Almost a decade ago now, I found myself in a screenwriting class. Despite being an evening class that ran from 7-10 PM, it ended up being one of my favorite classes thanks to a teacher who was warm and accepting of everyone’s ideas. It was the idea of deconstructing art and understanding how it worked. While I personally think that I am not equipped to even now to write a successful screenplay, I found the class helpful if just for getting to see how everyone else chose to express themselves. It was a fun environment and one that I haven’t gotten too many times since.
On one particular night, the teacher began class as he sometimes did by showing a clip from something emphasizing his point. In this case, it was the usefulness of actors. As he pressed play, I witnessed for the first time one of the most famous videos to every grace YouTube. It was the now-legendary MonkeyGrip100 compilation “Nicholas Cage Freak-Out Montage.”
In what ended up being one of the most unifying moments of my life, I sat in that room with everyone and watched as every clip played out of context. Here was Cage, an actor who couldn’t find small with a microscope. With his bug-eyes, he freaked out for over four minutes. It was bizarre, it was alluring, it was comedy gold. How was he able to capture our attention so easily and in so many different ways? The teacher would point out that our reaction spoke to what we looked for in acting and, quite frankly, it all makes sense. For as agnostic as I generally am towards Cage, there’s no denying that his ability to not only chew but swallow scenery whole is something that’s hard to not admire. How could I not feel that way when I watched a room full of screenwriting students losing their minds?
An important thing to note is how much of that video pulled from Vampire’s Kiss (1989), which has only grown in my imagination since that day. For years it has felt like this mythic rite of passage. You can go your whole life watching Cage movies, but you will never understand his ethos until you see him in Vampire’s Kiss. It’s in the small moments, such as when he breaks up a therapy session to emphatically recount the ABC’s. While the hand gestures at this moment are magnetic, there is one detail immediately following that floored me. In a moment of self-defense, he hugs himself and childishly says that he never files documents wrong.
That’s the thing about Cage’s Peter Leow. There’s almost no need for this to be a horror movie for it to work. It’s the story of a raging narcissist who is losing his mind, mostly by mistreating women and having illusions of grandeur. He flips over his couch and uses it as a coffin. He insists that he’s infallible, and yet this is an exercise to the contrary. Considering that nobody who works for him seems to listen, it’s amazing to note that he’s a literary agent. His job is actually to sell the idea of communication. By the end, it feels like he couldn’t even talk to himself properly. It’s a small symbolic joke, but one of the many ways that this is just an absurdist masterpiece, more comedy than horror and horror than comedy. It’s all interpretive, finding Cage somewhere between Klaus Kinski and F.W. Murnau. He’s out of time and rarely has it felt more perfect.
One of the greatest issues for Vampire’s Kiss in its current form is how inaccessible it often is. While it sometimes will pop up on streaming services, it’s fleeting and disappears into the ether before another generation can form another cult. It’s a bit of a shame given how many direct-to-video titles he’s produced that are inescapable. Then again, it’s because Vampire’s Kiss has had distribution problems following a dismal box office turnout. Luckily it exists on YouTube (at least for now) in nine-minute chunks. If you can put up with irrelevant subtitles, you’ll get to experience one of the wildest movies about, well, absolutely nothing.
That’s another joke within a joke. The way that I see it is that this is a parody of Wall Street (1987), the Gordon Gecko drama that proposed “greed is good.” It’s the mentality that success and wealth compensate for a satisfying internal life, and I think it feels just as prevalent now as it did at the time. Vampire’s Kiss asks the question about why we care about these archetypes and then seeks to openly mock it for almost two hours. Why is their over-the-top behavior acceptable? Cage constantly accentuates lines with such bouncy aplomb that you’re not entirely sure what’s going on. If you’re a conventional dramatist, I understand why Cage’s performance feels offensive and off. Then again, sometimes bold risks are what makes these movies timeless.
To be totally honest, I don’t even know if any of this is real. Everything happens in such an unconventional way that you can believe that he’s hallucinating his own demise. Did he really have sex with a vampire, or did he just believe he did because he “got turned on” by a bat in a previous scene? For all we know he just has rabies and is slowly spiraling out of control. Nothing about his wealth and security can protect him from the torment inside. There is nobody he truly trusts, and I can see this as a story about how greed corrupts absolutely. He’s believed his delusions for so long that it’s now gotten the best of him.
Even then, you are fascinated by the performance that Cage is giving because of how gradually it all happens. Sure, it may not seem gradual given that every line reading has a manic shift as if taken from Shakespeare one minute and Dragon Ball Z the next. It’s all glued together in such a fascinating tapestry that you can’t help but wonder just what is going on inside of his head. What is his personal motivation? We see it not only in his demeanor but how his apartment slowly falls apart, he stops returning phone calls and soon he becomes a recluse even as he wanders the streets, entering dance clubs while believing he needs blood to survive.
I can understand why it was once perceived as too much of a confusing mess, setting a bar where Cage was constantly having people hold beers. You’re coming off of an incredible run of nuanced early performances like Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Moonstruck (1987), and Raising Arizona (1987). You can practically use those three films like Animorphs, watching him evolve into his true animal. Still, this was the moment where everything became shameless, where he famously argued with the director over getting a live bat, only to be persuaded not to when it was revealed that he could get rabies. Then again, he also claims to have wanted hot yogurt poured over his feet during sex scenes.
The anecdotes on the making of this movie are ridiculous and ever-expanding. I suggest that you read The Ringer’s 2019 piece looking at the making of Vampire’s Kiss. It really does have so much that makes you admire the wildness that went into making this a reality. Everything feels so strange because, in reality, it all was. This is the magic of filmmaking so full of stories that makes you want to learn more. The fact that Cage even “casted” the cockroach he ate must have been wild at the time. You couldn’t even tell if this movie would be a success, but you had one of the rare masterpieces of acting about to go down, an actor so fearless that you’re sure he would dismember himself if the role called for it.
Which is what’s brilliant about Cage. While I am not someone with the patience or taste to parse through hundreds of direct-to-video titles, I do find myself aging into a fan of his best work. As you discover how dull the world of drama can be, there is this man willing to ask “What if?” He’s one of the few that understands the expressionistic nature by which this medium should be. We should be constantly trying to expand the potential of a performance like Ang Lee and his frames per second technology. It may not always work, but sometimes you get Vampire’s Kiss, which has the gift of being either a hilarious horror movie or a scary character study inside a comedy. It is such a blurry line that it makes the similar American Psycho (2000) seem like a try-hard by comparison.
I think a big reason that Vampire’s Kiss works very well is that I recognize this narcissism in modern America. Maybe it’s not as directly a Wall Street thing, but you have people as political leaders who talk with this sway of confidence that makes them sound like they’re selling you on ideas. They point erratically as if trying to convince their souls that this idea matters. It all feels a bit cartoonish and disingenuous, and yet it all works at conveying how disconnected the person is from anything resembling any human decency. When Loew has the chance to stop looking for a missing file, he doubles down on his frustration of having this loose thread. That’s how obsessed he is with a perfection that is slowly slipping from him.
Then again, it just feels like a metaphorical COVID-19 movie where the idea of having this virus totally under control is the message we send ourselves, but anyone watching notices the Loew in all of this. It’s the idea that we’re trying to convince ourselves that everything is fine when it’s more likely that the world is falling apart. What happens when the virus gets us and our whole basis of logic just ceases to exist? That is why I feel like Vampire’s Kiss spoke to me at this particular moment. It’s the fear of mortality, that your whole life is a waste. In Loew’s case, it’s hilarious because of how true it was. He was a vampire of the economy, his soul being sucked up until he was a misogynistic jerk who couldn’t handle the slightest bit of criticism.
Most of all, I just think of watching that compilation all over again and realizing that context makes everything a tad more brilliant. There are so many small moments that you can only appreciate when you’re not expecting them. It’s in the vocal shift or the growing desperation of Loew’s actions. It’s such a delightful experience that feels like it compensates by lying to the audience. Everything will be fine, but it won’t. Cage is a manchild, and you’re fascinated by his every tantrum. There’s a reason that every step here has become a meme, where we all know the hand motions now to the ABC’s. This was a time before we truly knew who he was before he took stranger risks, which is saying something. Somehow he won an Oscar during all of this, which only makes this scheme all the more impressive.
Now, if only the distributors can get a proper release for this movie available for legal use. Imagine a world where that happens. Maybe we’ll begin to recontextualize and respect Cage as the bravest actor of his generation, making us question how far is too far. He should know where the boundaries are because, quite frankly, he’s crossed that line too joyfully for decades. I wish that I could tolerate it as much as some people, but every now and then I get it. Him screaming “I’m a vampire” is funny, but it’s also a sad reflection of his deep insecurities. You wouldn’t expect that from a man who eats cockroaches, but life’s complicated in that way.
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