Anne Rice is a name many of us in the Western world have heard of when it comes to horror. While not everyone’s number one horror author, she’s up there in the hall of fame for her revolutionary vampire novel Interview With The Vampire. Here are some things that Rice taught me about horror as an author and a reader:
- Horror can be as simple as the hell you have to exist in.
- Horror is as much about the self as it is about what is happening to you.
- Horror doesn’t have to have teeth and claws to be terrifying.
- Good horror can be as simple as good vs evil.
- We love dark stories. They’re part of our culture.
Horror is the hell you exist in.
I first read Interview With The Vampire in 2023. I’d already seen the film and the latest television adaptation featuring Sam Reid and Jacob Anderson, and I’ve wanted to read it for years. Louis de Pointe du Lac is the most tragic, tortured, humanesque character you’re going to find in a vampire novel. Isolated from a world he once knew (mortality) and scrabbling around in the shadows to find meaning, Louis shows us one of our deepest fears: loneliness. True, unfiltered loneliness. The kind you find when you realise it is just you and the world, with no clear place for you to fit in.
Horror being the hell you exist in is a common feature across the Gothic genre: trapped women in isolated castles, ghosts cursed to linger for eternity, husbands with dark secrets they’ll take to the grave, or creatures cursed to endure suffering they never did anything to deserve. You probably had some titles already in your mind but I’m specifically talking about classic dark stories like The Castle Of Otranto, The Woman In Black, Jane Eyre and Frankenstein.
While the idea of Louis du Pointe du Lac is nothing new when it comes to a Gothic character, this is the first time we’ve had a first person POV of a tortured immortal grappling with his new life as a creature of the shadows: the faces he sees mostly looking at him with fear or repulsion. The Phantom Of The Opera came close, but it wasn’t told from the phantom’s point of view (I wish it had been, because Christine and Raoul were insufferable), however that deep sympathy for the tortured outcast was there, as it was in Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Horror being the hell you exist in is also a common theme among the female Gothic: Jane Eyre, the anonymous narrator in Rebecca, Estella in Great Expectations and the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper. The four walls or world that binds them is their hell, and they must find a way to live within it. This still happens today in Gothic horror and magic realism. I recently read Nightbitch which explores the isolation, loss of self and Heathcliff levels of wildness clawing to get out into the character’s public persona.
Horror is as internal as it is external. What happens within the self can be just as terrifying as what happens to you.
While creature features featuring killer sharks, bloodthirsty rats and rabid dogs can be terrifying, the horror that happens within you can be just as scary. Back to my point about Louis in Interview With The Vampire, we are looking at one individual’s internal battle between the man and the monster inside him.
‘I knew it when I first took a human life to feed my craving. It was my death. And yet I would not accept it, could not accept it, because like all creatures I don’t wish to die! And so I sought for other vampires, for God, for the devil, for a hundred things under a hundred names.’ – Interview With The Vampire.
Rice brings us as an audience to witness the horror of having to live with not just eternity but with a deep, insatiable craving for human blood. Some vampires accept their new nature and feel no remorse, but Louis cannot bring himself to do that. His self-disgust is one of the most compelling things about him, as is his desire for love, to be loved, and to find something that anchors him to the world. This of course could work as a metaphor for living with the regrets you brought on yourself (or didn’t act on), and the choices you might have made differently. It’s a very human sensation, and this is why it’s all the more agonising.
Teeth and claws aren’t always necessary for terror.
While teeth and claws appeal to our primitive sense of danger and threat, they aren’t always essential for a good dark story or a tale of terror. Sometimes it’s very much a case of what you can’t see that is terrifying. Something I see a lot in Catholic horror is how very difficult it is to prove something doesn’t exist, and as a result you’re left with what can be perceived as to be an empty, dark room. Sometimes the characters are unable to prove that anything is there, or worse: they can’t prove that it’s not. Is the exorcism truly over? Is the ghost really gone?
Though there are encounters with more animalistic vampires in Interview With The Vampire, the true terror is the eternal darkness, the abyss that Louis doesn’t have the strength to free himself from. A bottomless pit that can never be filled.
This novel particularly made me think of how awful it would be to have to live forever, and that’s even before the bloodlust.
Good horror can be as simple as good vs evil.
This is a case of ‘an old one but a good one’. The battle between good and evil will endure. It comes up all the time, whether that author is of a religious mindset or not. Morality is not unique to religion: it’s unique to humans.
People have shown time and time again a great capacity to embrace or act out evil, but they have also shown that good can prevail. We want to believe it can, and that’s why we still have superhero films and tear-jerkers about natural disasters and war. Good vs evil has been explored by authors since humans first began telling tales around the campfire. One of the oldest (and quite a dark one) pieces of literature Beowulf is about exactly that: Good triumphing over evil.
We love dark stories. They are a part of our culture.
Speaking for the western sphere of literature, dark stories are part of us. We only have to look to fairy tales to see that the darkness of the forest has always been there. Don’t answer the door to the strange lady, don’t go to the forest alone, don’t steal cabbages from the witch’s garden… there are plenty of horror tropes lurking within a 19th century fairy tale.
Dante, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Milton were giving us dark tales even before we categorised them. Frankenstein, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights showed us a dark side we couldn’t look away from. Human emotions and suffering make a story dark: Mrs Havisham using her own personal sense of pain, grief and loss to destroy Pip and Estella’s innocence, Cathy and Heathcliff tormenting each other, driven by jealousy and obsession.
It’s natural to want to explore the dark nature of the soul, and that’s definitely what horror is all about for me.
“dark stories” have been part of our literature for a very long time, and that they are viewed as highly valuable by educated people throughout the West.
I am hardly stating an original idea when I say that such stories are transformative. They invite the reader on a journey which reflects perfectly the formula of Aristotle for great drama: as one reads (or watches the film or play), one feels pity and fear, and eventually experiences catharsis. One is taken to a place, through the literary experience, to which one might not have ever gone on one’s own. I feel strongly that dark stories demand that the audience earn the transformation; they require a certain suffering on the part of the audience as the price of eventual affirmation.’ – Anne Rice, 2007.
Anne Rice taught me a lot about horror.
Horror can be sensual (Ramses the Damned), it can be internal, it can be about the spiritual journey and the battles along the way. Rice taught me about the spiritual quest more than any other horror author I’ve encountered so far.
In her 2007 essay To My Readers, On The Nature Of My Earlier Works, Rice discusses how she was asked by Christians to renounce her earlier works because they are dark or Satanic. It hurt her deeply. I feel that this is certainly something horror authors come up against a lot. Stephen King has received his fair share of letters basically coming to the conclusion that, ‘You write about evil things, so you are evil. You perpetuate it and encourage it.’ This is not what horror fiction is about.
Horror can be all about witches, occultists, murderers and ghosts. It doesn’t mean the author is a satanist who sacrifices children on a Saturday night. If we can’t explore these things and tell a good story, possibly even an enlightening or transformative one, what’s the point? Some of the most life-affirming, transformative books I’ve ever read were horror books. I’ve recently started re-reading The Exorcist and I’m sure that everyone who read through the demonic possession and the gore could see that faith in people counts for something. The horror and the monsters within it are sometimes excellent metaphors for very real thoughts, feelings and people in the world we live in.
‘There is no art without risk. There is no Christian art without risk. Reading a book is an experience. Looking at a painting is an experience. There is no experience without risk.’ – Anne Rice, 2007.
This is the beauty of horror fiction: it takes us somewhere we wouldn’t have necessarily chosen to go. It allows us to safely explore our innermost fears and process how evil and suffering can affect the human experience.
For me personally, horror can be life-affirming. The monsters go away as soon as you close the book, and even within the story, they can be defeated. I think horror can give us hope, or at least a reason to keep fighting the good fight.
Other articles on Anne Rice:
Hanna Delaney is a horror author from Liverpool, UK. her works include the Muldoon Supernatural Thriller series and The Shade In The Sands And Other Stories. Her Gothic thriller Salome comes out in October 2026.
Gothic Horror | Speculative Fiction| Fantasy
Leave a Reply