‘Queen of the Damned’: The horror move that inspired a brutal real-life murder
The White Album. The Exorcist. The Satanic Verses. All works of art that have inspired real-life murders, and in 2004, we had to add Queen of the Damned to that list. One of these things is not like the others.
It wasn’t even the original either. You see, Queen of the Damned is actually two works. The original Anne Rice novel was published in 1988 as the third novel in her series The Vampire Chronicles, and its Aaliyah starring movie adaptation in 2002. Both stories follow The Vampire Chronicles’ main character, the charismatic dandy Lestat de Lioncourt, as he travels the world in his rock band The Vampire Lestat. Yes, really, that’s the plot of the book, I’m not making this up.
As his band gains fame and fortune, Lestat’s music awakens the progenitor of all vampires, Akasha, otherwise known as (sing it with me now), the Queen of the Damned. What follows in both film and book are very different strains of absurd, ridiculous vampire bollocks involving concerts in Death Valley, living statues, killing 90% of the world’s men and establishing a new Garden of Eden on Earth.
As I said, ridiculous vampire bollocks. At least the movie has Aaliyah looking absolutely incredible the whole time.
None of that really matter though, compared to what happened next. If The Vampire Chronicles are a story of glamourous death and depravity, what followed was (supposedly) directly inspired by it but also the exact opposite. This is grottily real. As deeply sad as it is deeply disturbing. At best it’s the product of someone hopelessly lost and at worst it’s something genuinely impossible to understand.
But how did Queen of the Damned inspire a murder?
One of the biggest fans of the film version of Queen of the Damned was 23-year-old Edinburgh resident Allan Menzies, who reportedly spent the next year following the film’s release watching it over a hundred times and developing a vivid fantasy life based on Vampire myth and legend. Then everything got much darker, and not in the cool, gothic way either.
In 2003, Menzies was arrested for the murder of his friend Thomas McKendrick. As the investigation went on, Menzies was found guilty of stabbing McKendrick 42 times, drinking his blood, eating a part of his skull and then burying him in a shallow grave.
As his trial began, Menzies gave testimony on what inspired his shocking act, saying that before the deed had been done, Akasha had appeared to him, promising to turn him into a vampire if he took the life of another.
When McKendrick and Menzies were next together, McKendrick had made a disparaging remark about the film, and in particular the character of Akasha. This sent Menzies into a blind rage, bludgeoning McKendrick with a hammer before stabbing him. This was the testimony Menzies gave to the court as part of an insanity plea.
However, several psychiatrists interviewed Menzies and found that he had been showing signs of this behaviour since he was 14 years old. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison, but took his own life one year into his sentence. Arguably, the most disturbing thing associated with The Vampire Chronicles and a reminder that once a piece of art goes into this world, you must always be wary of what it inspires.