The Vampire Lestat's Scariest Scenes Set The Stage For A Terrifying Season 4

"The Vampire Lestat" is not scary, but that could change if AMC greenlights the show for another season.

Granted, Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) is an immortal mass murderer with godlike powers; conceptually, he's terrifying. But in a more direct sense — via razor-sharp writing and Reid's swaying between campy rock star egomania and wailing vulnerability — he's quite charming, and unlikely to inspire the type of bone-chilling dread associated with, for one example, a xenomorph from the "Alien" franchise.

But what about his eponymous, uproarious show on AMC (aka "Interview with the Vampire" Season 3, retitled to reflect the direction of the story)? Is it scary? Evil ex-boyfriend Armand (Assad Zaman) has some very unsettling moments in Season 3, and the program overall contains more than its share of blood 'n' guts. But most folks can probably watch an episode of the show and still get a nightmare-free eight hours of sleep afterwards. 

That may change if AMC orders Season 4. Presuming the rise of Akasha in Episode 5, "New York," and Louis de Pointe du Lac's (Jacob Anderson) visit to the butcher shop in the season finale are any omen, future "Interview with the Vampire" episodes will make "The Walking Dead" look like a "Twilight"-themed birthday party for a tween with easily offended religious parents.

Lestat's alluring but un-scary presentation is not surprising. Since their emergence in author Anne Rice's "Interview with the Vampire" in 1976 and many subsequent appearances across pop culture, Lestat and Louis have done as much to establish the cuddly vampire trope as anybody.

That's what makes Akasha (Sheila Atim) stand out.

The mother of all vampires and a major character in Rice's 1988 novel "Queen of the Damned" makes her AMC debut in a flashback during "New York." Frozen indefinitely as a de facto statue lying on a table for unexplained reasons, she summons Lestat to keep her entertained while her usual caretaker attends to other matters. Though explicitly instructed against giving Akasha any blood, Lestat goes a little bonkers after a few decades and wipes a bit across Akasha's lips, snapping her back into not-life.

Three days later, as a blood exchange has left Lestat gleefully floating near the ceiling, Akasha asks herself a torrent of abstract questions about the meaning of it all in a monologue (four pages long, according to Atim in "The Vampire Lestat: After Dark" podcast) that escalates into a wrathful proclamation: "I am the answer!" she tells the camera, as if attempting to mesmerize the audience. This scene announces Akasha as an entity of cosmic horror — a decisively non-cuddly vampire.  

"It's our pitch for Season 4," said showrunner Rolin Jones in the "After Dark" podcast. "Think about these people and their messed up little tiny dramas ... this energy is about to take it over."

Back in "The Vampire Lestat" Episode 3, "Toronto," the series takes a moment to remind us that especially powerful vampires can live without their heads for a period of time; this foreshadowing pays off in the concluding seconds of Episode 6, "Montreal." As Louis and Lestat share a romantic moment, Armand and Daniel (Eric Bogosian) totally ruin the mood by sneaking up and slicing the noggins clean off of the doting pair.

While decapitation sends Lestat to a literally soul-devouring introspective dreamscape of trauma, Louis wakes up in the back of a butcher shop in a position reminiscent of the titular character from 1962's shlock horror non-classic "The Brain That Wouldn't Die." His head is propped up in a frying pan while the rest of his body sits on the other end of the table. Throughout the finale of "The Vampire Lestat," Armand takes advantage of his captive's Cronenbergian condition to air his grievances at the expense of Regina (Delainey Hayles), a young woman with a profoundly complicated connection to Louis whom Armand has also kidnapped, but left her head attached.

This could be the most disturbing and delightfully ridiculous thing to occur on scripted television in 2026. If the show comes back and follows the chronology of the books to adapt the apocalyptic "Queen of the Damned," hopefully we can expect much of the same madness.