QUEEN OF THE DAMNED

QUEEN OF THE DAMNED is a modern vampire story based on the best-selling gothic novel by Anne Rice. Only one other of Rice’s many popular vampire novels, INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE, has been made into a movie so far, and that one starred Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. QUEEN OF THE DAMNED, however, relies on a group of virtual unknowns for its stars, except for the pop music star Aaliyah, who died in a plane crash last year after finishing her part.

In the story, the vampire known as Lestat, played by Cruise in the earlier movie, comes out of his 150 year rest in New Orleans and forms a rock band to promote the glories of being a vampire. This doesn’t sit well with the vampire community, which prefers working in the shadows. Lestat, however, hates their kind of self-imposed exile and enjoys the limelight, although most people in the “real” world think that his vampire pose is just an act meant to attract an audience; and, attract an audience it does.

Meanwhile, a woman named Jesse, with a mysterious past, hungers to know the secrets that Lestat possesses. She has become a member of a secret group of vampire watchers. The leader of the group lets her read Lestat’s journal about how he became a vampire. Jesse steals the journal and takes it back to Lestat, who jokes, “I wondered where I’d left that thing.”

Lestat plans a huge concert in the desert in Death Valley, California. He hopes to attract the other vampires, but his music also awakens the Queen of the vampires, a powerful Egyptian named Akasha who wants to rule the world while she sucks the life blood out of every human being around her. This sets up an ultimate confrontation between Akasha, Lestat and the other vampires.

QUEEN OF THE DAMNED is a hokey, curiously uninvolving movie. Although the evil female vampire is eventually defeated, Lestat makes Jesse into a vampire so that they can go off in some kind of romantic vampire bliss.

Anne Rice has taken the traditional myth of vampires, removed the Christian elements from them that Bram Stoker placed in his original novel DRACULA and added some gothic, homosexual flourishes. Furthermore, although in her own first vampire novel, INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE, Lestat and the vampire lifestyle were ultimately seen as bad things, Rice has taken a cue from the pagan, homosexual zeitgeist of this age and made Lestat, vampirism and dabbling in sexual perversions into positive things. Thus, homosexuality and bisexuality has become part of the milieu in which she tends to operate. This has proven to be a strong attraction within the world of pop music and especially the so-called Goth Movement among teenagers. Teenagers are especially vulnerable to this kind of thing because they are in a dangerous transition stage from childhood to adulthood. Teenagers who feel cut off from their peers, their teachers, their schools, their heterosexual society, and their parents are even more vulnerable. We suggest, therefore, that you and your children stay away from QUEEN OF THE DAMNED and any other new perversions that Anne Rice and her followers might want to create.