‘Interview with the Vampire’ Episode 5 Recap: Bodies Bodies Bodies

“I’m trying to think of something more fucked up than this.” Me too, Daniel Molloy, me too. Titled “A Vile Hunger for Your Hammering Heart” with the show’s typical baroque brio, the fifth episode of Interview with the Vampire is a troubling hour of television. It chronicles first the disintegrating sanity of the young vampire Claudia, then the traumatic event that forces her back home, then the final collapse of her surrogate family via the abusive tendencies of its miserable patriarch. It does all this while sacrificing none of the richness that has made the characters, and the show, so vivid and surprising all this time. 

It’s fascinating to watch how the nastiness seems to reach out from the past and wrap its fingers around the throat of reporter Daniel Molloy, who’s growing increasingly disenchanted with the Louis/Lestat/Claudia trio. The episode begins with him perusing a list Claudia kept in her diary of her victims’ last words; “It’s a kill list, in a teenager’s handwriting,” he accurately notes. 

But it turns out she was collecting more than just cries for help and pleas for mercy. After her disastrous encounter with Charlie — the boy she loved and then accidentally killed, whose cremation Lestat forced her to watch in graphic detail — humans, Louis says, all died in her eyes. Perhaps that’s why she not only got sloppy, killing dozens of people and burying them in shallow graves in the same spot, but also started collecting gruesome souvenirs like a serial killer would. Fingers, toes, feet, breasts, and even, we eventually see, a still-living victim covered in flies. 

Lured out of their townhouse by the politician they’ve been friendly with for years, they return home to discover it being searched by the cops, who come across an inebriated Claudia (the still-living victim was drunk as hell, apparently) and nearly her stash of human body parts as well. 

The fight that erupts is a nasty one. Lestat no longer has any love or patience for Claudia, whom he dismisses as both a “maniac” and a “mistake.” Claudia, in emotional agony, can only wish that she had a lover in her life like Lestat and Louis do. Who would be interested in her, she asks, beyond perverts and little boys, and what good would either do her in 40 years, when she’s a middle-aged woman in a child’s body? She’s been trying to make her own vampire companion with this in mind, but unsuccessfully. “How you gonna fix it, huh?” she shouts at her Daddy Lou and Uncle Les. “Which one of you gonna fuck me?” It’s direct and it’s shocking.

Claudia takes off after that, and things go bad for all parties involved. Louis and Lestat are forced to live clandestine lives in their own home — they are, in addition to everything else, under suspicion for homosexuality at this point as well — which quickly becomes a hoarder’s hellhole. (Lestat still ventures out to kill, and also romance a (female) jazz singer; Louis mostly stays in and reads and eats rats.) Claudia, meanwhile, makes a whirlwind tour of the region’s universities, killing students in the libraries while, it turns out, researching vampire folklore in hopes of finding more of her kind.

It should be noted here that Molloy harbors no sympathy for Claudia, though he does see her as potentially being “the girl who moves a million books” should Louis permit him sufficient access to her story. “Poor dear, she wasn’t held enough in between ritualistic murders,” Molloy scoffs; he compares her to “Charlie Manson,” who wrote a couple of beautiful songs but was still, y’know, Charlie Manson.

Unfortunately, for Claudia, her travails don’t end when her relationship with Louis and Lestat does. More vampires are, in fact, exactly what she finds, in the form of Bruce (Damon Daunno), a motorcycle-riding bad boy who saves her from a racist college letterman. Bruce regales her with tales of his making in Copenhagen and his return to the States via faking his own death, but slowly reveals that he’s been following her for weeks, if not longer. He attacks her, and though both the show and — through judicious expurgations of the offending pages by Louis — her diary do not reveal what he does next, we can easily guess.

Again, the nastiness infects the present day. When Molloy presses Louis about the missing pages and the content they were obviously torn out to hide, Louis uses telepathy to trigger Molloy’s Parkinson’s disease. While Rashid, the pliant servant for whom Molloy has developed a distaste, attempts to apologize on Louis’s behalf, Molloy gets up and slaps the vampire across the face before resuming the interview.

Back in the past, things only get worse. Lestat is both envious and, it seems, legitimately hurt that Louis prefers to hunt for Claudia than spend time with him, interpreting it as a rejection of their romantic love, which it is. Louis learns that his sister Grace is moving north, her wealth having been wiped out in the stock market crash; she’s had Louis declared dead, realizing that the brother she once knew is gone despite being unable to verbalize exactly how or why. A surreptitious Claudia witnesses this graveside conversation, and suddenly Louis’s reason for having Lestat turn her becomes clear: He wanted a new sister to replace the one he’d lost to his own vampirism.

So she heads home at last — and all hell breaks loose. 

Lestat interrupts the heartwarming reunion between Claudia and Louis, mocking Claudia’s attempts to investigate European vampires and warning her that they’ll tear her to pieces should she go through with her plan to travel there to meet them. When she reveals that she wants to bring Louis, but not Lestat, with her, the elder vampire goes apeshit. He assaults Claudia, and when Louis tries to stop him, he beats the shit out of Louis too, destroying half the townhouse in the process. Eventually he drags Louis out into the courtyard via his severed throat, lifts him up above the clouds, and drops him to the ground, all the while piteously mourning the fact that Louis has never loved him the way he’s loved Louis. Claudia runs to cradle her fallen “Daddy”’s body, and Lestat descends to witness it, his very presence a lethal challenge.

The end. Roll credits…under “Home Is Where You’re Happy,” an acoustic ditty by none other than your friend and his, Charlie fucking Manson.

As that jawdropping soundtrack choice indicates, this is bravura filmmaking from writer Hannah Moscovitch and director Levan Akin, pretty much from start to finish. Its primary goal is to drive home the fact that Louis and Lestat’s relationship was not just “shitty,” as Molloy had referred to it, but actively abusive. The violent fury Lestat unleashes against the two much younger and weaker vampires he’s made, mocking Claudia’s trauma and moaning about Louis’s failure to love him all the while, is the dynamic of countless abusive homes. The dynamic the ostensibly morally superior Louis has created around himself in the present — a legion of servants literally willing to sacrifice their blood to him, a willingness to set off an innocent man’s debilitating disease for the crime of pissing him off — shows how difficult it is to shake free of such formative influences. 

Pointedly, I think, the threat of other, still worse vampires lurks behind it all. There’s Bruce, of course, and his rape of Claudia. There are the unseen European vampires who Lestat promises are much, much worse than he is; given the fact that he’s no longer in Europe himself, we’ve got ample reason to believe he’s right, and that indeed he was their victim, replicating their monstrousness in miniature with Louis and Claudia. Finally, there’s Rashid’s warning that the book Molloy and Louis are planning is effectively Louis’s suicide note, given the certainty that the world’s vampires will find and kill him for outing their secret…though as Molloy notes, the threat of a vampire apocalypse is already looming on the horizon, by Louis’s own account. 

On the show Twin Peaks, the character of Major Merrick Garland once gave voice to his greatest fear: “that love is not enough.” That seems to be IWTV’s greatest fear as well: that good intentions only get you so far, that personal attachments are conditioned on personal neuroses and fetishes and trauma, that none of it can save you from the barbarians at the gate, then or now. It’s Charlie Manson’s world, and we’re just living in it.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.