How ‘Interview With the Vampire’ Used Sacreligious Statues, Projection Animation to Create the Théâtre des Vampires

variety.com:

Hunter Ingram The new season of “Interview With the Vampire” offers plenty of immortal pleasures for the patient fans of AMC’s Anne Rice adaptation.

But for production designer Mara LaPere-Schloop, Season 2 also fulfilled the artistic promise that first attracted her to the project — the Théâtre des Vampires. “Living in New Orleans, it was really an exciting exercise to think about how we could tell that story and showcase the city in Season 1,” LaPere-Schloop tells Variety. “But more than anything, I really wanted to sink my teeth into this theater and the coven.” The theater, which made its debut in Episode 2, is among the most beloved parts of Rice’s 1976 novel, the latter half of which finds Louis (Jacob Anderson) and Claudia (Delainey Hayles) joining a coven that lives in plain sight in Paris as a grotesque theater troupe.

The series updates the period from Rice’s 1800s to the 1940s, with the coven performing blood-splattering shows to the morbid delight of a desensitized post-World War II audience.

But it required a space that was an unapologetically and insatiably indulgent oasis for the campy and predatory coven. LaPere-Schloop and showrunner Rolin Jones knew it needed to be gritty, but entrancing. “Gothic in tone, but not necessarily in a historic way,” she says. “More of a turn-of-the-century industrial space with gothic fingerprints on it.” They found it in an old factory in Prague, one of the many European locations scouted for Season 2. “There were these multi-level platforms and raw brick.