Vampire’s Kiss (1988)

Official trailer

Nicolas Cage plays a yuppie literary agent who, after a one-night stand he believes involved a vampire, becomes convinced he’s turning into one, and slowly disintegrates into florid madness. I find this movie impossible to look away from and impossible to fully like. Cage takes risks no other leading man would dare, and somebody deserves credit for letting him, but the film around him is a mess I’d never sit through for its own sake.

Whether Peter is becoming a vampire or simply losing his mind is left ambiguous, but the ambiguity matters less than the spectacle of Cage going further than perhaps any leading actor has ever gone. This is a flawed, uneven film built entirely around a performance you have to see to believe.

The movie itself is a strange tonal object, a black comedy and a psychological horror film that doesn’t always cohere, and on its own terms it’s only intermittently successful. But as a vehicle for Cage’s legendary excess, it’s essential viewing, a film whose reputation rests almost entirely on what its star does inside it.

The Cage Performance

Nicolas Cage’s performance in Vampire’s Kiss is the stuff of legend, and it’s impossible to discuss the film without it being the center of everything. Cage plays Peter Loew as a man coming apart, and he commits to the disintegration with a fearlessness that borders on the deranged. He adopts a bizarre transatlantic accent, contorts his body into impossible postures, and delivers some of the most unhinged line readings ever committed to film.

He famously ate a live cockroach on camera, refusing to fake it. That tells you everything about his commitment to the role.

What’s unusual is that the performance, for all its excess, isn’t random. Cage is using his extremity to portray real mental collapse, and there’s a real method beneath the madness, a deliberate construction of a man whose grip on reality is dissolving. The performance is at once hilarious, disturbing, and weirdly committed to its own internal logic. It became the source of countless internet clips because it’s so extreme, but watching the full film reveals a stranger and more deliberate thing than the clips suggest.

It’s a real high-wire act, and the transatlantic accent is my favorite part of it. I laugh at it and I’m unnerved by it in the same breath, and I think that double reaction is exactly what Cage was after.

The Ambiguous Breakdown

Beneath the spectacle, the film has a real subject, the psychological breakdown of a shallow, predatory yuppie. Peter is a contemptible figure even before his collapse, a vain, cruel literary agent who torments his put-upon assistant, and the film frames his vampire delusion as the externalization of a man who was already a monster in the ordinary human sense. His belief that he’s becoming a vampire is the eruption of a sickness that was always there.

The film keeps the supernatural ambiguous. Peter buys plastic novelty fangs because his own teeth refuse to transform, sleeps under an overturned couch in place of a coffin, and behaves with escalating derangement, all of which reads as mental illness instead of actual vampirism. The film uses the vampire as a metaphor for a particular kind of eighties masculine predation and narcissism curdling into psychosis. It’s a sharper idea than the film’s chaotic surface always conveys, a portrait of toxic yuppie culture collapsing in on itself.

The plastic fangs are the touch I’d keep if I could keep only one. They’re the funniest image in the film and the saddest, a grown man shopping for the monster his own body won’t become.

The Film Around the Performance

The movie surrounding Cage is uneven and frequently doesn’t work.

The tone wobbles uncertainly between black comedy and real horror, and the film is never quite sure how seriously it wants us to take it. The pacing is erratic, some sequences drag, and the supporting characters, with the notable exception of Maria Conchita Alonso’s tormented assistant, are thin. Without Cage, this would be a forgotten, minor, rather messy film.

The tonal wobble is what keeps my number down. When the film wants me frightened, I’m usually still laughing at the last scene, and when it wants a laugh, Alonso’s fear makes the joke feel ugly.

Alonso deserves real credit, playing the assistant Peter torments with real vulnerability, and her scenes ground the film’s portrait of workplace cruelty in something painfully real.

But the film as a whole is a vehicle, built to contain its star’s performance, and it shows. The direction is functional instead of inspired, the script is a loose structure, and the film’s lasting interest is almost entirely a matter of what Cage does within it. It’s a performance in search of a better movie, and it nearly doesn’t matter, because the performance is that convincing.

Is Vampire’s Kiss worth watching?

Vampire’s Kiss gets a 6.5 from me on the strength of Cage alone. His yuppie’s descent into vampire delusion is hilarious, disturbing and weirdly methodical, and there’s a sharp idea underneath about predatory eighties narcissism curdling into psychosis, grounded by Maria Conchita Alonso’s affecting assistant. I can’t go higher because the film itself is a tonal mess that exists mainly to hold its star, and I can’t go lower because I can’t think of another performance that goes this far.

Essential for the performance, forgivable for the flaws, and unlike anything else on this list.

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