the scent of her blood that he spends hundreds of pages in Midnight Sun overcoming his desire to kill her.
Rice authored a romance where the subject of desire enthralls a vampire because of his sorrow. The contradiction Louis holds in the thoughts that are laid bare to Lestat frustrates him; he wants Louis to be free, unburdened by his own self-flagellation. Lestat sees himself in Louis and pleads to be with him out of intimately knowing him. Edward cannot access any depth in Bella. His inability to hear her thoughts consumes him. One love is filled with presence and another complete absence.
We never find out why Edward cannot hear Bella’s thoughts (she is a “shield,” once again, god has favorites) despite it being the catalyst for their romance. I believe that Meyer saw the dynamic Rice authored between Lestat and Louis and misunderstood the subtextual purpose of Lestat hearing Louis only to turn him and lose access to his thoughts, made more explicit in AMC’s version. “I send my love to you, and you send it back ‘round to me. And this circle, this home we barely had a glimpse of, know it frightens me as much as it does you.”
Hearing Louis’ thoughts is the catalyst for their romance. This “circle” is romantic torture. Lestat speaks to Louis, begs him to come to him, and Louis outwardly refuses while we understand Lestat to be hearing Louis wrestle with his desire to be with him. Lestat was not hunting Louis, or looking for anyone he stumbles upon to be his companion, he is provoked by the contradiction between Louis’ thoughts and actions. Louis sends his love back ‘round to Lestat, their infatuation with one another cannot be helped but its origin comes from a familiar, all-too-human place.
I see none of this in Twilight, which makes its “borrowed” mythos from IWTV read as a bastardized foray into what Meyer thinks are socially acceptable, uncontroversial plot beats to subsume into her vampire empire. Rice stares into her own wounds in all of their gory, intimate reality and gives us the vampire chronicles. Meyer thoughtlessly retreats into what makes her horny like there is some meaning in it beyond her immediate social conditioning. The opportunities to explore meaning, even tangentially, are cast aside in favor of putting our unconventional lovers through another “and then” plot beat. Any reality that may naturally arise from the context she has authored is quickly forgotten if the scene it births is too painful or inconvenient. Jasper spends over a decade suppressing his urge to kill people and Edward nearly kills himself when he feels he cannot contain his desire for her blood. Yet, when Bella must talk with her still-human father as a freshly turned vampire, Meyer conveniently skips over the strife Bella logically could’ve experienced in that moment. Would it not be obviously more meaningful to have to cut all of your earthly ties in order to protect the people you love? Nearly every time Meyer stumbles into an opportunity to explore a difficult truth in her work, she shies away from it and expects the reader to forget the stakes she’s chosen for her own story.
Rice kept writing until her wounds had filled with the love and understanding of the readers she garnered. Meyer kept writing until the buck stopped. Meyer beat a dead horse, reanimated it from death with tonally far too many parallels with the resurrection of christ, then sent it off with a “happy ever after” that said nothing, and did nothing other than take from a formidable writer's canon only to deny that you’ve done so.
Twilight could’ve had a reasonable space in pop culture as a young adult romance that expresses the burgeoning difference between men and women as they navigate young love. At the most basic level, Meyer’s reluctance to examine her own fantasies kneecaps this premise. Edward becomes a static, looming monster that wordlessly becomes enthralled with our protagonist. She wordlessly accepts and they’re only momentarily separated at Edward's behest by some vague, unexplored wish that she live a “normal” life. He returns to her as a more brooding, more suffocating partner yet this is not explored as such. Instead, Bella continuously begs to be turned into a vampire, unmoved in her commitment to Edward. Edward protests that the state of being a vampire is one she needs to think carefully about, yet this is unexplored too and the viewer must constantly ask themselves “why? Just turn her!” in lieu of any real display of depravity. This becomes all the more frustrating when Rice’s lore is integrated, otherwise the Twilight saga could have rightfully been called a mediocre franchise with understandable appeal.
In light of the inconvenient evidence outlined in this incomplete timeline, is this a tale as old as time? Conservative author takes inspiration from an author that openly embraced queerness, with a “bisexual mind,” “gay sensibility,” and “genderless soul”? I don’t think it is a coincidence that Rice’s chronicles had just concluded as Meyer began writing the Twilight saga.
I feel a bubbling disdain for Meyer the deeper I fall into Anne Rice’s universe. Rice took the responsibility and impact of authorship seriously. I see her inspiration for IWTV at the altar of a paralyzing question that the bereaved know all too well: if I could bring back a lost loved one at any cost, would I? The vampire is a vehicle to explore reanimation from death, and Rice pursues the implications for a 5-year-old vampire with heartbreaking honesty. Frozen in time but growing older, the life of the vampire Claudia is no life Rice could wish for.
My disdain swells when I think of Meyer barging into this picture, then refusing to acknowledge that the vampire chronicles resonated with her, meant something to her. Why might that be? Because it’s gay? Because it’s gothic in the truest sense of the literary meaning of the word? Less palatable for a wider audience because Rice feels no need to moralize the dimensionality of her characters away?
Meyer opened no wounds to pen Twilight. She, in my speculative picture, puppeteered Louis and Lestat in her mind as participants in a wholly sexual fantasy, then replaced Louis with a one-dimensional, chasted high school girl. Unimaginative doesn’t begin to cover it. That is what makes her the only real vampire in this exchange. Do away with all of Rice’s meticulous thought and attention to detail that made her vampires bleed, yearn, and suffer. Because it’s too painful? Because they have no neat, palatable happiness at the end of their torment? Because giving Rice her flowers endorses queer love that is “YUCK!”?
We may never know the extent to which Rice’s work had a conscious impact upon Twilight for Meyer, but one thing is for certain for me; you cannot be so moved by the conclusion of a story that you begin extending it, only to deny its impact. Meyer stumbles through the web Rice has woven with a telling superficiality that manifests in her vampires. Maybe it’s not that it’s gay, maybe it’s that it’s just better.
Interview with the Vampire ruined Twilight for me, and I could not be happier that it did.
