QUEEN OF THE DAMNED

Stylish vampire sequel Queen Of The Damned may have been panned by critics, but it produced an all-time classic metal soundtrack that, 20 years on, still has teeth

WORDS: ELEANOR GOODMAN

PICTORIAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO. JONATHAN DAVIS QUOTES: PAUL BRANNIGAN

One Halloween, Australian director Michael Rymer found himself surrounded by thousands of vampires. He’d signed on to direct a movie based on the second and third books of Annie Rice’s gothic fiction series, The Vampire Chronicles, and had travelled to her hometown to meet her.

“Warner Bros flew me to New Orleans and put me in a hotel, and then Anne sent an old hearse she’d converted into a clear glass limo, and took me to the monastery she’d bought,” he recalls. “It was decorated with rooms of mannequins and dolls. I stayed there, and the next day I was picked up and taken to a big, old house in the Garden District in New Orleans – maybe three, four storeys tall, with a giant, stuffed wolf looking down. And the limo door opens, and there’s this guy with slicked-back hair and a ponytail and a gun holster, and he says, in the thickest Louisiana drawl, ‘Welcome to New Orleans.’”

It was October 31, the day of Anne’s annual vampire bash. Michael ascended the stairs of the house, knocked on a door, and was greeted by a 17-year-old boy wearing a frilly shirt and angel wings. Anne, not in costume, entered the room.

“She was basically a miniature version of Diane Keaton. She had little round glasses, a hat, a long waistcoat and a long shirt – sort of San Francisco hippy chic,” remembers Michael. “And then we went to the ball, and there were about 6,000 vampires dressed in all sorts of crazy outfits. Anne came onstage and introduced me, and talked about the film. That was a pretty trippy weekend to get things rolling.”

“I HAD AALIYAH CRAWLING AROUND ON THE GROUND LIKE A CAT”

MICHAEL RYMER, DIRECTOR

The film was Queen Of The Damned, an adaptation of the 1988 novel of the same name and previous instalment The Vampire Lestat (1985). It would follow Neil Jordan’s sumptuous version of the first book, Interview With The Vampire, which was the 10th-highest grossing movie of 1994 in the US and landed two Oscar nominations.

The premise for Queen Of The Damned was simple: the vampire Lestat awakens and reinvents himself as a rockstar. His music wakes Akasha, the queen of the vampires, who wants to make Lestat her king. Despite the OTT gothic sets and costumes, on release in 2002 the film was largely derided by critics – but nearly everyone recognised the brilliance of its soundtrack.