If you have ever read the books or watched the movies Twilight and Interview with a Vampire you would notice that they are very different and share little in common. They are both vampire stories that portray struggles in their main characters. In Twilight the struggle is between a human and a vampire who are falling in love and finding difficulties between the two races. The difficulties being him the hunter and her hunted, and his growing want or need to drink her blood. But in Interview with a Vampire the struggle is so much more. The struggle is of the main character and his inner turmoil of being a vampire. He is fixed on good and evil and his struggle of him being a bringer of death and his need to kill. He is a vampire filled with emotions that are sought after by many vampires who feel alone and separated from the world. They think of him as their connection to the world and throughout the story it creates more conflict for him.
Interview with a Vampire shows more of the struggles of being a vampire than Twilight. Twilight is more of a simple romance struggle. It doesn’t emphasize the struggle of a vampire, but the struggle of a relationship. In Interview with a Vampire the story shows all the struggles of being a vampire such as: never aging, time changing all around them, the loneliness of being a vampire, the death, the horror of being a monster, and the need to be with someone to fill the voids of being different. Altogether the struggles of Interview with a Vampire seem like more adult and complex struggles, than the simplified youthful struggles of Twilight.
It seems to me that Twilight is focused more on teenagers rather than adults. The relationship is a youthful kind of love and the setting of the story is in modern times, high school. Even some of the dramas of youth are in the story. And in Interview with a Vampire the story is focused on adults and younger adults more than teenagers. The story takes place in the adult lives of these vampires in an old time period when maturity was important and when you became an adult at a younger age.
There is a difference in the darkness of the two stories that isn’t hard to miss. In Twilight the view on vampires isn’t very dark at all. The story is mainly focused on love and that there aren’t any dark struggles that can’t be overcome. But in Interview with a Vampire there are dark qualities that would never be overcome, and the fact that they must take life to live themselves is a very dark fact of their existence as a vampire and is in no way “sugar-coated” like it is in Twilight. The “sugar-coating” of vampires is throughout the story of Twilight. How they seem to sparkle in sunlight rather than burn to death in pain. Or how the vampires in Twilight don’t mind the never ending changes around them, and how nothing is the same after a while of time, stuck unchanging with time. However in Interview with a Vampire the truths of being a monster are revealed. They burn in agony from the sunlight, revealing just how different from human they are, and they suffer with their separation from humanity and time.
If you really like Twilight the truth of the matter is that it is an unrealistic story focused on the youth. And Interview with a Vampire expresses a more dark and realistic outlook on vampires, and the monsters they really are. It is a more adult story and it makes you think about how awful it could be to be a vampire and that even though they are both vampire stories they are very different.
I hope you enjoyed my ranting.
