The saga of the Vampire Chronicles’ tv series has had almost as many installments as the series it’s based on. The movie rights were with Universal Studios, tentatively (as of 2014) to be adapted by Josh Boone. Then that fell through for unknown reasons (Anne Rice’s Facebook page has a tendency to go back and delete posts that no longer gel with the current narrative, y’see), and after a period of silence it was announced that the series would be shopped as a TV series instead.
That TV series started out on a strong note with the announcement that Bryan Fuller would be the series showrunner, which is about as perfect a choice as I could name. His series Hannibal is already about the closest thing to capturing the spirit of the Vampire Chronicles on film, including the actual films based on the series, and his eye for updating and remixing problematic texts into something more inclusive and suited to their medium is something the series badly needed. Not to mention Fuller pegged adapting the books as his dream project way back when he was a teenager, which is just cute as hell.
Unfortunately, Fuller has a bad habit of flouncing off of projects when he loses creative control (see most recently American Gods and Star Trek Discovery); and Anne Rice has legendarily refused to use an editor on any of her books since the late 80s (it shows), considering her first drafts to be untouchable masterpieces. The meeting of these two control freaks was predictable, and Fuller left the project only two months after signing on (though the news wasn’t announced until almost six months out, possibly to draw attention away from the lightning-fast turnover).
The project went back to development hell until about two weeks ago, when it was announced that Hulu had picked up the rights with Anne and her son Christopher as two of four producers. The pilot script, titled “The Wolf Killer,” has been written by Christopher Rice but otherwise there’s no production news forthcoming.
Whew. Now, readers may or may not know that these books were quite formative for me, both in my professional and personal life, and I’ve talked about them a lot. That decade-plus of influence has also left me a lot of time to think about how this series, both crucially important to the horror genre and quite badly aged in some regards, might look in adaptation. And that’s left me with five major questions about the new series.
