Recap / Interview with the Vampire (2022) S1E4 "…The Ruthless Pursuit of Blood with All a Child's Demanding"

"Dear new diary, you've joined a happy home, even if we're an odd one."

The full episode title is "…The Ruthless Pursuit of Blood with All a Child's Demanding", and the URL had to be truncated because it exceeded the 64-character limit for page titles.

---

Aired October 23, 2022

Claudia's transformation into a vampire teen completely changes Louis and Lestat's lives. As Claudia asks more questions, Louis and Lestat are forced to confront questions about making a teen vampire. Claudia learns dark realities of her new life.

---

Tropes:

• Accidental Murder: The last thing Claudia wants to do is harm her First Love Charlie, but because she's an undisciplined blood drinker (more so when she's in a Hemo Erotic state), she goes overboard while feeding on Charlie, so he dies from exsanguination.
• Age Insecurity: Lestat is vain, so he doesn't like it when others bring up his age. He's offended when Louis points out that he's unable to relate to a teenager's mindset because he's too old (Louis' indirect phrasing while avoiding the dreaded o-word is "Tu as oublié ta jeunesse!" ^note the precise translation from French is "You've forgotten your youth!", which is slightly different than the "You've forgotten what it's like to be young!" provided by the on-screen caption). Lestat also does the vampire equivalent of claiming that he's 39 years old when he's actually 40.
  Claudia: How old are you again, Uncle Les?
  Louis: 160—
  Lestat: 159.
• Auto Erotica: Lestat and Claudia ambush two young couples (although most of Lestat's onslaught occurs off-screen) having sex in their cars at lover's lane.
• Babies Make Everything Better:
  • Louis and Lestat bring Claudia into their household right when Louis is on the brink of walking out on their relationship. In the short-term, it does work — they're quite happy as a little family for a time. Claudia writes in her diary that she helps to smooth out any major conflicts between her Daddy Lou and her Uncle Les ("And when they can't [sort out their problems on their own], I can always get in between and make it right"). In the long-term, though, it doesn't work out so well. Lampshaded by Louis and Daniel:
    Louis: Claudia was—
    Daniel: A band-aid for a shitty marriage?
    Louis: I was going to say... something else. But yes, that's almost certainly what she felt like.
  • The trope is played much straighter with Louis individually. Fatherhood brings a great deal of fulfillment and meaning to Louis' life.
    Louis: Claudia was... everything. I loved her unconditionally. All the noise, the chaos, the crisis of my former existence, silenced. The simple joy of her hand in mine.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • Louis pleads with Lestat to turn a dying Claudia into a vampire because "She's only a kid," and Lestat utters, "C'est impossible. Elle est trop jeune." ("It's impossible. She is too young.")
  • Rashid ends his Muslim prayer with "Asr namozi," which is Uzbek for "Afternoon prayer."
  • Lestat curses "Putain de merde" ("Fucking hell") while teaching a reckless Claudia how to drive.
• Boy Meets Ghoul: The cute vampire Claudia becomes enamoured with a young mortal man named Charlie. He gives her a bouquet of chrysanthemums, they eat ice cream sundaes on their first (and only) date, and then they canoodle in his carriage. Their romance is short-lived because Claudia has a voracious appetite and never learned moderation, so she consumes all of Charlie's blood until he dies.
• Bug Catching: The young fledgling Claudia catches a firefly in a jar during a rowboat ride with Louis and seals the lid. She admires the glowing insect for a few minutes before letting it go.
• Call a Human a "Meatbag": As a young fledgling vampire, Claudia refers to human blood as "kill juice" with her Uncle Les' encouragement, and she notes that "You suck 'em like frog legs."
• Cheerful Child: This is what Claudia was during her formative years as a fledgling vampire: laughing, dancing happily, skipping in the house.
• Compartment Shot:
  • The camera is inside the incinerator when Claudia watches the corpses of her first two victims (a policeman and a trumpet player) that she exsanguinated earlier being reduced to ashes.
  • The same angle is employed when Lestat forces Claudia to stay put and observe Charlie's body being charred by the flames.
• Crazy Jealous Guy: Although Lestat initially refuses Louis' request to transform Claudia into a vampire because "Elle est trop jeune" ("She is too young"), he does the wrong thing anyway (not to mention that she didn't consent to it) because he realizes that creating a daughter is the only way to ensure that Louis — who was about to abandon Lestat — will stay with him.
• Cue the Sun: The episode opens with the sun rising above the Dubai desert which fills up the screen. This is as safe as it gets for humans from the threat of vampires because the latter are Weakened by the Light. However, the daytime doesn't necessarily mean that Daniel is free of vampiric danger due to the sunlight-blocking shielded windows of Louis' penthouse apartment, which allows Louis to be active during the day if he so chooses. On this particular morning, though, Louis has decided to rest.
• Death Glare: Lestat gives the undertaker a sinister "I'm going to kill you" look before exsanguinating him to death.
• Diaries Are Girly: Claudia is a teenage girl who diligently records her thoughts and feelings about the minutiae of her daily life in her diaries, which all have pretty covers. She narrates her entries with a singsong voice and is very expressive.
• Disrupting the Theater: Lestat, Claudia and Louis are laughing their heads off while watching Nosferatu (which is not a comedy), irritating the other people in the theater.
• Door Slam of Rage: We hear (but not see) a door slammed in anger twice; the first is when Louis is disgusted at Lestat for bringing their vampire daughter Claudia to a Make-Out Point to hunt humans who are having sex, and the second is when Louis and Lestat argue over the latter's stern Tough Love stance on Claudia after her Accidental Murder of her boyfriend Charlie.
• Due to the Dead: Grace and Levi host Florence's wake at the de Pointe du Lac mansion. There's a funeral scheduled the next day, but the audience never sees it.
• Emergency Transformation: Near the beginning of the episode, Claudia is dying due to a combination of severe burns and smoke inhalation, so Louis begs Lestat to turn her into a vampire. Lestat doesn't want to at first because "Elle est trop jeune" ("She is too young"), but he changes his mind after it dawns on him that a daughter will bind Louis to him again when his boyfriend was ready to walk out on their relationship.
• Everything's Sparkly with Jewelry: Because Claudia is the daughter of a moneyed vampire couple, she wears an ornate floral-patterned gold headband studded with pearls for her 17th birthday party, and Lestat's gift to her is an emerald necklace that once belonged to a marquis. She's wowed by it, but the chain is too long for her, so Louis assures her that they'll find one in her size.
• Evil-Detecting Dog: Charlie's horse panics when it's near Claudia, so it can instinctively sense that she's a predator.
• Eye Cam: Near the beginning of the episode, the corners of the screen are obscured to illustrate that a dying Claudia can barely keep her eyes open while looking at what she assumes to be a Black angel (Louis) and a White angel (Lestat).
• Eye Colour Change: As part of Claudia's transformation into a vampire, her brown eyes become reddish-orange.
• Feeling Your Heartbeat: Lestat briefly rests his hand on Louis' chest where the latter's heart is during Claudia's birthday party. It's a simple gesture that helps Lestat feel close to his boyfriend.
• Flirtatious Smack on the Ass: There's a blink-and-you'll-miss moment when Lestat briefly performs the finger-brushing variant on Louis' bum just as he approaches his boyfriend from behind in the second coffin room scene. Lestat is signaling to Louis that he would like to have sex as soon as Claudia has settled into her coffin, and Louis smiling at the touch means that he feels the same way.
• Flowers of Romance: While driving his horse carriage, Charlie tosses a bouquet of chrysanthemums at the doorstep of Claudia's home as a way of displaying his romantic interest towards her.
• Foreign Cuss Word: Lestat blurts out "Putain de merde!" (French for "Fucking hell!") twice in this episode.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: The first of Claudia's diaries that Daniel picks up has a tiny sneak peek for Season 2:
  Paris, November 14, 1945: We've arrived in Paris, what a relief! My whole dead self feels revitalized head to toe. We might be outsiders to both humans and Parisian life, but I do appreciate both now with such fervor! Granted, I've never hated my body [unclear]
• Genki Girl: At the start of her vampiric existence, Claudia is an exuberant and energetic girl, frequently running around the house even though Louis and Lestat repeatedly tell her not to.
• Get Out!: After Claudia gets her own bedroom, she becomes very territorial about it (as is the case for most teenagers), so when Lestat passes through her open door and leans against the doorway, Claudia exclaims irately, "You have to knock first! Out! Out! Out!", and she even throws an object at him.
• Girlish Pigtails: Claudia sometimes sports braided pigtails (this is her hairstyle when Louis rescues her from the burning rooming house, when she's shopping for her own coffin, and when she's Bug Catching during a boat ride with Louis) as a visual cue to viewers that she's a young girly girl.
• Happy Birthday to You!: Lestat and Louis sing "Happy Birthday to You" to Claudia on her 17th birthday, although the audience only hears the tail end of the song.
• Healing Factor:
  • In the final moments of her mortal existence, Claudia is covered with life-threatening burns to her body, but after her Emergency Transformation into a vampire, the scorches on her skin are mostly gone by the time she explores Lestat's townhouse. There's only some scar tissue on the left side of her face.
  • Discussed when Lestat cautions Claudia about her careless driving; even though vampires live forever, acute injuries require months to heal.
    Lestat: Putain de merde ^note French for "Fucking hell", steer, steer.
    Claudia: Ugh, but we're immortal!
    Lestat: You can still smash your pretty little head and then take long, dull months to recover. Eyes on the road.
• Hemo Erotic: Downplayed with Claudia, who is only turned on when she's exsanguinating her boyfriend Charlie, as demonstrated by her pleased moans while they're making out in his carriage. However, because she lacks self-control, she ends up killing him unintentionally.
• Hiding Behind the Language Barrier: Lestat and Louis argue in French so that Claudia doesn't know exactly what they're discussing about her. She scribbles in her diary that "Fighting sounds funny in French."
• Hypocrite: Lestat insists that there are no secrets within their family, yet he becomes crotchety whenever Claudia inquires about his past or the history of vampires. She confides to Louis that it bothers her that Lestat keeps a lot of information hidden from them.
  Claudia: Uncle Les got secrets.
  Louis: How you figure?
  Claudia: He don't give good answers to questions, sits on the truth like it's his chair or somethin'. I thought we weren't supposed to keep secrets.
• Hypocritical Humor: Lestat, a Large Ham himself, complains about Claudia's "histrionics."
• Kill the Ones You Love: In a case of Accidental Murder, Claudia drinks all of Charlie's blood during their make-out session. She's extremely distraught about the death of her First Love afterwards.
• Kissing Discretion Shot: Lestat sneaks into Louis' coffin and snuggles next to him. The last thing Claudia sees before Louis shuts the lid is Lestat caressing his lover, but then she hears smooching sounds.
• Love at First Sight: Claudia is instantly smitten with Charlie when he first approaches her to check if she's alright after his horse is spooked by her presence.
• Make-Out Point: Lestat and Claudia are at a lover's lane to prey on unsuspecting couples. Claudia is innocent when it comes to human sexuality, so Lestat employs euphemistic language to explain to her what "the meat" do here.
  Lestat: This is what the meat calls a "lover's lane," and by my estimation, no blood is sweeter. Young people, swollen with passion, denied spirits by this senseless prohibition, park along this lonely stretch to contemplate that most mysterious of mathematical equations — how one plus one becomes one.
• Mixed Ancestry Is Attractive: While Lestat isn't sexually attracted to his biracial vampire daughter Claudia, he nonetheless uses similar terms to describe her as he does with the mixed-race Louis and Lily (e.g. "pretty little head," "belladonnic beauty").
• My Beloved Smother: Lampshaded by Claudia when she scrawls in her journal that "Daddy Lou can be smotherin'."
• Nephewism: As stated in her journal, after Claudia's mother died giving birth to her and she was abandoned by her father, she was raised by her aunt.
• Not Growing Up Sucks: At the end of the episode, Claudia writes in her diary with alarming instability about being stuck in a "flat-chested, hairless-crotched 14-year-old baby doll body" as her mind matures into that of an adult. This precedes her beginning to Self-Harm by sticking her arm in sunlight.
• Off with His Head!: Lampshaded by Lestat when he informs Claudia about the fate of the aristocrat who originally owned the emerald necklace that he gives to her for her birthday (the incident may have occurred during the The French Revolution).
  Lestat: This was given to me by a marquis who was beheaded by a mob ten years after he gave it to me.
• Parental Fashion Veto: Lestat doesn't like the skirt that Claudia is wearing when she goes out on her first hunt.
  Lestat: I'm not sure how I feel about that pleated skirt.
  Louis: It's chiffon. It has movement.
  Lestat: (disapproving tone) Hmm.
• Parental Hypocrisy: Lestat is the "Do as I say, not as I do" type of parent because his very harsh lesson to Claudia after she accidentally kills her First Love (and Lestat forces her to watch as Charlie's face melts in the incinerator) is that vampires should "never get close to mortals because sooner or later, they end up dead." Yet Lestat spent the entire first episode being wholly besotted with Louis when the latter was still human. Lestat stalked, flirted, courted, seduced and harassed Louis over a period of a few months (based on Louis' comment that "It was a cold winter that year, and Lestat was my coal fire"). While Lestat's endgame was to turn Louis into a vampire, he nevertheless fell head-over-heels for a mortal and invested a lot of time bonding with his human Love Interest before offering Louis the Dark Gift. Lestat's warning to Claudia rings hollow knowing that he did the very thing he's telling her not to.
• The Peeping Tom: Claudia, who is ignorant about sex (Lestat remarks that she's too sheltered), curiously observes a young couple engaging in foreplay, and even delays her feeding because she's so intrigued by what they're doing. When the two lovebirds realize that she's watching them, they abruptly stop, and the man asks, "You gonna stand there watchin', little girl?" With nothing more to see, Claudia pounces on him and messily slurps his blood.
• Piggyback Cute: When the vampire family returns home after Claudia's first hunt, Louis is carrying his newly adopted daughter on his back. It's an early sign that he and Claudia are bonding.
• Pink Means Feminine: Claudia is a girly girl with a pink coffin and she wears two different pink dresses in this episode.
• Pretty Boy: When Claudia is rescued from a burning house by Louis, she believes that he's a beautiful Black angel.
• Psychic Block Defense: Claudia can shield her thoughts from Louis when he telepathically inquires about the identity of Charlie, the young man she has a crush on.
  Louis: Who's Charlie?
  (Claudia gasps in her mind)
  Louis: Claudia, are you blockin' me? This is your father speaking.
  (Claudia smiles when she realizes that Louis can't read her mind)
• Puppy-Dog Eyes: Louis urges Lestat to turn Claudia into a vampire, but Lestat turns him down because "Elle est trop jeune" ("She is too young"). Louis then gazes at Lestat with his soulful, pleading eyes while touching his lover's chest and whispering "Please" twice. Lestat is so moved by how vulnerable and pretty Louis looks that he caresses his boyfriend's face before proceeding with the Emergency Transformation even though it goes against the vampire rules.
• Recurring Dreams: Daniel mentions to Louis that he had been dreaming about their first meeting in 1973 at Polynesian Mary's ever since Louis mailed to him the cassette tapes of their first interview.
• Sarcasm Mode: When Claudia refuses to eat a drunk homeless man sitting by a fountain, Louis hopes it means that she'll become a Vegetarian Vampire like he is; the mere idea of this annoys Lestat.
  Louis: Looks like she takes after me.
  Lestat: (sarcastically) Tremendous. Fortifying myself for an evening of swan hunting.
• Scream Discretion Shot:
  • The camera faces Louis and Lestat when a trumpet player across the street squeals "No!" in pain several times as Claudia mangles him.
  • Later, Lestat kills the undertaker off-screen, so viewers only hear the victim's yelps before he dies.
• Screaming Woman: The girlfriend of Claudia's victim screams in terror as she runs away from her boyfriend being butchered.
• Self-Harm: At the end of the episode, Claudia is so deeply traumatized from her Accidental Murder of her First Love and Lestat's Tough Love discipline that she extends her arm under the skylight during the daytime to hurt herself.
• Sexual Euphemism: Lestat uses arithmetic — a topic that most people would consider to be utterly unsexy — as a metaphor for sex when he attempts to teach Claudia about what humans do at a Make-Out Point.
  Lestat: This is what the meat calls a "lover's lane," and by my estimation, no blood is sweeter. Young people, swollen with passion, denied spirits by this senseless prohibition, park along this lonely stretch to contemplate that most mysterious of mathematical equations — how one plus one becomes one.
  Claudia: They come out here to do math?
  Lestat: You've been too sheltered.
• Stage Whisper: Because the past events are told from Claudia's point-of-view, the official English subtitles list "[Indistinct whispering]" when Louis replies to Lestat's question "You missed me?" as the two men are cuddling inside Louis' coffin. It's a prelude to sex, so they don't want their daughter to hear their sweet nothings, but viewers only need to turn up the volume to discern Louis' answer: "I hated sleeping without you."
• Stealth Hi/Bye: Lestat sneaks up on the newly fledged Claudia with his Super-Speed and greets her with "Bonjour." She reacts with surprised delight and asks, "How did you do that?"
• Stealth Insult: Louis intimates that Lestat is too old to understand adolescent behaviour when he makes the observation "Tu as oublié ta jeunesse!" (French for "You've forgotten your youth!" ^note which is the exact translation, although the on-screen caption offers the more wordy "You've forgotten what it's like to be young!") Lestat feels insulted and swears in French.
• Switching P.O.V.: The Flashback scenes are from Claudia's perspective instead of Louis' because Daniel reads passages from her diary.
• Terror at Make-Out Point: Lestat and Claudia drive to a lover's lane to hunt for humans who are in a state of arousal. In Lestat's estimation, they're a special treat because no blood is sweeter than young people who are swollen with passion. Claudia's fangs rip into one man's neck so savagely that his arterial spray splashes across the windshield of his car, his blood nearly covering the entire surface of the glass. Lestat murders a couple that was parked further ahead off-screen, and when the screaming girlfriend of Claudia's victim runs to Lestat to warn him of the danger, he kills her, too.
  Woman: There's something back there, something evil!
  Lestat: Ah, yes. She's with me. (dips the woman in The V-J Day Kiss pose and then drains her dry)
• Tough Love: Lestat takes on a disciplinary role after a panicked and heartbroken Claudia inadvertently murders her first boyfriend. He wants to ensure that she never does anything so foolish again by maximizing her psychological turmoil. He smirks while he's mocking her mistake ("It's easy to get carried away when you're young and in love"), picks up Charlie's arm and drops it to emphasize that he's dead as a doornail. Lestat then shoves Claudia towards the corpse and commands her to "clean up after yourself." After she places Charlie's body inside the incinerator, she's about to walk away when Lestat roughly grips her arm and face to hold her in place. She has no choice but to look while her First Love's "bones cracked black and his face turned to soup," the disturbing image being seared into her brain.
  Lestat: Stop squirming and watch. Remember this, his face as it melts. This is why we never get close to mortals. Because sooner or later, they end up dead.
• Unusual Euphemism: Claudia jots down in her diary that her vampire dads have "a funny way of being nice to each other" after she saw Lestat sensually touch Louis' shoulder.◊
• Vampire Dance: There's a brief shot of Louis and Lestat dancing◊ during Claudia's birthday.
• Vampires Are Rich: While getting to know her new vampire dads, Claudia observes that "Uncle Les and Daddy Lou were rich. They had nice clothes and a nice auto carriage." (This scene takes place in 1917, when only the wealthy can afford to own cars.) She later writes in her journal that "you wouldn't believe how time flies when there's people to eat and money to spend," and summarizes her vampiric lifestyle as "Kill, spend, kill, spend."
• The V-J Day Kiss: Lestat dramatically drops◊ a female victim in this iconic pose before draining her to death. In-Universe, it would be incorrect to say that Lestat is parodying the famous photograph because the scene is set in 1923, 22 years before the end of World War II.
• Your Vampires Suck: During a Good-Times Montage, we see the vampire family laughing hysterically while watching the first run of Nosferatu in 1922. Lestat later parodies Orlok's movements at home, much to Louis and Claudia's amusement.
• Writers Cannot Do Math: In January 1923 ^note episode 5 lists Florence's date of death as January 19, 1923, Claudia is mistaken about her own age because she claims in her journal entry that she's 18 years old when she's in fact 19 (her birth year is 1903) and will become 20 later.

---