Interview With the Vampire Season 3 just dropped its trailer (see it here) after the series was renewed ahead of the critically acclaimed second season’s finale. Season 3 of the series is apparently covering the second book from Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles, in which Lestat is awakened by a rock and roll band after a decades-long sleep. He goes on to join the band, becomes famous, and reveals the existence of the vampires to the world, annoying them to the point that they attack him openly during one of his concerts.
What we now described is not just the premise of The Vampire Lestat novel but also the premise of 2002’s The Queen of the Damned, a movie that’s notable for two reasons. It was R&B legend Aaliyah’s first breakthrough performance — though she debuted in Romeo Must Die — before serving as her tragic goodbye. After starring in a movie as the millennia-old vampire queen, Aaliyah tragically lost her life in a plane crash while the movie was still in post-production. However, her performance in the movie will remain remembered for ages to come because it literally changed vampire fiction forever.
When Queen of the Damned opened in theaters, both the critics and Anne Rice’s fans weren’t too kind to the movie, primarily because it deviated from the source material significantly. It managed to top the box office in its opening weekend against a fairly weak competition, but it barely managed to recuperate its budget, failing to meet Warner Bros’s expectations. Yet Queen of the Damned developed a cult following, buoyed by the members of the goth subculture (who also consider The Crow their Bible) and Aaliyah’s passionate admirers.
After all, Aalyiah was and still remains, the highlight of Queen of the Damned, where she portrayed a reanimated vampire monarch Akasha. Despite having only 38 minutes of total screen time, Aaliyah’s portrayal of Akasha has forever changed vampire fiction. Before Queen of the Damned, literary and cinematic portrayals of vampires were mostly male-centric, from The Vampyre — written in 1819 by John Polidori, often considered the first significant piece of vampire fiction — to Bram Stoker’s Dracula from 1987, and even beyond.
The exceptions to these male-centric portrayals were few and far between, with Carmilla being among the most notable ones. Written in 1972 by Sheridan Le Fanu, this novella introduced one of the earliest female vampires in literature. It’s important to note that all of these characters were shrouded in mystery or melancholic sorrow, placed within the narratives filled with gothic and tragic elements. Stoker’s Dracula and even Ann Rice’s Lestat de Lioncout and Louis de Pointe du Lac all more or less fit those descriptions.
Aaliyah’s Akasha broke several stereotypes that were deeply embedded in the literary and cinematic vampire mythos since Akasha wasn’t just a powerful female vampire, she was the progenitor of all vampires. Unlike Lestat (from the novels), she wasn’t a tragic figure but rather regal, unapologetically powerful, and exuded a modern sensuality that broke away from the traditional vampire mold. The character, brought to life by Aaliyah’s talent, challenged gender norms within vampire fiction, giving us a powerful female vampire that wasn’t defined by her relationships with male counterparts.
To underscore this, Ann Rice actually had Akasha kill Enkil, a male progenitor of the vampire race and Akasha’s consort throughout the centuries. This further underscored Akasha’s power, ruthlessness, and ambition. Even her relationship with Lestat wasn’t born completely out of love; though she admired Lestat on a personal level due to his strength, beauty, and spirit — which is why she desired him as a consort — Akasha also saw him as an ideal partner to help her execute her plans to reshape the world in her own image.
Though her ambition isn’t as clearly defined in the movie, Aaliyah perfectly captured Akasha’s essence. The R&B star brought a sense of royalty and a commanding presence to the role, which befitted Akasha’s status as the ancient vampire queen. Not only that, but the performance itself exuded both seduction and menace, which aligned well with Akasha’s character traits. Just look at the Admiral’s Arms scene in Queen of the Damned; her seductive movement captured every gaze at the vampire pub before she ended the vampires whose vision didn’t align with her own.
She didn’t beat them into submission or use her telepathy to let other vampires at Admiral’s Arms know who and what she was. She simply erased them with ease, as if their very existence was insignificant to her — and it was. The portrayal of an unimaginably powerful female vampire who is defined by her power and ambition alone was really important from the cultural perspective, as it bridged the gaps between ancient myths and modern sensibilities and opened doors for a more diverse and dynamic representation of vampires in media.
The influence of Aaliyah’s portrayal of Akasha in Queen of the Damned is notable to this day; in just 118 days, Aaliyah managed to reshape an entire genre that was deeply entrenched in tradition. She brought a fresh perspective by blending power, sensuality, and modernity in a way that hasn’t been associated with vampire fiction before, transforming the entire genre and paving the way for future representations of vampires. Hopefully, we’ll get to see her in a future season of Interview with the Vampire.