Hello, and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! I am Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and this is a little addendum video to my child vampires video. This is a new feature on here, a little something that I can do in between the larger video essays, where if something comes up that is relevant to a previous video that I made, I’ll put out a shorter, more casual addition. And thank you so much to redblack9618 for the idea!

            Side note: I am still clearly in my living room. My office is still not set up, and I hope that you can’t hear the band next door that’s practicing. I doubt that will be picked up by these, but if you can, sorry about that. I don’t have the other space yet.

So here we go. In my full child vampires video, I talked a lot about Claudia from Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles, both the book Interview with the Vampire and its adaptations, including the current AMC series. In the book, Claudia is a five-year-old white girl who is turned into a vampire, and in the 90s movie, that age is bumped up a bit so she could be played by the then-eleven-year-old Kirsten Dunst. But the AMC series makes a lot of changes to the source material, and so here, Claudia is a 14-year-old Black girl when she is turned. In the first season, she’s played by Bailey Bass, and in the second and third seasons, she’s played by Delainey Hayles.

            So in the original video, I talked about the first two seasons of the show, which aired under the name Interview with the Vampire, because those are what existed at the time. The third season, titled The Vampire Lestat after the second book in the series, just recently aired this year. And from here on out, there’s going to be spoilers for all of it, so if you’ve been meaning to get around to this series and don’t want to know what happens, then I will catch you in the next one!

            Okay, so, as I discussed in my original vampires video, Claudia is executed by sunlight at the end of the second season. This follows her fate from the book series. She, along with Louis, had attempted to kill their maker, Lestat, which is very vampire illegal. Claudia’s trial is a gruesome display in front of a human audience that thinks this is just macabre entertainment. Before this, Claudia had been forced to perform for these audiences night after night in a rather minstrel-like song-and-dance routine that cast her as a doll-like little girl who longs for freedom so much that she jumps out the window to her death. But Claudia had just about found her real freedom with her new lover and companion, Madeleine. For the first time, she was someone’s equal and someone’s first choice. With Louis and Lestat, she had been the child that fails to patch up a dysfunctional relationship. She herself is a crime according to the covens, because children are not meant to be turned into vampires. Her existence has always borne heavy symbolic meaning for the people around her at the expense of anyone seeing her for herself. With Madeleine, that was all set to change – and then they burn together.

            In my original video essay on child vampires, I talked about how this type of monster reveals a lot of the horror of childhood itself, once the illusion of innocence is stripped away. The construct of childhood innocence is immensely powerful in modern society. It is the idea that adults appeal to when they talk about “protecting childhood.” We want to keep children in that state of innocence – which includes ignorance, lack of guilt, and presence of moral purity – for as long as possible, because we believe that it is something good and joyful and separate from the cares and pressures of the adult world. However, many of the ways in which that protection is enforced is through withholding knowledge and social power from young people. Children don’t have legal, financial, or geographic rights. Child vampires demonstrate how horrifying it would be to be trapped in that socially powerless state forever – which, I think, should really make us think about why we inflict that state on children in the first place.

            By race-bending Claudia, the AMC series adds another layer of horror onto the life of the child vampire, because a pubescent Black girl is not actually seen as innocent in the first place, even before she becomes a vampire. The constricted material realities of childhood are only imagined as secure and comfortable because of our belief in the blissful state of innocence; its extension past the loss of that innocence (by doing something like, say, draining someone’s blood) is what makes it horrific. But Claudia was already experiencing all of the restrictions of childhood with none of the imagined benefits, because childhood innocence is ultimately inextricable from white supremacy. You can check out both the original vampires video and my childhood innocence and race video for more research on that topic. I am holding myself back from adding scholarly sources to this one, because then it’s going to turn into a whole essay in and of itself, and that will defeat the purpose of it being a chill, easy in-between-essays work! So source on this one is going to have to be our own eyes and ears in simply observing how children are treated wildly differently based on race all around us, all the time.

            So if you can imagine getting stuck in a body that makes people see you as not a full person yet, not able to be off on your own and making your own life decisions, and also not even sweet and innocent but a troublesome source of suspicion and delinquency at best – and keep in mind that AMC Claudia’s life spans the first half of the twentieth century with all its attendant racist violence – then you will perhaps understand why this version of Claudia is very, very angry. And then she gets publicly murdered.

            So that brings us to her appearance in season three, aka The Vampire Lestat. It is worth noting here that this season didn’t have any regular Black writers, unlike the first two, which is troubling. As a result, the way race impacts the characters’ lives was considerably less of a focused theme than it had been previously. One could chalk this up to the shift of the series’ focalizer from Louis (also Black in this adaptation) to the white Lestat, but white is still a race, and Lestat’s relationship with whiteness could have been very interesting to explore, but alas. Anyway, I wanted to put that out upfront to just note that we don’t know what might be different in how Claudia might have been written if there were still Black writers in the room, but I think we should keep that question in our minds.

            Delainey Hayles’ main role in this season is Regina, a twenty-something Claudia doppelganger with whom Louis forms a deeply unhealthy attachment, as he is wont to do. But we do see her as Claudia’s ghost once, and also as an imagined Claudia from Lestat’s perspective once, and there is a sharp contrast between the two. Starting with the latter, I was really struck by how much younger the makeup team can make Hayles look, contrasted with her more true-to-her-own life appearance as Regina. After seeing the “adult” version, I was really struck by how sad it was to see the girl who never was allowed to get that far when Lestat imagines her at his side as he composes and sings the song “Stained Glass Eyes.” This song absolutely rules: it is a wrenching power ballad about Lestat’s memories of Claudia, especially the memory of how she stared at him while she died. He does allow himself to imagine her anger in this song, as the chorus puts the following words in her mouth: “Don’t break that stare/I’m burning in your mirror tonight/No, don’t you dare/Call it yearning/It’s the fear that I’m right/Don’t you try to forget/All the things you regret/Like the ashes you spread/Til you had nothing left/In those stained glass eyes.” But the version of Claudia that Lestat pictures as he’s writing the song is more sad than angry, and she sits with him at the piano as they play together, as she used to when she was newly turned and still actually a child.

            Turns out, that’s not really how Claudia feels. In a decision that they both know is terrible, Louis and Lestat visit a witch to perform a séance to speak to Claudia. When Claudia turns up, she is not just angry: she is enraged. She unloads most of her ire onto Louis, though the actors have suggested that, since this is Lestat’s point of view season, we perhaps should wonder if there was more vitriol for Lestat that he’s conveniently edited out of his memory. But she fully lays into Louis for the way he’s warped her memory to fossilize his guilt. She considers the dress that they used to summon her – the dress Madeleine made for her, and that Louis hung on the wall. He says that was “Meant to honor you,” and Claudia says, “Oh, yeah, that’s what I want to be, car fuel for your self-pity.” This made me think about learning about pity porn when studying childhood and disability, especially in mediated images of children with terminal illness, as well as discussions of literary innocent children – we can think of Little Eva from Uncle Tom’s Cabin – who are so pure that they literally can’t live to adulthood, so they die beautifully as children. In both of these cases, we see a vampire-like crystallization of the image of beautiful childhood that means so much to adults that it blots out all individuality and interiority of the child themselves. So it makes sense that Claudia would be really pissed off that that’s how Louis is treating her memory, when that was what she tried so hard to break free of for her entire un-life.

            Another thing that infuriates her? Louis’s insistence that she should “thank him” for hunting down and killing the vampire Bruce, who had raped her on her first forays away from her vampiric family home. Louis did this earlier in the season, and before he burned Bruce, he made him listen to Claudia’s diary entries about the assaults. Claudia is not impressed, shall we say, by Louis’s decision to “read my little girl diary pages seven decades late.” She asks, “You think I want not one, but two men I hate using me as an excuse for their bullshit, all cry-face, reading my diary like it fucking happened to you?” Gotta say, she makes some good points there! And that’s another thing that real children have to go through all the time: their pain, their victimization, being used to make adults feel a certain way – often, to feel righteous for either avenging them or using their stories to protect – “protect” – other kids or, as I so often talk about, using the narrative of childhood vulnerability as a political cudgel to push different agendas, all of which, again, makes a symbol out of children’s suffering that disconnects it from the real thing. It matters because of how it affects how adults feel, not how the actual child feels about their own experiences. “Dress on the wall, song on the radio,” Claudia says to Louis and Lestat, respectively. Those are the symbols she’s been reduced to, she who was never allowed to be much more than a symbol when she lived, and she hates them for it.  

            Her fate is even more unkind than that, because she reveals that her afterlife has been an isolated nothing, a void – a stasis. Unchanging, like her body. More of the same, and the same, and the same, for this everlasting child who only ever wanted to grow. And she doesn’t have Madeleine with her, who was “The one good thing in my bleak, Black life.” Incidentally, the subtitles capitalize “Black” there – whether that’s in the script or not, I don’t know, but the implication, at least from the subtitler, is that Claudia means not just black as in dark but as in the way she was racialized and all the ways that affected her. She screams for Madeleine until she falls away from this realm again, leaving only that dress behind. A symbol again, cut off from the one person for whom she was more.

            In my last video, I said that horror and tragedy are often the same thing, and I think few characters encapsulate that as well as Claudia. I think that her appearance in this season was a powerful call to treat children as full, whole, complete, individual, specific human beings, to not reduce them to their age and the way their age intersects with their other social positionalities. It’s not fair. It’s a terrifying and devastating fate to be someone else’s symbol. It’s absolutely monstrous.

            So now I’ve made myself sad again, but I hope that you enjoyed this quick little addendum. If you did, please like and share the video, and remember to subscribe so you never miss a monstrous conversation. If you want even more discussions, consider signing up for my Patreon, where I post additional reaction videos and hold polls for future video topics. You can also consider joining my Monster Book Clubs. The next adult Monster Book Club meeting will be the last Wednesday of this month. Teen Monster Book Club will start up as soon as we have enough participants. Either way, you can sign up on themonsterandthechild.com. I’ll be back next week with a full video essay about monster child collectives, including two winners of the Patreon polls, Village of the Damned and Who Can Kill a Child? Until then, take care, and I will see you soon for more monstrous food for thought.