The Witching Hour

Anne Rice’s influence can be seen in many forms of media, including books, film, television, games, music, and websites. Her novel Interview with the Vampire was published in the mid-1970s and adapted into a movie in 1994. In 2002, the film Queen of the Damned, another adaptation of Rice’s novels, was released in theaters. This release caused a huge media sensation because one of its stars, R&B singer Aaliyah, died in a plane crash between the film’s production and release. In 2022, AMC created the Immortal Universe and produced the television series Interview with a Vampire. The Witching Hour became part of this universe with AMC’s Mayfair Witches series in 2023. Rice’s vampire novels paved the way for a huge boom in vampire media, such the Twilight novels and movies, as well as the tabletop roleplaying game Vampire: The Masquerade, which was adapted into a television show called Kindred: The Embraced. Rice’s phrase the “savage garden” also inspired the name of the band Savage Garden. This phrase, and variants of it, appear in Rice’s vampire novels and The Witching Hour: “the depths of the garden patch, savage and shivering, a hideous mouth of a flower” (828). Rice’s universes have been cataloged and described in several encyclopedias, including The Vampire Companion and The Witches’ Companion by Katherine Ramsland.

Rice brings together the supernatural and the erotic in The Witching Hour. Prior to its publication, Rice authored three vampire novels, the erotic Sleeping Beauty trilogy, and other works of erotica including Exit to Eden, which was adapted into a film in 1994. In The Witching Hour, Rice includes both realistic and fantastical depictions of sex. The sex scenes between Michael and Rowan can be compared with some of the realistic sex scenes in Exit to Eden, while those between Lasher and Rowan can be compared to the fantastical depictions of sex in Rice’s erotic version of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale. Several decades before films like Magic Mike XXL celebrated female sexuality and desire, Rice created sexually liberated women.