Classic Movie Review : Vampire's Kiss (1988)
By the time Nicolas Cage appears in a movie, the movie stops being about whatever it thought it was about. It stops being a horror film or a comedy or a pulpy genre exercise. Those categories disintegrate on impact. The moment Cage shows up, the film becomes about him and everyone else is just an accessory. He’s not a performer inside a genre. He’s an energy source that melts genre into slag.
Some critics like to pretend he’s some washed-out eccentric who doesn’t take acting seriously enough, but the truth is more uncomfortable: he’s been rebelling against the idea of conventional acting since before anyone knew his name. Even when he was twenty-four and fresh off Raising Arizona, Cage was already operating on a wavelength Hollywood wasn’t ready for.
Vampire’s Kiss only looks like a weird movie. The real weirdness is Cage insisting, years before the Internet would crown him king of the deranged, that you shouldn’t keep something simple when you could make it complicated.
So, Vampire’s Kiss is technically the story of a New York literary agent named Peter Loew (Cage), a predatory office sociopath who spends his nights drinking and humiliating his secretary (Maria Conchita Alonso) as if it were a recreational sport. His life only really changes when he’s seduced at a bar by a vampire (Jennifer Beals, because 1988). She bites him in the neck and rewires his reality. From that point on, he becomes convinced he’s transforming, not just into a monster but into his true self.
He starts sleeping under his couch like a feral aristocrat. He stalks the city believing that vampirism is the inevitable destination of American masculinity. That’s the core of the film: not a man losing his mind, but a man arriving at a version of himself he always suspected was waiting beneath the surface.
Letting Go (Of The Way Of The Living)
Vampire’s Kiss is marketed as a comedy, but the humor doesn’t come from punchlines or setups. It comes from a man collapsing into an identity he secretly believed was his birthright. The vampire mythology is barely relevanr. There’s only one, Jennifer Beals, and she exists more like an intrusive thought than a monster. The real show is Peter Loew believing he’s too exceptional for the pedestrian rules of society and deciding to discard them with theatrical confidence.
He screams his way into transcendence. He treats suffering like a performance art. The film becomes a case study in how men behave when their ego feels like it’s bleeding to death: loud, petulant, convinced that their unraveling is somehow majestic. That is actually funny because it’s accurate.
Peter’s problem isn’t that he’s a predator, he loves it. It’s that the world stops treating him like one. Being an arrogant jerk isn’t enough anymore, so he escalates his suffering until it becomes the emotional center of the universe. If other people don’t respond with reverence, he throws tantrums like an aristocrat who can’t believe the peasants have opinions. The original script was supposedly inspired by writer Joseph Minion’s toxic relationship, but Cage turns it into something larger: a portrait of what happens when a man’s ego encounters resistance and decides it must convert the entire world into an audience for his crisis.
The question of whether he’s really turning into a vampire barely matters. What matters is that Peter Loew has been conquered by a woman, and his ego can’t metabolize that. He should, in theory, welcome the transformation. He’s becoming a super predator. But what terrifies him is not the loss of humanity; it’s the loss of control. His identity isn’t threatened by the supernatural. It’s threatened by the idea that someone else has authored his fate. The magnitude of that panic, channeled through Cage’s unhinged conviction, is what makes the movie unforgettable.
Living On Through Cage
Most people haven’t watched Vampire’s Kiss, but everyone knows about it because of Cage. His performance has become the artifact, not the film. Which raises the stranger question: is Nicolas Cage a cultural vampire? He drains the movies he’s in, not of blood, but of authorship. He feeds on the narrative until it becomes a vessel for his identity. And the irony is that this parasitism grants the film the immortality it never would have earned on its own. When a movie stops being itself and becomes a Nicolas Cage movie, it doesn’t die. It becomes undead.
Whatever you think of Nicolas Cage, he’s living proof that a performance can eclipse the film it inhabits. His roles aren’t memorable because they’re well-written or iconic. They matter because Cage uses cinema as a technology for self-creation. He treats every movie like raw material for personal mythmaking and the films become secondary to the phenomenon of his presence.
Casting Cage is a Faustian bargain: you surrender the identity of the story so that something stranger and more enduring can take its place. He operates outside the behavioral rules of an industry obsessed with containment and predictability. And there’s something undeniably heroic about a performer who refuses to play by the logic of a system that was never designed to cater to someone like him. He might be a cultural vampire, but it doesn’t mean that he’s the bad guy,
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Vampire’s Kiss is the opposite of those lazy films where one character has all the agency and everyone else is just a prop. Peter Loew believes he’s the protagonist of the universe, but the tragedy of his life is that there’s no evidence the world agrees. He is exceptional only in his conviction. And that’s what makes the film such a strange thesis on American identity: the mythology of greatness without the proof to justify it. Nicolas Cage becomes that idea himself on screen. He turns the character into the warning that most men ignore: believing you’re special is not the same as being right.
7.6/10
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