Spoiler alert!

If you haven’t seen Vampire’s Kiss and you think you might (which I recommend) you may not want to read this post until you’ve watched the film. I’m going to speak freely about the plot and the ending so read on at your own risk.

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Coming into my WATC(H) viewing of Vampire’s Kiss (1988) I thought I had already seen it back in the 80s. I remembered it as a sexual comedy about a female vampire who must feast on the blood of a virgin in order to keep her beauty (or something like that.) But, as I started Vampire’s Kiss I quickly realized this wasn’t the same movie I remembered. (The movie I was thinking of was actually Once Bitten (1995) and starred Jim Carrey.)

Vampire’s Kiss shared a few (but only a few) similarities with Once Bitten which explains some of my confusion.

Both movies are categorized as comedies–but I’d argue that Vampire’s Kiss is a black comedy at best, and “funny” in same way that Joaquin Phoenix‘s depiction of the Joker was “funny”. You may laugh a few times, but in an uneasy, disturbed sort of way.

Both movies have female vampires preying on unsuspecting male characters (at least that’s what we are lead to believe at the start of Vampire’s.) As far as I know, that’s where most of the similarities end between the two films.

Vampire’s Kiss is really a slow-burning psychological thriller or portrait that is hidden, unevenly at times, behind an outer wrapper of fantasy, horror, and office comedy. It sounds weird to write it out this way, but it was weird watching it, too.

At the end, the pieces all come together and fall into place, and you start to see what made the movie so strange (and at times nonsensical) from the very beginning. I know, right?!? Weird. So let’s get into it…

The World According to Vampire’s Kiss

Therapy sessions early on, are usually a clue. In 2023, therapy has become so firmly entrenched into our cultural experience that we forget there was ever a time where it was seen as otherwise. Not so long ago seeing a person in therapy or with a psychiatrist, in a film or TV show, was a novel concept, almost voyeuristic. Therapy was not the norm and therefore created an element of the exotic or fantastic to any storyline. We felt that therapy happened in metropolitan areas, other place like New York City, or in high-crises mental health situations, when someone was “losing their grip” or on the verge of “going crazy.”

But it wasn’t a practice the common man considered or practiced as part of his regular boring and regular mental health hygiene. In movies from the 80s and 90s, therapy then is a telling clue to something else happening in a movie. I think about the opening scene of The Sixth Sense as the pinnacle example of this, or lesser movies like Final Analysis, etc. where psycho-analysis provides clues to the nature of narrator and/or foreshadows something that will happen in the film.

So, the fact that Vampire’s Kiss opens with Peter Loew (played by Nicolas Cage) talking from a couch to his therapist should have been my first clue: things may not be what they seem here.

But since I was expecting a comedy, I took it at face value, with maybe a more contemporary view (like The Soprano’s)

Peter Loew’s sessions with his therapist, Dr. Glaser, (played by Elizabeth Ashley) provide important details about the experience he is going through and the transformation that is happening to him as a result (we believe) of a bite he will receive from a vampire named Rachel (played by Jennifer Beals).

But before we get into the psychological questions related to Peter Loew and his downward spiral into becoming a “vampire”, what do we know about Loew’s character?

Here’s a few things:

• He’s a player. Loew is a lady’s man who dresses in fancy suits and goes to clubs and takes women back to his apartment for sex.
• He works for a “boy’s club” style publishing house as a literary agent where men make crude jokes, smoke cigars, and leer at the female secretaries who type letters, maintain files, get coffee, and try not to get cornered by the “handsy” men.
• He encounters a bat that flies into his apartment one night while he is making love to a girlfriend. He tells Dr. Glaser that he was turned on by the bat’s arrival (more so than the woman herself). Mmmmhmmmm.
• He’s desperate to locate a misfiled literary contract for one of his top clients. It’s buried somewhere in the publishing house files. Most of the movie is focused on finding that contract.
• He terrorizes his secretary Alva (played by Maria Conchita Alonso) whom he deems to be the responsible party for recovering the file and contract.
• He seems to rapidly lose control of his life after a vixen named Rachel bites him and then returns to his apartment nightly for more blood samples.

When Vampire rules don’t apply. I’ve seen my fair share of vampire movies and I know that being bitten by a vampire is almost universally a bad thing. IF the vampire doesn’t take the victim’s life at first draining (or slowly over time), then typically their bite infects them and (depending on the mythology rules being followed) eventually turns the victim into a vampire as well.

I was expecting this to be the case for Peter Loew. Peter begins to show more and more erratic (telling) behavior as the impact of his bite bleeds into his daily life and habits.

Examples:

• He wears a band-aid on his next to hide the bite from others.
• He starts to wear sunglasses
• He has trouble keeping track of time and holding to commitments.
• He seems angry, belligerent, and obsessed.
• He eats a cockroach for no good reason.
• He talks to people that cannot be seen (perhaps the vampire Rachel we are to assume?)

But what’s strange is that the other vampire rules do not seem to apply to Loew. Even though he seems unhappy with sunlight, it doesn’t kill, hurt, or burn him. Alva, his secretary, wears a cross necklace all that time, that also elicits no reaction from him at all. It’s only as Loew starts to “self identify” more and more as a vampire, that these vampire rules start to apply to him, but very loosely. Which is really where the pieces start to fall together…

Peter Loew is a vampire who is definitely not a vampire.

So to summarize my first two observations then, we have a guy who is going to therapy on a regular basis, who suddenly finds himself having fantasies when a bat enters his room, and then starts behaving more and more erratically after he believes he’s encountered a vampire and been bitten. What this sounds like (when removing the possibility that vampire’s exist) is someone with a very serious mental health condition–which is exactly what we have here in Vampire’s Kiss!

It’s easy to put the pieces together in retrospect, but it wasn’t until the telling events near the end of the movie that this pattern emerged for me clearly. Much like The Sixth Sense, if you played very close attention, there were things that just felt “off” about the whole movie, but if you believe that an actual vampire had bitten Loew than it makes it harder to question some of these clues, but let’s look at them now.

The Telling Clues:

• After the night with Rachel he is talking to someone who is invisible. He tries to hand a full glass of tea to no one.
• Throughout the movie he has this weird affectation to his voice: one part British, one part Californian.
• Leaves his girlfriend at an art exhibit. He says to her, “I gotta take a piss,” then escapes the building and takes a taxi home. He doesn’t respond when she leaves a voicemail chewing him out.
• He keeps having jaw spasms for no apparent reason. Maybe he has rabies?
• Mercilessly berates then consoles then berates Alba about the missing files; makes her work all night; jumps onto a desk; chases her into a bathroom; drives to her home when she calls in sick; chases her into the basement; asks her to shoot him; and then tears her clothes off and rapes her.
• Destroys his own apartment after getting dumped by the girl he dumped at the artshow.
• Freaks out about the possibility that someone could misfile a contract (or anything). Sings the ABCs.
• Blames his anger and erratic behavior on mescaline use.
• Keeps watching old vampire movies like Nosferatu.
• Wants to be killed by Alba. He knows she has a gun in her purse and wants to be shot by her. Eventually he tries to shoot himself, but the gun only contains blanks.

Great twist of an ending.

For the most part, this movie really bothered me, until the very end when the pieces came together. I loved seeing Cage go Cragey and get bug-eyed and scream inane arguments above whatever else was happening. He has this acting volatility power of going from 0 to 60 in 3 seconds when it comes to anger and tantrums, which I find highly entertaining if overdone, but in this movie he takes out all of his rage on this innocent secretary and the torture seemed endless for her.

For whatever reason, I didn’t clue into ALL the clues above while they were happening and I didn’t realize he was seriously mentally deranged from the very beginning. I thought he was ambitious, or eccentric, or unfortunately vampire-bitten, and I excused some of that behavior as being “under the influence” of the mythical and folkloric, but I didn’t realize that none of those things actually explained what was going on with Loew.

The guy was completely unhinged.

As the movie progresses we see that Loew believes he actually is a vampire, but obviously he is not.

He cannot see his image in the mirror, but we can.

He begins to avoid sunlight (sleeps under an overturned couch in his home, as his make-shift coffin).

In desperation he goes out and buys fake vampire fangs from an Asian market, but because he cannot afford the nice porcelain ones settles for the Halloween plastic variety.

He starts to suck blood from pigeons he finds and captures on the street, and in a climactic and disturbing scene he takes his first female victim in a night club by ripping out her throat with the plastic fangs. But even this death is called into question, as we have everything filtered through Loew’s sense of reality.

We learn that Rachel is just another girl he slept with, and as she looks at him in horror when he approaches her at a busy night club, we are left to wonder what had even occurred between the two that made Loew think she was a vampire.

All of Loew’s experiences are suspect by the end, when we see that when he thinks he is talking to his therapist, he is actually talking into an empty store window, babbling at a reflection of himself, looking like a disheveled and bloody transient, asking about what he needs for salvation.

When Loew is eventually killed in his own apartment, supposedly by Alba’s vengeful brother, we are left wondering if that event even happened, since Loew dies with a stake plunged into his heart, a death he has been longing for for some time.

While Vampire’s Kiss was not the comedy I was anticipating, it was a highly intriguing psychological portrait of vampirism and mental breakdown. It allowed Cage to unleash all the powers of madness at his acting disposal and really show us what make him great.

Favorite lines from the movie:

“How could somebody MIS-FILE something? What could be easier? It’s all alphabetical. You just PUT IT IN the right file. According to alphabetical order.” [Singing] “A. B. C. D. E. F. G. H. I. J. K. L. M. N. O. P. Q. R. S. T. U. V. W. X. Y. and Z. That’s ALL YOU HAVE TO DO!” 

“Yeah, well fuck you too, sister!”

“Am I getting through to you, Alba!” [Cage swings points a finger at Alba, looking down. at his lap. First Elvis impersonation on screen.]

Firsts for Cage onscreen as Peter Loew:

• First time in therapy (if imaginary).
• First time talking up a girl at a bar.
• First time in literary world.
• Stabbed through the heart with a stake.
• First time posing as a vampire.
• First murder (or imaginary murder?)

Notable seconds for Cage onscreen (any character)

• Using an unloaded gun (see Raising Arizona).
• Weird voicing of a character (see Peggy Sue Got Married).
• Decimating his entire living space in one scene (see Raising Arizona).

I think watching Vampire’s Kiss a second time would likely be much different than watching it the first. I might like to try it some day. I think I could find the comedy in it, but would likely laugh less knowing that Peter Loew has gone off the rails. Not because of a vampire bite, nor his OCD work ethic, nor his use of mescaline, nor some twisted and misogynistic view of women; but because he truly is loosing his mental capabilities and needs an actual therapist (and likely some strong meds) to help him regulate.

Similar to Joaquin Phoenix portrayal of the Joker mentioned earlier, Peter Loew is truly a tragic villain and one that will garner some sympathy and provoke further thought.

And man, was he downright Cray-Cray Cragey!