“Am I Getting
Through to
Youuu,
Audience?!”
The Story of Vampire’s Kiss
“I always saw the movie as a story about a man whose loneliness and inability to find love literally drives him insane.”
— Nicolas Cage
The yuppie-nightmare comedy proved to be a fruitful genre in the mid to late ’80s, and few generated more actual nightmares for audiences than After Hours (1985). Written as his thesis by Columbia University student Joseph Minion, the story of a word processor who takes a chance on a late-night hookup only to get chewed up and spat out by the eccentric denizens of downtown SoHo became the career comeback for a then down-and-out Martin Scorsese.
Coming off the cancellation of his long-gestating The Last Temptation of Christ and the disastrous reception of The King of Comedy (1983), this completely stripped-down, raw production took Scorsese back to his roots. With After Hours, Scorsese won back his credibility, his creative mojo, the Best Director award at Cannes (1986) and, eventually, the chance to finally make Last Temptation; first-time screenwriter Joseph Minion, on the other hand, didn’t exactly experience the same upswing.
Fractured development on his follow-up script, the surreal road film Motorama (1991)— pushed Minion into a deep depression, leading to a desperate trip to Barbados with producer girlfriend Barbara Zitwer, who implored Minion to write a script, any script, in order to lift his spirits.
While Zitwer returned to New York, Minion persevered at the typewriter in his hotel room for two weeks with the motivation that whatever he wrote, Barbara promised to get it made. Zitwer, who had grown to love the Caribbean, had encouraged him to write something actually set in Barbados, but alas this tropical mise-en-scène was not to be. Instead, Minion’s tortured mental state took him back to the same urban paranoia and social dysfunction that permeated After Hours, albeit this time within the framework of a psychological horror story.
“I was just alone with my demons. I rented a typewriter. I pounded it out. One night, I was staring out the open window and saw a group of bats fly out of an opening in the roof. It was like, Oh my God. This is the universe speaking to me.”
— Joseph Minion, writer
Enter our main character Peter Leow, the deeply troubled and narcissistic literary agent who succumbs to madness after believing he’s been bitten by a vampire. In the midst of disillusioned womanising and vainly poring over his neurosis with his psychiatrist, Dr Glaser (Elizabeth Ashley), Leow becomes obsessed with a missing contract and proceeds to belittle and browbeat his long-suffering secretary Alva (Maria Conchita Alonso), into finding it.
This short-circuiting of his psyche brings on paranoid fantasies of a mystery woman literally sucking the life out of him and sends him down a path of lunacy, self-destruction and violence that would make Alex DeLarge wince.
Barbara Zitwer’s angst at the personal subtext in her live-in boyfriend’s writing notwithstanding, the script became a huge hit with her indie filmmaking circle, who banded together to get it made, eventually finding a home with British producer John Daly’s Hemdale Films.
“I was completely horrified… because I was Joe Minion’s girlfriend and living with him. And I read it and it was like… this is our relationship. To read someone write about this woman he’s in love with who’s like a vampire and destroying him—”
— Barbara Zitwer, producer
Vampire’s Kiss is widely considered the original incubation of the Nicolas Cage one-man acting class he’s been teaching himself for many years now. The method is as follows: deconstruct an already off-the-rails screenplay and take it to places beyond any rational instinct, with an energy so aggressively insane it borders on conceptual art.
Vampire’s Kiss was where he was first given the opportunity to develop THIS: the phenomenon we now accept as the punk-rock Nicolas Cage performance. Which is why it’s crazy to think that Mr. Twinkle-In-His-Eye Dennis Quaid was originally cast as Peter Leow!
This choice certainly reads more as a “Peter Leow was a regular guy who had it all, until ONE day…” kind of film, far from the more demented vision that Minion, at this time attached to direct, had in mind.
Thankfully, Quaid eventually dropped out to make Joe Dante’s Innerspace (1987) and the search continued. When word got back that the then 22-year-old Nicolas Cage was very interested in the script, Zitwer and Minion figured that whatever he would do, it would be something special. They were, to put it mildly, correct.
At the time, Cage had already garnered a reputation for being “out there”, but usually in support of a grander eccentric vision, such as in the Coen brothers’ screwball classic Raising Arizona (1987).
This time, however, Cage would BE the vision, and his enthusiasm for the material won him the part… although it would take another year to get him to sign on!
This time, however,
Cage would BE the vision.
Sadly, Barbara Zitwer and Joseph Minion’s volatile relationship being reflected in the script led to Minion moving on from directing Vampire’s Kiss and leaving the project altogether.
This development, along with pressure from his agents not to take on such a bizarre indie oddity, led to Cage begrudgingly stepping aside. His star was on the rise and apparently a weird little art film where he runs around screaming “I’M A VAMPIRE!” was considered a bad move after the Oscar-winning mega-hit Moonstruck (1987)… pfft, I guess.
Despite these efforts to direct Cage towards more commercial pastures, it was only a matter of time until he gave in to his everlasting obsession with this screenplay. There was no question in his mind: he HAD to make this movie.
But simply “making” the movie is far too pedestrian a term for what Cage really wanted to do with Vampire’s Kiss. His pursuit to push himself and theatrical physicality as we know it to such extremes, while completely shedding any ounce of modern “naturalism” from his craft, would take this already twisted screenplay to heights no one could predict.
“I was like, Oh my God. He sort of brought it to these heights that exceeded even my expectations in my wildest dreams.”
— Joseph Minion, writer, on seeing the film for the first time
What’s interesting about this is that first-time feature director Robert Bierman was seemingly all too happy to indulge as many of Cage’s manic ideas as he could. One in particular was the bizarre accent Cage affects for Leow, which teeters between faux-British, transatlantic and a literary professor in a B-movie.
The concept, born out of giving Leow a hyper-pretentious façade, while infuriating to producer Zitwer, was embraced by Bierman, who believed it gave the frankly repugnant character a cartoonish filter that made him more digestible.
“People might wonder what that voice is I’m using. In some ways it was my father, you know, ’cause he was a professor of comparative literature and he made a decision at some point to speak with ‘distinction’ and, to me, it always sounded absurd—although now I understand. It used to be like this very continental sound, which I thought a literary agent would adopt to try to be impressive to people.”
— Nicolas Cage
As filming lurched on, weird accents became the least of Zitwer’s problems, as Cage’s idiosyncratic demands continued to be a source of hair-pulling exhaustion for the young producer.
This included Cage wanting hot yoghurt poured on his toes to generate arousal for his love scenes with Jennifer Beals, whom he vehemently objected to playing the “vampire”; insisting a real live bat be used in a scene where one flies into his apartment; attempting to sincerely pull off saying “Boo-hoo” in a crying scene; and yes… eating a LIVE cockroach.
While Cage, thankfully, did NOT get his way in regard to having an uncontrollable, rabies-infected flying animal on a closed set… the cockroach was another story.
“The actual story has got very low stakes, I realised. To keep the story moving, the character that Nic was playing would have to be constantly changing, constantly in a new phase of his derangement, so the audience would never know what they would get.”
— Robert Bierman, director
According to Joseph Minion, this was the only element of his screenplay that was altered, originally calling for Leow to eat a raw egg. However, Cage wanted to push through a personal phobia of cockroaches by actually eating one on camera.
The obvious issues regarding hygiene, safety and animal cruelty took a back seat to an almost frightening devotion to shock the audience, pushing this performance as far as possible—and once again, Bierman took Cage’s side over Zitwer.
With two takes.
Two ingested roaches
and one mouthwash swig of vodka.
Arguably the most infamous scene Nicolas Cage has ever filmed was now in the can.
“I was always infuriated with him but also thought he was completely brilliant. Bob calls me and says, ‘Nicolas wants to eat a water bug instead of sucking on the egg.’ I’m like, ‘Fuck him! I’ve had it with him.’ I said, ‘Bob. It’s probably full of germs. He could get sick.’ Bob says, ‘Barbara, I think if Nicolas wants to eat a water bug on film, we should let him.’”
— Barbara Zitwer, producer
Handsomely shot on location in Manhattan by Stefan Czapsky on a very modest $2 million budget, Bierman had to get creative to facilitate the ambitious chaos Vampire’s Kiss called for.
One such method was shooting on a long lens for the scenes where a completely deranged, blood-soaked Cage wanders the street in a trance while carrying a giant makeshift stake pulled from a discarded pallet.
People, NOT extras, would wander into frame while a terrifyingly in-character Cage begged them to kill him, to which they would react with genuine shock and an understandable impulse to get the fuck away from him.
This culminates with arguably the film’s most inspired sequence, where Leow plays out an ideal conversation with his therapist, who absolves him of all his horrific acts, while in reality he babbles to the corner of a building with blood smeared all over his face.
Seriously, this movie is something else.
“He just put himself into this environment of really pitiful people, dragging the stake down the street. I just set the camera up across the street and photographed it.”
— Stefan Czapsky, cinematographer
The journey to get Vampire’s Kiss IN theatres was fraught with complications. While the admittedly gorgeous score was composed in Budapest to save money, Cage was busy COSTING the production money by humming Stravinsky’s Petrushka on camera, essentially drying up the dwindling budget to the tune of ten grand.
Hemdale’s disastrous handling of distribution was the final nail in the —forgive me—coffin, leading to the film being shelved for an agonising 18 months.
“You had to understand what this movie was about to really be part of it, and I think most of the people who were in it really did understand the movie. I’m not sure that Hemdale, the people that made it, really understood what we were doing.”
— Robert Bierman, director
Once it was out, however, things only got worse… much worse. Vampire’s Kiss grossed a dismal $728,660 worldwide, while critics mainly found the film off-putting at best, self-indulgently grotesque at worst.
Nic, on the other hand, couldn’t have been happier, a sentiment that continues to this day, where he still cites this as his favourite film he’s ever made.
“It was a grim experience. We went to a theatre on the Upper West Side and sat in a half-full screening. The old guy I sat next to had a portable TV on his lap. He didn’t laugh once!”
— Robert Bierman, director
Not everyone took the failure of the film in stride, least of all Barbara Zitwer, who soon realised movie producing wasn’t for her and switched careers, eventually launching, strangely enough, her own literary agency!
Joseph Minion’s sensibilities never quite meshed with the studio system either and, while he was able to establish a compelling niche for urban Kafkaesque insanity with After Hours and Vampire’s Kiss, follow-up films like the previously mentioned Motorama in 1991 were just far too opaque for even the most open-minded of audiences.
“How did it affect me? I dunno. Go ask people who didn’t hire me.”
— Joseph Minion, writer
Robert Bierman’s feature-directing career was also stunted by the film’s depressing response, leading him back home to England to direct for television. In recent years, Bierman has lectured at film schools, where students will periodically approach him after class to ask if he’s “THE Robert Bierman who directed Vampire’s Kiss?”
Which brings us to this more positive footnote: the cult resurrection of this insane little movie.
Vampire’s Kiss has enjoyed a fervent revaluation over the past decade due to the growing fascination with Nicolas Cage’s storied “losing his shit” library of performances, as well as cult-movie circles embracing the sheer audacity of this film to be as extremely goofy as it is while tackling such dark themes.
This is essentially a psychological character study of a vile, hateful man going off the deep end in a manner so beyond ridiculous that we have no choice but to laugh despite the disturbing undertones of what we’re seeing.
Sometimes it’s not even an “undertone”, so to speak; take the office-harassment subplot, for example. There is no dancing around the abhorrent viciousness with which Leow breaks down Alva over the course of the film, and yet the delivery is so preposterous, so utterly MAD, that it’s perplexing how we are supposed to comprehend it. I imagine Maria Conchita Alonso felt similarly.
For a plotline this upsetting to be so integral to something as silly as a man thinking he’s a vampire is confounding enough in the first place, but to have this lunacy and ugliness side by side in the same frame, with no attempt to balance the scales, is at times truly astonishing.
Is it any wonder that Christian Bale used this film as an influence for his performance as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (2000)?
Is it really surprising that a film where the main character screams the alphabet at his therapist before flamboyantly declaring he’s never misfiled anything— “NOT ONCE, NOT ONE TIME!”—eventually caught some people’s attention?
My mother looked at me like I was insane when I rented this on video as a teenager. I vaguely remember her using the word “painful” as her summation. However, Leonard Maltin’s Film Guide—RIP—had told me that Cage was “really something to see”, plus I was already obsessed with After Hours, so there was no doubt I had to check it out.
Even with all the “big” Nic Cage I’d seen up to this point, this was still a revelation to me in every sense of the word. I had no idea that you could do THIS in a movie!
From that day onward, this became the Nicolas Cage film I HAD to bring into any discussion should the man come up, as it was criminal to me that this tour de force hadn’t been seen by more people.
Thankfully, the internet’s ability to excavate and parcel out lost films until they take on a life of their own is undefeated, and Vampire’s Kiss is one of its greatest discoveries in that regard.
“Even if the worst happens and it doesn’t come out for some reason, it’s a movie with integrity. Someone’s going to see it and want to see it again. Maybe it can become a rare movie, like a bootleg record. I act for myself. I did Vampire’s Kiss for myself. It was something I had to do whether or not people liked it.”
— Nicolas Cage
Transmission · Limited Edition
Vampire’s Kiss
Limited Edition 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
Nicolas Cage’s cult performance arrives in a new 4K restoration from the original 35mm camera negative, presented in Dolby Vision HDR and housed in a rigid limited-edition box.
Limited edition includes
- Brand-new 4K restoration from the original 35mm camera negative
- Dolby Vision HDR presentation
- 4K UHD and Blu-ray editions of the feature
- New interviews with director Robert Bierman and composer Colin Towns
- New commentary by Kim Newman and Nick de Semlyen
- Archival commentary with Robert Bierman and Nicolas Cage
- Robert Bierman’s short film The Dumb Waiter
- Original theatrical trailer
- Pull-out poster and six lobby card-style postcards
- 40-page book with new writing by Julia Armfield and Justin LaLiberty
- Rigid box, full-height Scanavo case and removable OBI strip
- Limited to 5,000 copies