The Tale of the Body Thief heading to cinemas?

Another Anne Rice novel from her Vampire Chronicles series could be heading to the big-screen.

According to The Hollywood Reporter the rights have been optioned to The Tale of the Body Thief, the fourth novel in Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series. The novel revolves, once more, around the vampire Lestat who swaps bodies with a psychic only to realise he’s been tricked. Star Trek and Transformers writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kirtzman are reportedly penning the script.

It won’t be the first Anne Rice novel, from the series, to be adapted for the big-screen. In the 1990s her most famous novel Interview with the Vampire (the first novel in the series) was made into a movie starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. At the time Rice objected to Cruise’s casting in the film but later admitted she was wrong. In the early 2000’s Michael Rymer adapted Queen of the Damned (the third novel in the series) which featured parts of The Vampire Lestat (the second film). The Queen of the Damned was not well received by critics or cinema goers or fans of the books who complained the majority of the plot was cut out.

There have been rumours of remakes of the two movies for several years now though so far they had amounted to nothing. However, the novels of Anne Rice have had a clear influence on much of the modern vampire fare such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Vampire Diaries and True Blood as well as Twilight.