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Anne Rice


She had a flair with vampire novels. And she saved vampire movies.  

Indeed, one might say she resuscitated the genre, and its silver screen derivatives.

The campiness of Leslie Nielson's Dracula: Dead and Loving It of 1995 might have seemed to put a stake in Bram Stoker's characters as objects of further Hollywood treatment. 

But, if I may mix metaphors, the seed for a revival had already been planted. The year before that, 1994, Neil Jordan directed a motion picture adaptation of Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, taking a fresh look at the material. It was not at once a market sensation, despite the presence of Tom Cruise. It was not a sensation precisely because of the weariness of the movie-going public with the whole genre, the weariness that was soon to produce Nielson's act of desperation.

And yet over time, in the years to come. the growth of Rice's influence would undo some of the damage that wear-and-tear had done to the whole thought space.   

In 2020 alone, we had Vampires versus the Bronx, Midnight Mass, and Blood Red Sky, none of them based directly on an Anne Rice work, but all representing the renascence of the form for which she gets deserved credit. 

Rest in Peace, Anne Rice. 

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