Queen of the Damned (2002) on Netflix
Lestat de Lioncourt wakes from a long slumber and fronts a nu metal band, The Vampire Lestat. His music stirs Akasha, the first vampire, and draws Jesse Reeves, a paranormal researcher.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb5.3/1064,980 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes17%
Trailer
Plot summary
Waking after a long sleep, the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt takes over a nu metal band and renames it The Vampire Lestat. In an interview advertising his first live concert, he discloses that vampires exist and taunts his own kind. Jesse Reeves, a Talamasca researcher who studies the paranormal, hears one of his songs and tells her colleagues she thinks the singer may be a vampire. Her mentor David Talbot hands her Lestat's recovered journal and urges her to leave him alone. The journal recalls the winter of 1788, when Marius de Romanus brought Lestat to a Mediterranean island and turned him, and how Marius's violin playing roused Akasha, the first vampire. Marius comes to Los Angeles to warn Lestat that his music has woken Akasha and that his fellow vampires will not accept his public display.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Queen of the Damned (2002)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Ten months after the film's release, a man in Scotland who claimed to have seen it more than a hundred times killed his friend and drank his blood, telling the court that Aaliyah's character Queen Akasha told him it would make him immortal. He was found guilty of murder and, a year later, found dead in his cell.
- The film is dedicated to Aaliyah, who died in a plane crash on August 25, 2001, after completing her scenes in the production.
- Korn frontman Jonathan Davis wrote and sang the songs for Lestat's band, but a Sony BMG contract barred his vocals from the official soundtrack album, so other rock singers re-recorded the songs for release; the end credits, however, quietly play Davis's original vocal take while crediting it to Wayne Static.
- Author Anne Rice wrote that she had begged the studio's executives to let her write a script for The Vampire Lestat for union scale and that they simply were not interested, leaving her feeling "snubbed and hurt"; the Queen of the Damned film being developed instead was, she said, "a bad idea, and basically a doomed project".
- To fill Lestat's Death Valley concert scene, the production recruited more than 3,000 goths from Melbourne nightclubs and the internet and bused them to a quarry in Werribee, Australia, to serve as extras.
- Casting the vampire Lestat took so long that the studio considered bringing Tom Cruise back to reprise the role from Interview with the Vampire before he declined, and weighed Wes Bentley, Josh Hartnett, and Heath Ledger before Irish actor Stuart Townsend finally won the part in 2000.
- Aaliyah and Jonathan Davis had planned to record a duet together, but the collaboration never materialised, due to Aaliyah's death.
