Fans lined up from Orpheum Theater’s entrance all the way down the block to the VooDoo Mart liquor store on Canal Street Saturday, awaiting an opportunity to finally bid farewell to the late Anne Rice, the New Orleans-born queen of Goth literature. No one since Marie Laveau contributed as much to New Orleans’ supernatural mystique than she.
Rice, the author of the sensation 1976 novel “Interview with the Vampire” and 35 other enormously popular books, died in December 2021 at age 80. The COVID-19 pandemic made a large public memorial impossible at the moment, but her son Christopher Rice and her friend Eric Shaw Quinn made up for lost time with a theatrical extravaganza befitting the cultural icon.
The ornate, 1921 Orpheum was ideal for the event. The audience of Rice devotees blended perfectly amidst the filigree. Corsets, waist coats, spidery lace, bejeweled brooches, macabre makeup, menacing artificial fangs and eerie vampire contact lenses were the order of the night. The house seemed to be at capacity. If there were empty seats, they were few.
Rice’s ardent admirers paid $57 and higher to attend the All Saints’ Day event, traveling from Portland, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Orlando, New York and elsewhere across the country to be there.
Symbolically speaking, Zack Behany of Warner Robins Georgia, said that author Anne Rice was a mother figure to him. Here, Behany waits in line to enter the Anne Rice All Saint’s Day Celebration at the Orpheum Theater on Saturday, Nov. 1, 2025.
Zack Behany, an employee of the Olive Garden restaurant chain, had come from Warner Robins, Georgia, to pay his respects. He clutched a beloved, autographed photo that he’d received from Rice.
Behany said he first discovered Rice in 2008 after the death of his father. Rice’s psychological horror tale “Interview with the Vampire” offered him solace. “It was like she came into my world and said ‘I know you’re going through some stuff and I think I have some friends that can help you.’”
Those friends, Behany said, were Louis, Lestat, Claudia, Armand, Santiago and all the characters in all of her books to come.
“She had one influence on me after another,” he said. Later, Behany said, he corresponded with Rice via email. “I would not be who I am today without her,” he concluded.
In that, Behany spoke for many.
Ammie Kenney and Whit Hubner of Nashville line up for the Anne Rice All Saint’s Day Celebration at the Orpheum Theater on Saturday, Nov. 1, 2025. Kenney said that though the event memorialized the beloved author who died in 2021, “I don’t think she’s far away.”
Ammie Kenney and Whit Hubner had come from Nashville for Rice’s long-postponed public sendoff. Hubner wore a scarlet mask evoking “Memnoch the Devil,” one of Rice’s many sinister inventions. Kenney, who wore bangs reminiscent of the author’s own, said that though the event recalled Rice’s death, “I don’t think she’s far away.”
During Saturday’s lengthy memorial presentation, actors recited select passages from Rice’s novels, tenor David Michel sang “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” a song Rice found especially comforting, and fellow horror authors described their devotion to the perennial bestseller, whom they considered a role model.
The centerpiece of the presentation was an intimate documentary video that followed the life of the literary superstar who was born Howard Allen Frances O’Brien in 1941 in the Irish Channel. Footage shot during Saturday’s event will be included in the documentary before it is released to the public.
Anne Rice’s 1976 bestseller ‘Interview with the Vampire’ was a cultural milestone in New Orleans
Further highlights included a pageant of Anne Rice character costume contest winners, captivating eulogies delivered by Eric Shaw Quinn and Christopher Rice and a marvelous appearance by Irma Thomas, who sang a soulful version of “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans.”
Though Mayor-elect Helena Moreno did not attend the event, she arranged for a proclamation declaring Saturday to be Anne Rice Day in New Orleans.
Christopher Rice captivates the audience as he delivers a eulogy to his mother, the legendary horror novelist Anne Rice, during the Anne Rice All Saint’s Day Celebration at the Orpheum Theater on Saturday, Nov. 1, 2025.
On a cool Wednesday morning, sunlight slipped through the curtains of a hotel suite in downtown New Orleans, where Christopher Rice was stayin…
Queen of contemporary Gothic literature might have appreciated Saturday’s violet sky, mist, rain
Anne Rice, the novelist whose 1976 blockbuster “Interview with the Vampire” conjured a singular vision of a gothic and mysterious New Orleans …
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.nola.com ’
