INTRODUCTION

            Hello, and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! I am Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and this video is all about the child vampire. This is, in many ways, the final video in my little trilogy on queer child monsters; the first two were both about shapeshifters. However, this script wound up being about more than just queerness. It also led me to think about some of the horror inherent in childhood itself, or at least the position that childhood occupies in society. The modern Western social construct of childhood is governed by two overarching ideas: innocence and futurity. Innocence – say it with me – can refer to ignorance, lack of experience, lack of guilt, and presence of moral purity, and those associated meanings are frequently all conflated together. This is why withholding information from kids – essentially, enforcing ignorance – is so often seen as a means of safeguarding moral purity. What they don’t know can’t corrupt them.

Futurity, meanwhile, is defined by Alison and Adrian James as “The recognition, in the present, of the child’s potential for being different in the future and the prediction of present actions on the basis of this recognition.” Sounds logical enough. As James and James acknowledge, “the period of childhood as a whole, for children everywhere, is typified by physical, psychological, intellectual growth. Childhood is also a period of growth in a social sense; it constitutes a social apprenticeship, a period of socialization and acculturation, during which children learn the necessary social skills and absorb the elements of their cultural heritage in order to enable them, at some point, to join and participate in adult society.” This is where talking about childhood as “socially constructed” can become a little tricky, because biologically and also because of how time works, yes, children do develop and change and grow toward adulthood. Children are, if they’re lucky, future adults.

The socially constructed part of futurity, however, is what cultural meaning any given society attributes to that biological and temporal fact. James and James point out that the way that futurity is constructed in modern Western society implies a point of “arrival” – a finishing line where an individual crosses from child – human-in-progress – to completed adult. The goal, therefore, is to raise children in such a way that they become the right kind of completed adults: productive, moral, and capable of participating in the most important national institutions: the workplace and the nuclear family, thereby producing more innocent kids who will turn into those productive and moral adults in the workplace, and so on and so on until the heat death of the universe, presumably.

Innocence and futurity have a somewhat uneasy relationship as constructs. On the one hand, childhood innocence is seen as something that must be protected and maintained for the sake of the child’s future. If their childhood is “ruined” by exposure to concepts and experiences seen as off-limits to children, then their future adulthood is at risk to being the wrong kind of completed personhood. But innocence, by definition, can’t be maintained forever. The child has to change at some point – has to gain in experience and knowledge to reach that “finish line” of adulthood. Balancing safeguarding innocence and preparing for the future is the basis for kind of all of the debates about how children should be raised and treated and educated.

When a particular concept or identity can be framed as opposed to innocence and futurity – like queerness, for example – that rhetoric can be very politically powerful. That’s why queer people are called “groomers” if they dare to suggest that maybe kids should know about the existence of queer identities. That’s why queer books are banned from schools and libraries, why “Don’t Say Gay” bills are passed, why gender-affirming healthcare is withheld from minors. But, to my mind, the emphasis on how queerness is a threat to innocence is mostly a smokescreen for the real concern, which is the potential threat that queerness serves to futurity. After all, a great deal of futurity is reproductive futurity: the ability of the child to, as an adult, participate in the recreation of the nuclear family unit. A queer future is not seen as conducive to that, so queerness is often seen as a failure of futurity: what happens when the project of raising a child to adulthood goes wrong.

But what happens when childhood has no future at all – and no innocence, either? What if you just stay a child forever and ever, amassing knowledge and experience but never arriving at adulthood?

As Lisa Nevárez points out in her article “What to Expect When You Are Expecting (A Vampire): Reading the Vampire Child,” seeing children who are “violent, blood-sucking creatures runs counter to the construction of the carefree, natural child” (93). Hard to argue with that. If we’re talking failures of innocence and futurity, you can’t really get more on the nose than the child vampire. In this video, I’m going to discuss two child vampires who have been through multiple adaptational iterations: Eli, from Let the Right One In, and Claudia, from The Vampire Chronicles. For Eli, I’m going to focus almost exclusively on the Swedish film with just a little bit of info from the novel, but for Claudia, we’ll go through both her novel and 90s film version (because they’re basically the same, with just a slight age difference), and then the version (or versions) of her that exist in the AMC TV series. These two queer child vampires are rich texts for exploring what happens when innocence and futurity break down, and how terrifying and tragic childhood is revealed to be without those seemingly “protective” forces. So join me as we leave the sweet sunlight of innocence for the eternal night of the child without a future.

“TWELVE, MORE OR LESS”: ELI IN LET THE RIGHT ONE IN

            I’m going to be real with you right now: the reason I’m talking about the film version of Let the Right One In is because I couldn’t read the book by John Ajvide Lindqvist. I tried a few years ago, but I’ve got my limits. First of all, if you haven’t read or watched much Scandinavian horror, then let me tell you, those writers know how to do bleak. But the real reason I couldn’t hack the novel is because one of the main initial point-of-view characters is Håkan, a man who lives with someone who appears to be a twelve-year-old girl. This child, of course, is the vampire Eli, and Håkan is not a relative or even a fellow vampire. Instead, in the novel, he procures victims for Eli in exchange for getting to live with the object of his desire, because he is a pedophile.

            I am not going to talk much about this, partially because YouTube reallywouldn’t like that, and I’m just unwilling to play the linguistic algorithm dodging games like saying PDF-file, etc., to get out of the demonetization crosshairs. No shade to people who do, because I totally get it, but language and storytelling is my whole thing, and I can’t bring myself to not use the words that I mean. But I’ll give the algorithm one thing: it is an awful subject, and it turned out to be one that I simply could not immerse myself in for the sake of reading a novel. That doesn’t mean that I think that it’s a subject that shouldn’t be explored through art – I don’t really think there is such a thing – but I also think that every person has a right to decide when a piece of art just is not for them. I couldn’t spend that much time inside that character’s head. So I can’t speak to the book because I only read the first like 40 pages and I’m probably never going to read more than that.

            Luckily for me, the film diminishes that character’s role considerably. He does live with and procure victims for Eli – until he eventually fails at that role – but his whole deal is left up to the viewer’s imagination, with just the barest suggestion of what his true motivations may be. So that’s enough about him. Let’s get to the real stars of the show: Oskar and Eli. Oskar is a lonely 12-year-old who fantasizes about violence. He imagines confronting his bullies with a knife and telling them to “Squeal! Scream!” He has divorced parents – broken nuclear family ahoy – and he keeps a scrapbook of murder stuff. So on the innocence front, we’re not doing great.

            In the snowy courtyard of his apartment complex, on a spare jungle gym, Oskar meets Eli, who has just moved into the apartment next to his. Eli, as I mentioned earlier, appears to be a girl about his age. So now is now the second video in a row where I have had to figure out what to do with a main character’s pronouns. In my last video, when I talked about I Saw the TV Glow, I avoided pronouns for the protagonist Owen until the end of the story, to indicate that this character frankly does not know her own gender, but that the film supports the idea that the character is transfeminine. With Eli, things are more complicated, so we’re going to briefly jump ahead to some spoilers and some more stuff that The Algorithm is not going to like. So know that for just the next few minutes, we will be discussing – not in detail, but discussing – an instance of intense child abuse.

            Eli was assigned male at birth, but in the book, during the process of being turned into a vampire, all of Eli’s external genitalia was cut off. Apparently, in the novel, when this is revealed, the pronouns for Eli switch from female to male. In most scholarly articles that I have found about this story, including the film, authors use male pronouns for Eli in acknowledgment of this backstory. Now, in the movie, we are not given the full story of how this happens. Instead, we just have several instances of Eli professing, “I’m not a girl,” and then a shot of the healed but scarred aftermath of the mutilation, without an explanation of what actually occurred. I will discuss those aspects of the film in more depth when I get to them, but first we need to clear up the issue of actually gendering this character. So based on the fact that Eli does say “I’m not a girl” and of course did not consent to this abusive transformation of the body, I would be inclined to go ahead and use male pronouns, except Eli doesn’t actually have to present with feminine hair and clothing, but still chooses to do so. This is apparently (again, based on scholarly articles) more emphasized in the book, where Eli deliberately asserts this presentation over a more masculine one. (Again, this is second-hand knowledge, because I ain’t reading that.) So “they/them” does feel in some ways like a little bit of a cop-out, because this character doesn’t assert a specifically nonbinary identity at any point, but I do think that that’s what I’m going to go with, just to indicate that this kid’s identity is not something that can be neatly categorized. They say they’re not a girl, but they don’t say that they’re a boy – even though, at their age, they could easily present as either one. Of course, abuse like what Eli suffered is not the determinant of gender identity, so my choice of pronouns for Eli is intended to indicate not what’s going on with their body, but instead the fact that they have chosen not to claim “girl” and not to present as “boy.” They exist outside the binary in a way that their just-barely-pubescent appearance allows them to do without ever “arriving” in a final category. (As an aside, Eli is played by a female child actor, Lina Leandersson, but their voice was dubbed to make it lower – albeit by another female actress, Elif Ceylan – so the ambiguity is baked into their on-screen portrayal, as well.)

            Okay, so back to where Eli and Oskar meet. Right off the bat, Eli warns Oskar that they can’t be friends, but the next time they encounter each other, Eli’s resolve is tested by Oskar’s Rubik’s cube. (This movie takes place in the 1980s, so the inclusion of a lonely kid with a Rubik’s cube is required I think by law.) Oskar is surprised that Eli doesn’t recognize what this toy is, and he lends it to them when he sees that they’re intrigued by the puzzle. After a quick feed – posing as a helpless kid to draw in a victim – Eli completes and return the cube to Oskar, and their friendship starts in earnest. Oskar asks how old Eli is, and they answer, “Twelve, more or less.” Oskar, meanwhile, knows exactly how old he is: “Twelve years, eight months, nine days.” He is literally keeping his increasing age like a score, which makes sense, because this whole childhood thing is not going that great for him. Despite his violent fantasies, he is helpless against the gang of bullies at school – particularly the ringleader, Conny, whose delight in tormenting Oskar even freaks out his little hench-kids. After the bullies beat Oskar with a switch, Eli tells Oskar to hit back as hard as he can. When he protests that he’d be outnumbered, Eli promises that they will help him, and they touch his hand in reassurance and burgeoning attraction.

            What follows is a relationship that mixes the markers of “innocent childhood” with the beginnings of pubescent desire as well as plenty of adult violence. It becomes clear that, despite having much more literal life experience than a typical twelve-year-old, Eli’s answer of “twelve, more or less” is not a lie. They are very much still a kid mentally and emotionally. They are interested in things like Rubik’s cubes and games like “how many fingers am I holding up against your back.” Some markers of childhood, however, are no longer compatible with what Eli has become. Oskar buys them candy, but it makes them sick. Right after seeing them vomit, Oskar hugs Eli for the first time. I’ve talked before about the concept of “abjection” in some of my previous videos. As theorized by Julia Kristeva, the abject is that which is disgusting, repulsive, that which must be cut off and thrown away because of its inherent threat to the perception of a stable subject position, a stable selfhood. The illusion of a nice, clean, contained system of rational thought within a controllable body falls apart in the presence of the abject, in the forms of bodily fluids and waste and death and rot and violence. Vampires, as living dead who feed on blood, are inherently abject figures. But so is Oskar. He bleeds from the wounds that the bullies give him. He exchanges the “innocence” he is supposed to have for fantasies of violence. And he deals with disgusting torments like his pants being stolen and urinated on while he’s in gym class. He is not progressing well towards the right kind of future, but instead is becoming the kind of abject thing that is tossed aside and hidden for the sake of everyone else’s stability. So when he embraces Eli with chocolatey vomit around their mouth, it is a moment of real connection and communion between two kids who are very much getting childhood wrong, according to just about every social construct there is.

            While he is hugging them, Eli asks, “Oskar, do you like me?” “Yeah, a lot,” he answers. Eli presses, “If I wasn’t a girl, would you like me anyway?” Oskar says, “I suppose so. Why do you ask?” Eli does not answer at this time, but Oskar’s response clearly means a lot to them. Later, after Eli drains Håkan – long story, but good riddance – they arrive back at Oskar’s apartment window and ask to be let in, but for Oskar not to look at them. Eli strips off their clothes and gets into bed behind Oskar, their mouth still bloody. Oskar is surprised that they are naked, but his main remark on the subject is, “You’re as cold as ice.” Eli says, “Sorry. Is that gross?” A particularly poignant and childlike question from this eternal child, self-conscious about their abject corpse body, but Oskar, accepting and meeting them in their abjection, assures them that, no, they aren’t gross. Oskar then asks if Eli wants to go steady and be his girlfriend. Eli once again protests, “I’m not a girl.” Oskar’s response? “Oh … but do you want to go steady or not?” While Oskar may not totally understand Eli’s assertion, he also appears not to find whatever they mean by “I’m not a girl” all too important. It doesn’t affect how much he likes them. So is there a burgeoning queerness within Oskar – and is that part of what makes him such a target to bullies? Entirely possible, but also Eli has other concerns. They want to “keep things they way they are.” When they sense Oskar’s disappointment at this, they ask, “Do you do anything special when you go steady?” “No,” Oskar says. “So everything’s the same?” Eli presses, and Oskar agrees. Eli decides, “Then we’ll go steady. It’ll be you and me.”

            Now, most people would probably argue that “going steady” does actually imply some sort of change. It’s dated now, obviously, but in terms of a romantic relationship, it implies exclusivity, being an “official” couple, not just casually dating, and more romantic as well as sexual intimacy. So saying that they’re going steady but everything is the same demonstrates that push and pull that Eli and Oskar have with childhood and adulthood. Twelve is such a quintessentially pubescent age; it’s the last year before being a teenager. The embodied changes are a-happening, but typically your outward appearance still very much reads as “child” at this age. And Eli is stuck there, unchangingly in a moment defined by change. They want the intimacy, but they can’t have the forward motion, the progress. It will inevitably outstrip them.

            Indeed, Oskar does show signs of wanting the relationship to change in certain ways – to deepen, to become more “special.” After all, Eli has already changed his life. He takes their advice to fight back against the bullies, cracking Conny hard in the head and causing him to need stitches on his ear. This scene coincides with other schoolkids finding the body of one of Eli’s victims, suggesting that the two are united in violence. The next time Oskar and Eli are together, Oskar takes his knife, which he has been very attached to throughout the film, and cuts his hand, with the intention of mixing his blood with Eli’s.

This act of mingling blood – which also shows up in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, which I talked about in my last video – is clearly sexual but in a queer, sideways kind of way. So we return now to Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the 20^th Century. Stockton’s thesis is that “growing up” is not a path that a queer child can follow, because growing up is perceived as hitting all of the heterosexual life milestones – you leave childhood once you are dating a potential spouse, and then marrying them, and then procreating. Instead, the queer child grows sideways into something else, something Other, often that cannot be named, because the child themself lacks the knowledge and context to do so. The temporality – the sense of time – around the queer child is warped and looping, since Stockton points out that queerness can often only be recognized retroactively. The queer child often does not know that that is what they are; the label of queerness is bestowed from the future adult self to the lingering ghost of the child self. This also gives us another way of reading Eli’s desire for nothing to change in their relationship with Oskar: queer kids don’t have a blueprint for a future romantic and/or sexual development, rendering the whole thing murky and unknowable to them. Eli may not be able to imagine what comes next; the stuckness of vampirism is a good metaphor for that, as well.

So we have this sort of sideways sexual encounter – mixing up ideas of violence and bloodshed and desire – from Oskar, a child who has been Othered by his peers and has found solace with another child outsider. But offering blood to a vampire is a dangerous proposition. Oskar’s blood drips to the floor and Eli falls upon it, lapping it up animalistically. When they look up, their face is transformed into old age, but for only a moment. They shout at Oskar to go, which he does. But he returns to Eli’s apartment soon thereafter, not particularly put off by what he saw. He’s figured out that Eli is a vampire, which Eli admits to, and then he asks, “Are you old?” Eli answers, “I’m twelve. But I’ve been twelve for a long time.” Vampires may be the ultimate in growing sideways: they are an eternally stretched moment, changing, but not progressing. Eli is certainly different from a typical child. They have much more experience living. That’s one strike against innocence, and as for the question of guilt and purity, I mean, Eli literally does murder people. If innocence is a fundamental attribute of childhood, as it is constructed to be, then Eli should be ejected from the category. Yet here they are, still twelve. Their non-innocence doesn’t change that fact; their childhood is irrefutable, in their interests, their speech, their need for caretaking, and their desire for peer relationships. Eli is two incompatible categories at once: non-innocent and child. And through this monster metaphor, we have a way of seeing into the isolation and yearning of those real kids who embody socially incompatible categories, such as queer and child.

All right, so now we get into some of the most important scenes in the film. Eli shows up at Oskar’s apartment, but, per vampire rules, they can’t come in unless they are invited. Oskar challenges them and waves them in without speaking, clicking at them like they’re a dog or a horse. I read this as Oskar trying on a masculine sense of power over Eli, who, despite their protests, he definitely still views as a girl. It’s highly unsettling behavior to watch, but when it comes to unsettling, Eli has Oskar beat. They silently answer his challenge, crossing the threshold and turning to face him. They remain silent as blood begins to seep from their body – through their shirt, from their hairline, from their eyes. Oskar quickly repents of his show of power, shouting, “No! You can come in!” He hugs them again – once more initiating this affection and comfort when Eli is at their most abject. They are literally covered in their own blood that their body could not contain, and Oskar is moved to hold them close.

But then it is Eli’s turn to challenge Oskar. They repeat his opening words to him: “Scream! Squeal!” They say that they are like Oskar due to their relationship with violence. Oskar protests that he doesn’t kill people, but Eli counters, “But you’d like to if you could. To get revenge. Right?” When Oskar concedes, Eli responds, “I do it because I have to. Be me, for a little while. Please, Oskar. Be me.” Eli cries then, and their face once again momentarily appears old. One way of interpreting Eli’s plea is as a cry for help in procuring victims and staying alive. They get caught pretty regularly. I haven’t focused on those parts of the plot, but Eli’s not that good at this, which Nevárez also points out. Eli still very much needs a caretaker to meet their physical needs, just like any child. But on a more figurative level, Eli is also clearly just tired of being alone in their strange, isolated, Othered form of childhood. It’s awful to do childhood in a way that places you outside of the “protections” that “innocent” children are supposed to receive. Eli wants to be able to put that burden down.

Okay, so next up is a scene where we bring up Eli’s past physical maiming again, so be forewarned. Eli showers off the blood and Oskar offers them one of his mother’s dresses. There’s a lot that we can be Freudian about with this film if we wanted to, which I generally don’t, but it would be a bit dishonest of me not to acknowledge that plenty of the old psychoanalytic symbolism is extremely present here. We’ve got Oskar’s knife, the conflation of parental and romantic roles, Eli’s literal castration, it’s all there. But anyway, while Eli is changing, Oskar peeps in on them. Again, we have this really unpleasant trying on of masculine power, but also again, Oskar doesn’t get what he wants from this attempt, because what he sees is the old scar tissue from Eli’s past abuse. He is clearly shocked and confused, but just as when Eli told him that they’re not a girl, it doesn’t figure into his relationship with them going forward. The film never follows up on this from this point on.

I don’t totally know how I feel about this aspect of the story. It does seem like a lot of the character’s gender queerness is implied to stem from this trauma, which can skirt dangerously close to the homophobic and transphobic rhetoric about people only “becoming queer” if something has gone wrong in their childhoods. Obviously, I don’t love that, since that’s not true. With that said, this is a horror story; horror is the genre in which really bad things happen to people and the audience is supposed to be disturbed. I am glad that the film is much more ambiguous about Eli’s backstory than the novel. What exactly have they suffered? Why do they choose to present as a girl? That’s for them to know, and us to … not. Stockton argues that the queer child is an opaque creature, unknowable in many ways, even and especially to themself. Oskar accepts this ambiguity and, based on his actions in the film, decides that it’s irrelevant for his care and desire for Eli. He doesn’t have to know or understand them to love them. (But also, Oskar, never do that peeping thing again, ugh.)

Oskar and Eli’s relationship continues to deepen, but once again through violence, as opposed to the sanctioned milestones of growth and romance. While Eli is sleeping in a womb-like bathtub during the day, the friend and lover, respectively, of two of their victims tries to come and kill them. Oskar interrupts the would-be vengeance, and gives Eli the chance to kill the intruder themself. After this, Eli decides that they must leave for their own and Oskar’s safety, but they kiss Oskar goodbye with blood still on their mouth. Yet Eli returns when Oskar is in danger from the bullies, just as they had said they would. Conny’s older brother, who’s even more dead-eyed and violent than Conny, holds Oskar underwater at the local gym’s pool, but before Oskar can drown, the bullies’ dismembered body parts start raining down into the water. Cut to: Oskar alone on a train with a large trunk. From within, Eli taps out Morse code – which is what they used to communicate between their apartment walls – and Oskar smiles and taps back their message: “kiss.”

Oskar never quite lives up to Eli’s plea to “be me.” In both of their final two violent encounters, Eli does all the killing. But Oskar does do what he can to protect Eli, and they protect him in turn. The sweetness of the Morse-code kiss and the brutality of dismemberment get to coexist – uneasily for the audience, but I think as something of a relief for Eli. They are very aware that they’re not innocent, but Oskar gives them an opportunity to still be a child: a different child, a queer child, but a child nonetheless. They get to reembody that category that they were never allowed to physically leave but were also morally prohibited from for ages.

In “Childhood’s End: Let the Right One In and Other Deaths of Innocence,” John Calhoun points out that, as children, both Eli and Oskar are presented as vulnerable, which is pretty standard when it comes to our social constructions of childhood. But in their cases, they are particularly vulnerable to the adults meant to protect them. Eli’s childlike appearance makes them “vulnerable to unwanted notice and interference by the authorities” (28). Oskar, meanwhile, doesn’t receive any real help from adults for his bullying and isolation; Eli is the only one who “seems equipped, or even willing, to protect him” (31). Calhoun concludes that as a pair, the two of them overcome their vulnerability through violence, and “Together, Eli and Oskar find the strength to do the most frightening thing a monster can do: they survive” (31).

But some tragedy still inevitably looms. Eli can either turn Oskar or he can grow up. There’s no future where nothing changes. No milestones that they can achieve. But there is, for this moment, a childhood that exists outside of the bounds of all the constructs, a queer connection, a brief escape. Instead of being cast out for once, the abject kids have struck off on their own. They get to do the rejection instead of the other way around. They choose each other in all of their wrongness and violence. Will it last? Realistically, no. They left a trail of bodies that are definitely traceable back to them. But they’re happy in this sweet moment of rest that the film allows them at its close – even if we, as adults, know too much about what surely must await them.

Part of why we idealize childhood is because it is short. When it gets too long, it makes us uneasy. When adults act childlike or childish, we are put off. When kids have more experience than we think they should, we are likewise disturbed. I, as a viewer, don’t want Oskar to remain an eternal child – and I don’t think he does, either. He continually yearns for more power than he has. Eli wants things to stay the same, and in some ways, for them, they always will, but their life is hard and brutal. When we imagine staying within the powerlessness of childhood forever, we are horrified – which means that on some level, we recognize how scary and un-free childhood can often be. It’s just that we paper over that with notions of innocence so that we can imagine that the children who lack agency are content and protected at least while they are still ignorant. But take away that innocence and ignorance, and childhood can seem like a prison. And if you don’t believe me, then ask Anne Rice’s Claudia.

“THIS UNNATURAL CHILDTHING”: CLAUDIA IN INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE

            In Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach writes, “what vampires are in any given generation is a part of what I am and what my times have become.” In other words, vampires, despite their immortality, change with the times. Storytellers use these monsters to mean different things throughout the ages; they represent the anxieties and desires that are specific to a time and place. This is also what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen means when he says that “the monster always escapes.” Even if one iteration of a monster is vanquished, there will always be a new threat on the cultural horizon, and the monster morphs to embody it. This is a particularly fun facet of monstrosity to explore when you have a monstrous character who has been revived, as if from the grave, through different adaptations – like the child vampire Claudia.

            As I’m sure most people watching this video already know, Claudia first appeared in the novel Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice, which was published in 1976. This became the first in Rice’s genre-defining series, The Vampire Chronicles. Interview got a film adaptation in the 1990s, which cleaved pretty close to the source material, at least as far as Claudia is concerned. I’m going to use the images from this movie to go along with my discussion of the book, because the main difference is Claudia’s age, and that’s entirely for practical reasons. In the novel, she is five, but this simply isn’t a role that a five-year-old could actually play. So she was portrayed by 11-year-old Kirsten Dunst posing as an eight-year-old – to great effect, in my opinion.

            In the novel, we first encounter Claudia, through Louis, the eponymous interviewed vampire, as a sick orphan in the eighteenth century. Her mother has recently died of the plague in New Orleans. Louis, who is perhaps the prototypical angsty vampire, is mad with hunger at this point, because he’s been trying to exist on just the blood of animals like rats. He sees the beautiful and helpless little girl and nearly drains her. But Lestat, our prototypical Extremely Extra vampire, saves her and brings her back to their home. Lestat made Louis, and their relationship is both queer and messy. Lestat sees Claudia as a means of getting Louis to stay, despite his vampiric misgivings, as well as to create and complete a facsimile of a nuclear family, something he could otherwise not have by virtue of his undeadness and his disconnect from linear time and procreation. (So, again, read: queerness.) Both Lestat and Louis badly crave love and affection, though they have very different ways of expressing this, and very different attitudes towards the people that they love. Louis is pretty horrified by Lestat’s plan, but Lestat goes ahead and turns Claudia anyway, declaring her their daughter, and they her fathers.

            Louis describes the transformed Claudia thus: “She was the most beautiful child I’d ever seen, and now she glowed with the cold fire of a vampire. Her eyes were a woman’s eyes, I could see it already. She would become white and spare like us but not lose her shape.” So immediately, Claudia is unmoored from time, split but recombined into two incompatible categories coexisting together: child and monster. This duality will only grow as time passes. Claudia is instantly insatiable for blood, nearly drinking too much from Lestat in the process of being made into a vampire. Her first words upon reviving are, “I want some more.” It seems that as great as her outward childlikeness is, so is her inner monstrosity.

            But she is still five (at least for now), so she takes to Louis and Lestat and they do, in fact, form a family together. Louis reminisces that they play with Claudia like a “magnificent doll.” Which works, for a while. But, unlike Eli, Claudia does not mentally and emotionally stay at the age at which she was turned. Louis watches with unease as Claudia learns literature and music while still appearing to be “the chubby, round-fingered child.” Louis declares, “Claudia was mystery. It was not possible to know what she knew or did not know.”

            This quote is particularly interesting to me. I’m not sure I completely trust Louis on this point. He claims that knowing Claudia is impossible, but I think it’s more that he’s afraid to know her. He’s afraid to know what she knows. The anxiety about the knowing child, the not ignorant child, is a logical result of the construction of childhood innocence. The suspicion that the child knows more than she says, that the innocence may already be lost, is a real-life source of suspense and dread for many. It can easily turn into both denial and paranoia, fueling things like the book ban craze in the U.S. If we take away all means of receiving knowledge, then perhaps the child won’t become that eerie knowing child. But Louis can’t stop Claudia from experiencing year after violent year and accumulating knowledge despite her eternal child shape. His relationship with her is muddled, as he describes the two of them as “Father and Daughter. Lover and Lover.” Claudia can’t stay in one category, or perhaps more accurately, she can’t belong to any category. She is disqualified from childhood by her lack of ignorance and innocence, but also disqualified from adulthood by her inability to ever physically grow up. Is it any wonder that when she feeds, she kills whole families one by one? A non-innocent child with no future is the greatest threat to the institution of the family – and in Claudia’s case, she makes that literal.

            Claudia eventually makes her own feelings about her situation known, and those feelings are bad. She masterminds the plot to kill Lestat (spoilers: unsuccessfully) and escape his possessive grip so she can join the greater vampire community. Unfortunately, she can’t fit into that world, either. She eventually rages at Louis that he and Lestat were “Monsters! To give me immortality in this hopeless guise, this helpless form!” She demands that Louis turn a dollmaker named Madeleine into a vampire to give to Claudia as a companion, so that she can have someone of her own, instead of always being a hanger-on to Louis and his relationships (an experience shared by plenty of real children at the mercy of their parents’ choices). Claudia can’t turn Madeleine herself, because her body is too small to provide the vampiric blood necessary to complete the transformation. Claudia has the power to destroy, but not to create. That reproductive futurity, even in an undead, twisted, monstrous form, is denied to her by her eternal childhood.

            Madeleine is a grieving mother who desperately desires “a child who cannot die.” That is why she makes her dolls, and that is how she sees Claudia, so we see that association with an inanimate object, a totem of carefree and playful childhood, come back again. Indeed, Louis describes Madeleine’s relationship to Claudia by calling Claudia “this unnatural childthing she believed she loved.” I love that construction of the compound word “childthing” here: it’s really chilling and tragic. A child without the future potential of what would be seen as full personhood gets demoted all the way down from human to “thing.” Madeleine in her grief can only see the wonder of an undying childhood, but Louis knows better.

            It makes sense at this point to mention that Anne Rice herself lost a five-year-old daughter, Michele, to leukemia, before she wrote this book. Apparently, it needed to be pointed out to Rice that she was probably working through some stuff with Claudia, but once that connection was made, she did concede that clearly a lot of grief work through art was taking place here. To me, that makes the character of Madeleine so poignant, because it’s not only Louis who knows better than to want what Madeleine wants, but also the author herself, even if she deeply and horribly understands Madeleine’s need. A child who cannot grow up, in Rice’s work, is always a tragedy – even if that child is still physically present. I think this serves as a good reminder, in the midst of our big discussion of the social constructs and symbolism and metaphors of childhood and monstrosity, that behind all of the cultural meanings that we layer over children are real people who, like all people, want and deserve more life.

            With that in mind, it makes sense that Claudia’s feelings for Madeleine are complicated. First off, it’s no accident that Claudia chooses a woman for her companion. Auerbach explains that within Claudia’s family unit with her two fathers, “vampirism is no release from patriarchy, but a perpetuation of it until the end of time” (154). As a girl child, Claudia is in a doubly subordinate social position, forever. Madeleine wants to be a mother again, but Claudia sees Madeleine, a grown woman, as an object of envy and desire. She says to Louis, “Six more mortal years, seven, eight … I might have had that shape!” If she cannot ever embody that womanhood, at least she can possess it eternally as her companion. So even if there is not necessarily a sexual or romantic element to the relationship with Madeleine here, there is still something queer in the desire to identify with a gendered body that Claudia can’t have, and to seek proximity to this identity in lieu of inhabiting it herself. The body can be next to me if it can’t be mine: I can look sideways, but not grow up. I can make what is foreclosed to me some extension of myself.

            But even this facsimile of a future is denied Claudia. Louis does turn Madeleine for her, but shortly thereafter, both Claudia and Madeleine are captured, tried, and sentenced to death for their transgressions against the vampiric laws (not least of all, Claudia’s part in attempting to kill Lestat, her patriarch). They are executed by sunlight, and Rice describes how Madeleine’s auburn hair mingles with Claudia’s golden ringlets in the aftermath. The mixing of their hair and ashes is the closest this “ancient one,” despite all her experience and violence, ever gets to leaving childhood and embodying womanhood.

            Auerbach writes that vampires “embody not fear of death, but fear of life: their power and their curse is their undying vitality” (5). We may say that we want immortality, but how do we even envision life without the milestones of time? In “The Vampire, the Queer, and the Girl: Reflections on the Politics and Ethics of Immortality’s Gendering,” Kimberly J. Lau begins with the following declarations: “Life is straight (take 1): Linear, developmental, teleological. Life is straight (take 2): Heterosexual, reproductive, normative” (3). Lau explains that “in the dominant cultural imagination,” these twin straightnesses are what make “a life worthy, valuable, purposeful” (3). She references the term “chromonormativity,” as discussed by scholar Elizabeth Freeman, as a way of framing this idea that milestones are what give meaning to life. Without them, we have a hard time seeing a life as truly being lived, as opposed to just … existed through. This relates back to Auerbach’s assertion that Anne Rice’s vampires “scarcely participate in history” (153). They may exist through the centuries, but they stand outside of the great goings-on, watching from afar. But it is precisely this relationship with history that the new adaptation of Interview with the Vampire is so interested in.

            So, AMC’s Interview moves the whole timeline up, bringing the vampiric transformations of both Louis and Claudia out of the eighteenth century and into the early twentieth century. It also quite notably racebends Louis and Claudia, and they are now portrayed as Black people in New Orleans. This racialization makes it a lot less possible for either of them to not participate in history. They no longer have that privilege. History’s going to participate in their lives, whether they like it or not. That’s why, instead of needing to be rescued from the plague, this Claudia is rescued from fire. Louis retaliates against racist white business owners who have been sabotaging him at every turn. At first, it seems like this was their mistake; after all, Louis is a vampire. He is more powerful than any of them individually. He kills one and strings up his disemboweled body with a “whites only” sign around his neck. But you could be the most powerful individual monster in the world and still be smaller than the forces of systemic white supremacy. Black homes and businesses are set alight in response to Louis’s actions, and Louis, horrified, stumbles through the flames until he hears a girl crying out for help. This, of course, is Claudia.

            The viewer is then presented with the second big alteration for this adaptation: Claudia is considerably older. Her stated age in the show is 14, and, in the grand tradition of teenagers on TV, she is played by an actress in her 20s – two of them, in fact. She was recast after the first season. Both actresses, Bailey Bass and Delainey Hughes, turn in stellar performances, though I had a slightly harder time buying Hughes in season 2 as actually 14, just visually speaking. The recast was not initially planned, but there are fun ways of interpreting it; I can’t remember where I read this, because it was a while ago, but someone on the internet said that they see season 1 Claudia as how Daniel Molloy – the interviewer – pictures her, until he sees a photograph of how she actually looked, which is her appearance in season 2. With all of the show’s themes of unreliable memory and narration, I think that’s just neat. Anyway, there’s quite a difference between the ages of five and 14. I think that the show overshoots her childishness a little bit in her first few scenes – but we could also interpret that as Louis’s faulty memories – but it quickly evens out as both she and her fathers come to grips with what it means to be an eternal adolescent. And not just that, but an eternal Black female adolescent.

            Claudia’s first hunt in the show leads her to lure in a cop as she stands in her cute, girlish clothes, humming sweetly. The cop, however, is not charmed in the way that book Claudia’s victims so often are. Irritated, he demands, “Where are your parents at this hour?” Black children aren’t automatically granted the assumption of innocence, especially on the cusp of adolescence. Claudia is treated by this authority figure as a nuisance at best, not a little angel. Then, when she pounces, the cop gasps, “You’re not a girl, you’re a devil!” After he drops to the ground, Claudia, smiling with his blood on her mouth, repeats this line back to him, seeming to savor the power of her new monstrosity.

            Louis, on the other hand, sees Claudia as his escape from all of those cares about human categories. He wants to be outside of history again. He tells Claudia, “I used to get a little caught up in human affairs.” “Then what?” she asks. “Then you,” he answers. Claudia, in need of care and guidance and protection possibly forever, is Louis’s long-awaited means of pausing time. What does it matter how the world sees him when he’s preoccupied with his daughter/sister/niece? If she can’t change, then he doesn’t have to, either. Well, we already know how that works out for him.

            At fourteen, Claudia already has sexual and romantic desires, and the first object of these desires is a carriage driver named Charlie. She dresses up in what she believes are sexy womanly clothes, but by this point, she’s already out of time, and she is mocked by white girls. The fangs start to come out, but that causes Charlie’s horse to rear and Claudia to hide. The moment of danger passes, and Claudia gets a ride home from the sweet boy. She records her thoughts in her diary, with her pubescent and her vampiric desires getting all mixed up: “He’s got veins like rivers” and “I want to know what his tongue tastes like” are written side by side. But her first kiss with Charlie turns predictably to a feeding frenzy, and before she knows it, she drains him dry. The implication is clear: the straight line of normative relationship progression is not in store for Claudia.

            Then again, it was never in store for her fathers, either. All of Anne Rice’s vampires are queer as hell, and that is showcased front and center in the TV adaptation. But by the time Claudia is introduced into the mix, as in the book, the strains of an eternal union are beginning to show for Louis and Lestat. Molloy calls Claudia “a Band-Aid for a shitty marriage” and in a devastatingly tired line delivery, Louis responds, “I was going to say … something else. But yes.” These vampires may want to avoid history, but queering and mixing races within the institution of the family is not something history is willing to pass unnoticed. None of them can escape the gaze of society, and none of them can excise societal expectations from what they want from each other. Louis and Lestat each chafe under the roles of husband and father as much as Claudia is increasingly suffocated by her role of daughter, with each of them still carrying the emotional baggage of the ways they are viewed as monstrous not only because of their fangs, but because of their gender, race, and/or sexuality.

            In the second season, post-attempted-Lestat-assassination, Claudia and Louis are once again on the run from history, this time skirting around the wreckage of Europe in and after World War II as they try to find more vampires. If Claudia can’t have a future, she at least wants a past. But history, once again, stands in the way, with the war serving as a great interruption of life and time, demonstrating the inability of monsters to go forward or back. Claudia thinks that she has a reprieve from this temporal isolation when she and Louis meet the Paris coven, who run the Theatre de Vampire, a grand guignol theater that caters to unsuspecting mortals looking for a cheap thrill. But Armand, the coven’s master, freaking hates Claudia, for a few reasons but at least in large part because he wants to get with Louis, and so he falls into a sort of wicked stepparent role against this kid who’s in his way. Claudia is forced to perform in an exaggerated little girl costume, singing a song called, “I Don’t Like Windows When They’re Closed” before plummeting to her onstage death to gales of audience laughter. Just to make the metaphor for Claudia’s imprisonment in her outgrown child identity perfectly literal, Armand also punishes Claudia by making her wear the costume day in and day out. This is not just an enforcement of gender and age, but of race, as well, as the song and dance are inescapably minstrel-like. But amid all these torments of marginalized childhood, Claudia meets Madeleine.

            Here, Madeleine is a dressmaker instead of a dollmaker. So instead of representing Claudia’s eternal childhood, she represents a way forward into the adulthood that Claudia has always been denied by making her dresses that allow her to appear more mature. Madeleine describes Claudia’s body as “about to bloom,” but never actually doing so. But this time, history has actually provided a neat alibi for Claudia, and she claims that her growth was simply stunted by malnutrition during the war. Madeleine is just as much of a pariah as Claudia, as her tryst with a young Nazi soldier during the German occupation has forever branded her a collaborator. The two become more and more attracted to the other due to their respective willingness to see past the social roles otherwise they cannot escape. Claudia’s fangs do come out when menstrual blood trickles down Madeleine’s leg, but she’s older now than she was with Charlie, even if she doesn’t look it. She can control herself and only kill who she wants to, and she definitely wants to kill a group of attackers who assault Madeleine and trash her shop. Madeleine catches her in the act of draining one of the attackers, and despite her initial shock, she quickly accepts what Claudia is. She’s clearly pretty excited by the prospect, in fact, as she presses Claudia to describe what drinking blood is like. She even offers her own wrist, but Claudia refuses. She doesn’t trust herself that much. She still needs Louis to help her turn Madeleine, and only then does she drink from her beloved, when she knows that, unlike Charlie, Madeleine can come back.

            In the show, it is kind of easy to gloss over the discomfort of an adult like Madeleine choosing eternal romantic companionship with somebody with the body of a fourteen-year-old, because this Claudia doesn’t actually, really have the body of a fourteen-year-old; she’s played by 20-somethings. And then in terms of Claudia’s mental age, she’s clearly much different from who she was when she was turned – like her book counterpart, she is sort of the opposite of Eli in this regard – although the show does note that the hormonal highs and lows of adolescence are eternal for her, even if she intellectualizes her feelings differently than she used to. But by all appearances, Claudia seems to actually grow up in the show – and grow up queer, at that. She’s got it beat; she’s done the impossible. She’s found a forward, a future, that had been denied to her based on race, gender, sexuality, and age.

            But we know how the story ends. For all of the deviations from the book, Claudia’s death is not one of them. Just like Louis thought he could ignore history and time and social categories once he had his daughter, Claudia believed that she could finally live outside of all of that once she has her partner. For both of them, it all comes crashing down. The window that had stayed open for too long on Claudia’s queerest of childhoods finally closes.

CONCLUSION

            Typically, I end my videos with some real life examples of how some of these ideas about monstrous childhood affect real kids. But I’ve already been through a lot of the challenges that queer kids face in my two shapeshifters videos – remember to check those out if you haven’t seen them already – and so I think I’ll just keep us in kind of the vibes for this one. Vampire children are undeniably tragic figures. Eli and Claudia show us that we – collective we here – don’t just find the prospect of a non-innocent childhood scary, but we also find it incredibly sad. If we accept that children can’t take care of themselves, can’t go where they want, can’t do what they want, can’t learn, experience, connect with others in ways that society values – i.e., sexually and romantically – then “innocence” is kind of the only good thing that we give childhood in our social constructions. We imagine all of those restrictions protect childhood, keep it safe and happy and carefree, but without innocence, the conditions that we’ve created for childhood can kind of suck. No pun intended. Nostalgia dictates that adults long for the imagined ignorant bliss of childhood, but if we were to return without the ignorance, we know we wouldn’t get the bliss. Characters like Eli and Claudia prove that.

            So maybe some of those conditions of childhood need changing? Maybe you don’t have to be a vampire to chafe against the constraints of what Claudia calls the “helpless form” of the child? Oskar’s a human kid who’s not having a good time. He has his small spaces in which he is allowed to exist: the home and the school. In neither of them are his needs actually met, but as a child, he doesn’t have access to much else. Only the jungle gym – a child space that excludes ineffectual adults – is his and Eli’s haven. Claudia and Eli, meanwhile, are at constant risk of adult destruction because they are eternally at the mercy of those who society deems automatically more capable, more authoritative, and more free to exist unfettered in society. I’m not saying like turn all the kids loose here – obviously, adults do need to serve as caretakers to kids – but I think these fictional child vampires show us just how much the way we’ve organized the spaces and rights – or lack thereof – of childhood allow adults to not listen to kids and not meet their needs. If the only thing kids can do is wait to get to the next life milestone so they can be taken a little bit more seriously, then that means they’re forced to live only for the future, not for their actual present moment. And if they can’t or don’t want to meet those milestones, then will they ever be heard, or will they just be discarded as failures of futurity?

            Queer kids aren’t the only ones with interrupted access to straight time and its milestones. Sick or disabled kids, particularly with terminal illnesses, embody a childhood with an altered – or severed – relationship to the future. Time operates differently for racialized kids, as well, as we saw with Claudia; regardless of vampirism, she was kicked out of innocent childhood early, but still denied adulthood. Kids who’ve experienced abuse or violence or other traumas are preemptively shunted off the normative life path in the minds of many, as well, as the damage to their innocence is assumed to also damage anything that can come after. Because this normative life path is treated as necessary for a life worth living, is it any wonder that we wind up with vampire stories for the kids who exist outside of it? If they’re not really living, they might as well be undead. Neither this, nor that. Not really child, because they lack the required attributes – innocence and futurity – but not adult. Not in the ground, but not moving forward.

            It’s heavy stuff, and these are heavy stories. But, as always, I see every child monster as a call to action. What if we adults weren’t like the bumbling parents, dangerous predators, and violent enforcers that the child vampire must contend with? What if we expanded our definitions of what childhood could mean? Eternal childhood for an individual is impossible, but children replenish. Childhood as a category will always be with us. So maybe we should heed these stories’ warnings and allow that category to change.

            What do you think about the child vampire? Do you have any good recommendations for me? I would love to hear them in the comments. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a like, and please go ahead and subscribe so you don’t miss out on future conversations about monstrous kids. I have a Patreon, which is linked in the description; paid patrons get the chance to vote on media to be included in future videos as well as reaction videos to new-to-me monster stories. In two weeks, I will be back here with a discussion of monsters and children at war. I know, not very cheery, but I’m sure I can entice my fellow millennials at least with the following: Animorphs. Also hopefully, by that point, I will no longer be getting over a cold. Thanks for putting up with my voice for the last hour. And until then, take care, and I will see you soon for more monstrous food for thought.

Media discussed:

• Let the Right One In, dir. Tomas Alfredson (2008)
• Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice (1976)
• Interview with the Vampire, dir. Neil Jordan (1995)
• Interview with the Vampire, showrunner Rolin Jones (2022-present)

References:

• Auerbach, N. (1995). Our Vampires, Ourselves. University of Chicago Press.
• Calhoun, J. (2009). Childhood’s End: “Let the Right One In” and Other Deaths of Innocence. Cineaste, 35(1), 27-31.
• Cohen, J.J. (1996). Monster Culture: Seven Theses. In J.J. Cohen (Ed.), Monster Theory: Reading Culture (pp. 3-25). University of Minnesota Press.
• James, A., & James, A. (2012). Key Concepts in Childhood Studies. SAGE.
• Kristeva, J. (1982). Approaching Abjection. In Powers of Horror: An Essay of Abjection (Trans. L.S. Roudiez). Columbia University Press.
• Lau, K.J. (2018). The Vampire, the Queer, and the Girl: Reflections on the Politics and Ethics of Immortality’s Gendering. Signs, 44(1), 3-24.
• Nevárez, L. (2015). What to Expect When You Are Expecting (a Vampire): Reading the Vampire Child. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 26(1), 92-112.