Vampire's Kiss is not a good movie. Let's get that out of the way at the start. The overwrought tale of Peter Loew, a literary agent losing his mind and starting to think he's a vampire, has an intriguing premise but fails to deliver. It's a strangely ugly little film, a harrowing tale of misogyny masquerading as a black comedy. It is frequently deeply uncomfortable to watch but for all it's faults there's something strangely fascinating about it. Part of that fascination stems from Nicolas Cage's legendarily exuberant performance. You can get a flavour of that performance from the clip below in which he rants the entire alphabet at his therapist to illustrate how easy filing is.
Cage delivers a performance that punches straight through parody and comes out the other side with a deranged grimace and a determination to baffle and confuse. He rips through the ghastly script with a maniacal enthusiasm, gurning and waving his arms about as though the audience were somehow watching him from a nearby hill. This is the element of the film most people remember.
Watching Cage stalk, harrass, torment and sexually assault his employee Maria is deeply uncomfortable, not least because his grotesque behaviour is ostensibly being played for laughs. We are invited to smirk at an awful human being behaving in an awful manner towards a woman who is clearly traumatised by his increasingly erratic and dangerous conduct. There is little sympathy for his descent into madness because he was clearly a terrible person before the collapse. We learn nothing about him, we learn nothing about his psychology, other than bad things sometimes happen to bad people. This, for me, is why the narrative of the film fails.
There's a comparison to be made here with Bruce Robinson's exhausting film How to Get Ahead in Advertising, released in the same year. That film stars Richard E Grant as an advertising executive to starts to believe that a boil on his neck is talking to him and growing into a second head. It's a strange, funny little movie, which charts a man's breakdown and resurrection as a biting satire on the advertising industry. It's another riff on the same theme that Vampire's Kiss fails to properly address. You can get a flavour of How to Get Ahead in Advertising from it's darkly upbeat final rant, delivered with fervour by Richard E Grant. It's well worth a look, if only because Robinson should be known for more than just Withnail & I.
One thing that Vampire's Kiss does do well is to interrogate the idea of the vampire as a sexual predator. This is an old theme, Dracula in particular has long been seen as a dramatic enactment of Bram Stoker's sexual issues. What Vampire's Kiss does is strip away the layers of glamour and charisma to reveal the rather grubby reality beneath the facade. Many vampire films work with the ambivalence of sexual feeling, a strange mixture of attraction and trepidation that leads to fascination. Peter Loew behaves exactly as a vampire does but the result leads to a feeling of revulsion in both the protagonist and the viewer. The vampire is not glamorous, not fascinating, just a nasty little creature on a deranged power trip. Had the film been played straight, rather than inviting the viewer to laugh, it might have worked rather better. The sheer ugliness at its heart just isn't funny, it isn't sad, it is ultimately just ugly. You'd be much better off watching George A Romero's Martin which deals with the subject of vampirism as mental illness in a much more intelligent and interesting way.
Vampire's Kiss made me think about my own work and what I was trying to do with This is Not a Lovesong (available here for not much money). I wanted to get inside the head of monsters, to convey a sense of what it would be like to be a monster. I wanted to write something that expressed ugliness but with prose that was carefully crafted. I spent a long time writing and re-writing every scene to try and get under the skin of the protagonists and to make the horrors completely . I don't know whether I succeeded but I do wish that I had seen Vampire's Kiss before I began as knowing how not to do something is as important as knowing how to do it.
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