NEW YORK, July 30 -- When AMC announced last Thursday that Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire would return for a fourth season, the renewal itself was almost beside the point. The network had something more significant to deliver to the Hall H crowd at San Diego Comic-Con: the show they had been watching was no longer called Interview With the Vampire.

The new season is titled Queen of the Damned. That shift, from the confessional intimacy of Louis de Pointe du Lac's interview to the figure who commands all of vampire civilization, signals where AMC intends to take this franchise. The show began as a story about one vampire's guilt and arrives at Season 4 as something closer to a mythological reckoning, with every character the serie...