Vampires Kiss

Peter Loew has money, a Manhattan apartment and a successful career, but underneath the surface he is narcissistic, cruel and increasingly detached from reality.

After meeting a seductive woman named Rachel, Peter becomes convinced that she has bitten him and transformed him into a vampire.

Soon he is avoiding daylight, wearing sunglasses indoors and becoming obsessed with his supposed need for blood. His behaviour toward the people around him — particularly his secretary Alva — becomes increasingly disturbing as his grip on reality deteriorates.

The clever part is that Vampire’s Kiss never needs to become a conventional vampire story.

Peter believes something supernatural is happening to him, while the audience is left watching a man descend further into obsession, paranoia and madness.

You cannot really talk about Vampire’s Kiss without talking about Nicolas Cage.

His performance as Peter Loew is enormous.

Cage switches between arrogance, terror, rage, self-pity and complete absurdity, sometimes seemingly within the same scene. Peter's strange accent, exaggerated movements and increasingly bizarre behaviour make the performance almost impossible to look away from.

It's also the source of several moments that have taken on a life of their own online decades later.

Taken out of context, those scenes can look like Nicolas Cage simply going completely over the top. Within the movie, however, that excess works because Peter himself is falling apart.

Cage doesn't portray that breakdown quietly.

He makes you experience every ridiculous second of it.

That's where Vampire’s Kiss becomes much more interesting than its title initially suggests.

The film continually plays with Peter's perception of events.

He becomes convinced that he cannot tolerate sunlight. He believes his reflection is disappearing. He starts behaving as though he needs blood to survive and embraces increasingly theatrical ideas about what being a vampire should look like.

But Peter's transformation doesn't follow the rules of a traditional vampire film.

Instead, vampirism becomes a language through which his deteriorating mental state expresses itself.

The question isn't simply whether Peter has become a vampire.

It's whether the vampire ever existed anywhere except inside Peter Loew's head.

Calling Vampire’s Kiss a comedy doesn't quite explain what watching it feels like.

There are moments that are genuinely hilarious, particularly because Cage commits so completely to Peter's increasingly ridiculous behaviour.

But the film can also become deeply uncomfortable.

Peter is not an innocent eccentric stumbling through a supernatural adventure. He is frequently cruel, particularly toward Alva, and his worsening instability makes his behaviour increasingly frightening.

That tension gives the movie its strange personality.

You're laughing at something completely absurd one minute and wondering whether you should be laughing at all the next.

Few vampire movies from the decade operate in quite the same space.

One of the best things about Vampire’s Kiss is its setting.

Instead of foggy graveyards and candlelit castles, Peter wanders through late-1980s New York.

His apartment, office and the city's nightlife become the landscape of his imagined transformation.

That modern setting helps strip away the romantic image of the vampire. Peter isn't an elegant immortal aristocrat.

He's a deeply unpleasant Manhattan professional slowly convincing himself that he's becoming one.

The contrast is perfect for the film's satire.

The 1980s were brilliant at reinventing vampires.

The Lost Boys turned them into rebellious teenage outsiders. Near Dark dragged them into a violent American road movie. Fright Night mixed traditional vampire mythology with suburban horror.

Vampire’s Kiss did something completely different.

It took the idea of becoming a vampire and turned it inward.

The horror isn't primarily about an undead creature hunting Peter Loew.

It's about watching Peter become consumed by the person — or creature — he believes himself to be.

That makes the film messy, uncomfortable, hilarious and fascinating in roughly equal measure.

Probably not.

The corporate Manhattan setting, exaggerated confidence, nightlife and distinctly 1980s atmosphere all contribute to the film's identity.

But more importantly, Vampire’s Kiss arrived during a decade when filmmakers seemed unusually willing to dismantle traditional vampire conventions.

It sits comfortably beside the decade's other experiments with the genre while still feeling completely different from all of them.

And Cage's performance pushes that eccentricity into another dimension.

Vampire’s Kiss isn't the vampire movie to choose if you're looking for traditional gothic horror.

That's precisely why it deserves remembering.

More than three decades later, Nicolas Cage's performance remains astonishingly watchable, while the film's combination of psychological horror, satire and black comedy still feels wonderfully strange.

Some 1980s vampire films made vampires cooler.

Some made them scarier.

Vampire’s Kiss gave us a man running around New York absolutely convinced that he had become one.

And somehow, that might be even better.

Verdict

★★★★☆ — 4/5

Still has bite: Definitely.

Best for: Nicolas Cage fans, dark-comedy lovers and anyone who likes their vampire movies seriously weird.

80s vampire credentials: Unhinged, original and impossible to forget.