Interview With the Vampire Recap: Somebody to Love

Claudia goes on a murderous rampage while Lestat and Louis have trouble — including an upsetting sequence of domestic abuse. A recap and review of season one, episode five of ‘Interview With the Vampire,’ “A Vile Hunger for Your Hammering Heart.”

Season 1 Episode 5 Editor’s Rating2 stars **

Photo: Alfonso Bresciani/AMC

Oof. So … Are we still having fun? It’s a little hard to tell. If you’ll indulge me a moment as I wax ever so slightly philosophical, I’m still having a hard time figuring out how to react to that final sequence. As a general rule, vampire shows require audiences to bend our moral compasses a smidge to allow room to sympathize with mass-murdering protagonists and root for ethically murky romances. Usually vampires are metaphors for some relatable inner demon or conflict — like addiction or sexual libertinism — which lets us apply the same moral judgment to our vampire story lines as we would to, say, anger-management issues or mental illness.

But violent domestic abuse? Well, that’s much more difficult to square in a moral universe that simultaneously asks us to feel for Claudia, the teen serial killer. Especially for a show that is tonally so all over the map. Like, this episode also has Claudia frantically checking the dresser drawer where she stashed a woman’s dismembered left breast. This is a show about vampires, so I’m not here to take anything with complete seriousness. But that last scene was just such a vivid portrayal of intimate-partner violence — the kind that doesn’t rely on any sort of vampire context to make horrifying — it seemed to break the cardinal vampire-media rule of moral relativism and deliver us right into straightforward human trauma. I don’t know, you guys. While we’re all chewing on that, let’s talk about the rest of “A Vile Hunger for Your Hammering Heart,” which is told partly through Claudia’s diaries and partly through Louis’s narration.

All in all, it’s a pretty miserable episode, beginning with Claudia’s emotional meltdown and subsequent murder spree. Louis is fretting because he hasn’t seen his daughter come out of her coffin in days and assumes that in her depression she’s been starving herself until Lestat is like, “No, dummy, she snuck out.” Sure enough, they open the lid and find only her diaries, which of course they immediately read — Lestat because he wants to know what Claudia has been up to and because he has no respect for personal boundaries; Louis because he’s a dad. They discover that Claudia has been indiscriminately munching her way through town (helpfully she keeps a detailed log of her nonstop murders) and throwing the bodies God knows where because their garbage disposal (backyard corpse incinerator) is suspiciously unclogged.

For whatever reason, Claudia did not record in her diary that she’d dumped all of her leftovers in Chalmette, which is a really dumb idea because they are sure to wash up, all 56 of them, when a storm comes and the area floods, which they do. Neither did she note that she’s also been taking body parts from her victims — a toe, a hand, a single boob — as trophies and then hiding them around her room like they’re plastic earrings she shoplifted from Hot Topic. To put the cherry on top of her vampire teen rebellious phase, when the cops come to the house looking for stray earlobes, Claudia is sloshed on bootleg liquor and lets them in to poke around sans warrant.

Now, I am loathe to side with Lestat against Louis on anything, but Claudia’s current tailspin is not because Lestat made her watch Charlie’s body burn. Louis really wants it all to be Lestat’s fault — which would make sense because Lestat is the bad dad — but it is actually all Louis’s fault. Louis was the one who didn’t teach her about sex. Louis was the one who needed a sister/daughter so bad he made her become a vampire in the first place. Hell, Louis didn’t even bother to open the coffin lid to confirm she was really in there, which is like Parenting 101. Louis and Lestat have each other, Claudia further points out, but if she ever wants to have sex again, her options are pedophiles or little boys, and that, too, is on Louis.

I mean, what did he expect? For Claudia to just stay happily lonely for all of eternity? The fact that she would be working this hard to create her own vampire buddy — which is what she’s really been trying to do all of this time — is not exactly a shocking development.

Lestat does bear responsibility for chasing Claudia out of the house, however. He mocks her cruelly. He calls her a mistake. He blames her for coming in between him and Louis. Message received, Uncle Les. Claudia takes off and Louis and Lestat’s relationship only gets worse. Louis’s signature attitude of morose self-flagellation cranks several degrees higher, and all he does now is telepathically scream Claudia’s name or else comb through the crime sections of newspapers searching for clues of her. And yet, he is still not as insufferable as Lestat.

Lestat is, obviously, completely evil both in the supernatural sense and in the “r/AITA for manipulating my husband into opening our relationship and then lashing out at him for hooking up with an ex-lover?” sense. But when he’s not triggering PTSD flashbacks in everyone who’s ever been touched by domestic violence (seriously, AMC, a title-card warning would have been so helpful), he is usually a blast to watch. Not this time. This time, he is an unrelenting heel from start to finish. He’s cheating, first of all, which comes as a surprise only to Louis. He is unusually cruel to Claudia during her breakdown, and he doesn’t even try to be nice to Louis after she’s gone. He does nothing but bitch, in fact, until Claudia comes home and shit hits the fan.

While Louis and Lestat are miserable in New Orleans, Claudia’s life on the road isn’t going spectacularly well, either. Molloy may be furious that Louis ripped out the pages of Claudia’s journal that describe what happened with Bruce — the rape-y fellow vampire she meets outside a college library — but ya know what, I’m good. I don’t think we really need a scene here to get the gist of what happened. Speaking of Molloy, not even he escapes this abuse-heavy episode. In anger, Louis somehow turns up the volume on his Parkinson’s so that his hand shakes uncontrollably. He also nearly chokes him to death. Ugh, are we done yet?

After all of this, I’m still not sure how I feel about the spousal abuse at the end. At least it looks like Louis may be on his way out the door with Claudia at last.

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