Interview with the Vampire Locations — Anne Rice's New Orleans on Screen

Anne Rice wrote about the Garden District houses she lived among, and when Neil Jordan filmed the 1994 adaptation of *Interview with the Vampire*, he shot in those same streets. The neighborhood became Lestat's world on screen — his Royal Street townhouse, the 1860s funeral scenes, the architecture Rice had already turned into vampire habitat on the page. Most of the filming locations are still private homes, which means you can't go inside, but that was never the point. The value is in walking the blocks at dusk. New Orleans was founded by the French in 1718, chosen for strategic reasons: relatively high ground along a sharp bend of the flood-prone Mississippi, adjacent to a trading route and portage that Native Americans had used for centuries before Europeans arrived. The site they selected had been a Quinipissa village. By the Civil War, it was the largest city in the South. The Garden District came later, but it carries the same layered history — a place where the architecture exists simultaneously as landmark and backdrop, where someone's private home doubles as a gothic dreamscape committed to film. Walk the neighborhood as the light fades. It's the closest you get to the novel's atmosphere.