Peter Loew is a high-class publishing agent with everything going for him. You wouldn’t think so by looking at him tonight, though. Tonight he’s running through the grimy streets of New York City, his hair disheveled, flailing his arms like a madman, with pointy plastic teeth shoved over his gums, screaming to anyone who will listen that he’s a vampire. Will Randall, another high-society literary agent, tears through Central Park on all fours like a beast. His hair is a mess, his eyes have turned a sickly yellow, and real fangs jut out from behind his snarling lips. He stops for a moment to tilt his head back and howl at the moon. These two men are no longer human. They are animals, some kind of insane, twisted, monstrous parodies of mankind. If not for the six years between them, these two scenes feel like they could take place on the same New York City night.
Vampire’s Kiss and Wolf are two separate films, removed by time and changing cultures, but there are more similarities to them than meets the eye. The further one digs underneath the surface, the more connections one can find. As the decades pass, time has revealed that these two films are bosom buddies, sharing a thematic throughline that ties them together at the hip. The oddball cult films are strange portraits of men in authority who abuse their power and become literal and figurative monsters. This context has a much heavier weight when the films are screened for modern-day audiences. Audiences in the late eighties and mid-nineties may not have caught onto the relevance of these storylines at the time, but today, most of these monsters have come out of the shadows and their presence has become all too real for us. In light of a modern context, one of these films presents this theme much more successfully than the other due to how each film chooses to tell its story.
The film Vampire’s Kiss has an origin story that makes it feel like the horror version of Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver screenplay. Like Taxi Driver, Vampire’s Kiss was born from the depths of depression. After a lucky break with his first screenplay, After Hours (which, coincidentally similar to Taxi Driver, was also directed by Martin Scorsese), screenwriter Joseph Minion found himself at a career standstill. He couldn’t get his second screenplay off the ground, he was in what he claimed to be a toxic relationship with film producer Barbara Zitwer, and he was creatively blocked. Zitwer convinced him to take a vacation to Barbados with her. But Minion’s depression followed him there. In an attempt to help Minion, Zitwer told him to write a script while in Barbados, saying “Whatever you write, I promise it will get made.” In Zitwer’s mind, this would have led to a low-budget film set in Barbados. Instead, the grimy story of Vampire’s Kiss was born: a tortured black comedy about a man who is convinced that he’s turning into a vampire after an encounter with a bat. Zitwer was horrified at the real-world parallels between the relationship between herself and Minion.
Originally, the part of Peter Loew was to be played by Dennis Quaid, who left the film for Joe Dante’s Innerspace. After Quaid left, the film went to Nicolas Cage, a change that now seems like it was destined to be. It certainly feels impossible today to imagine anyone else inhabiting the persona. While most critics dismissed Cage’s over-the-top performance, some did recognize what he was doing. Pauline Kael called the performance “airily amazing,” writing that Cage was doing “way-out stuff that you love actors in silent movies for doing.” Kael nails Cage’s portrayal of Peter Loew directly on the head. Even today, now that Vampire’s Kiss has garnered a cult fandom, many still consider Cage’s hammy performance bad in a charmingly ludicrous sort of way. When watching Cage’s performance today, there’s nothing bad or unintentional about what he’s doing, and Cage still cites it as one of his favorite creative endeavors. Cage truly understands the haunted, ugly persona of Peter Loew and goes to every required height to portray his descent into madness. Peter Loew is a monster from the opening scene of Vampire’s Kiss. Like Taxi Driver, this film understands that the protagonist of the story is a deeply disturbed individual whose grasp on sanity will only slip out of his fingers faster with each passing minute. Loew is a man in power who hates what he’s become so much that instead of facing it head-on, he creates an entirely new monster to distract and absolve himself from the real-world damage he inflicts on the people, mostly women, around him. The monster he fixates on is a vampire. His mind is haunted by a spectral vampiric figure (Jennifer Beals) who lures him back into the shadows every time he tries to escape, whispering in his ear after sucking his blood that he “chose her.” He’s doing it all to himself.
Although Joseph Minion claims that the inspiration for the story came from his supposedly unhealthy relationship with Barbara Zitwer, the film doesn’t once side with Loew, understanding what the character himself won’t accept: that he’s already a monster, even without the supernatural help of blood-sucking fiends. From the opening scenes, it’s clear that Peter Loew has a real problem with women. “You always get uncomfortable when I’m the one who says time is up,” his psychologist (Elizabeth Ashley) notes after their session in the film’s opening wraps up. When he’s not confiding in his psychologist or chasing after Jackie (Kasi Lemmons), a woman who is obviously too good for him, Loew is making the life of his secretary, Alva (Maria Conchita Alonso), a nightmarish hellscape as he forces her to keep looking for a specific short story contract that the agency he works for established in the 1960s, even though it’s clear that no one else cares about the contract as much as Loew claims. He needs that power in order to keep Alva terrified and in the palm of his hand. As he descends into the depths of his id, Loew’s terrorization of Alva becomes more open, going so far as to scream her name from his office…when she doesn’t come running like an obedient lapdog, he runs out of his office, jumps on her desk, and bellows “There you are!” before chasing her down the hallway while she cries for help that never comes.
You’d think that actions as blatantly predatory and abusive as that would get Peter Loew a one-way ticket straight out of the building. Instead, the entire incident is laughed off at a board meeting while his colleagues gently chide him for his “eccentric” behavior. Perhaps a story element like that may have seemed unbelievable in 1989. How on earth could a professional literary agent act that way and not lose his job? Watching those events play out in 2021 is just a bitter reminder of how often something like that really does happen in a workplace of the real world.
Even when Peter is friendly with Alva, it’s nothing more than a veiled predatory excuse to lure her back into his grasp, as clearly displayed when he finds out she’s called out sick on a Friday, goes to her house, and coaxes her back to the office, promising her that everything is forgiven. She called out sick specifically to get away from him and his constant berating of her completely human inability to find an obscure contract from decades ago. Once he’s coaxed her into the taxi cab, he takes off his mask and makes it clear that he’s still going to force her to find that contract no matter what. The monster didn’t go anywhere. The only way Alva ever seems to be able to ward off Loew is when she threatens him with violence, claiming to have a gun like it’s Peter’s own personal form of garlic or a crucifix. Peter even whispers, “Don’t you want to use your gun, Alva?” after she flees from one of his many public freakouts in front of her. Deep down, he’s always hoping Alva will follow up on her promise and end his pathetic life, something he’s clearly too afraid to do himself.
But no one will kill poor Peter; instead, his personal vampire demon continues to haunt him, stealing him away from dates with Jackie and making him more and more like a vampire with each passing night. He eats cockroaches, upends his living room, and turns his couch into a makeshift coffin. As Peter gives in to the darkness, Cage’s performance becomes increasingly surreal. The Silent Actor quote from Pauline Kael hits home as we watch Peter stalk his way through an underground club, his shoulders arched, his eyes wide, and his face frozen in a pained vampiric grin. His homage to Max Schreck in Nosferatu is undeniable; in fact, Peter is even watching the film in his apartment at one point, just in case the love letter to Murnau’s horror masterpiece wasn’t clear enough from the performance.
By the film’s conclusion, Peter Loew has transformed into a truly pathetic creature. After assaulting Alva, he thinks he’s part of a legion of the undead because the blanks in her gun, one he thought was loaded with real bullets, didn’t kill him. He even murders a woman thinking he needs to drink her blood or he’ll wither away to nothing. He runs into the woman he’s convinced turned him into a vampire; when she rejects him, her boyfriend has Peter thrown out of the club she was dancing at, ignoring his protesting screams that she’s a creature of the night just like the one she supposedly turned him into. He wanders the streets, blood all over his face, rejected by both humanity and the monsters he thought wanted him for themselves. He fantasizes a final meeting with his psychologist, who happily announces to him that he’s cured and cheerily absolves him of all his sins as he admits to rape and murder as if these crimes were the equivalent of spilling milk or breaking a vase. The forgiveness he receives in his mind isn’t enough to save him from Alva’s brother, though, and when Peter returns to his apartment, he’s stabbed through the heart with the wooden board he’d been dragging all over the city. He dies pathetic and alone, bleeding to death underneath his makeshift coffin. It’s a fitting end for Peter: it’s the ending he was chasing for the entire running time of Vampire’s Kiss, but only after destroying so much for the people around him. Although the Washington Post’s Hal Hinson considered Vampire’s Kiss to be “incoherently bad,” he did acknowledge that Cage’s performance was a kind of “scorched earth acting” and “the most flagrant scenery-chewing [he’d] ever seen.” The scorched earth approach is exactly what Cage was going for, and it’s the only thing Loew accomplishes by the time credits roll.
Years later, it was Wolf’s turn to emerge from the shadows. While Vampire’s Kiss was birthed from a personal exorcism of Joseph Minion’s demons, another young screenwriter was working his way up the industry ladder. Wesley Strick was building up a repertoire as a script doctor, working on screenplays for blockbuster movies like Tim Burton’s Batman Returns. In 1992, he was approached to rewrite the first draft script for an upcoming vehicle for Jack Nicholson and Mike Nichols. The film was Wolf, and the original script was written by essayist Jim Harrison.
According to an interview with Strick, the story goes that Jim Harrison and Jack Nicholson were buddies and Nicholson would visit Harrison at his cabin in Montana. One weekend, after a particularly intense drinking binge, they stayed up all night, stumbled outside in the light of early dawn, and howled up at the sky. They felt as though they’d been transformed. A running theme in Harrison’s work was the idea that men and their impulses were neutered by civilization and that their true potential blossomed when men accepted their raw, uncut, animal instincts. What resulted from that night was a dense, unfilmable screenplay that read more like a summary of a novel than it did an outline for a piece of film entertainment. Strick and Nichols developed a rewrite that kept the basic outline of Harrison’s original script, added characters, and found a way to make the story of Will Randall much more palatable for a wide audience.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s incredible it took this long into Jack Nicholson’s career before he played an actual werewolf. Nicholson made a name for himself with simmering, volatile madmen just waiting for the right moment to explode. With a chaotic twinkle in his eye and a dangerous smirk upon his lips, Nicholson breathed life into iconic villains such as Jack Torrance, the Joker, and even the literal incarnation of Satan in George Miller’s The Witches of Eastwick. The role of Will Randall, the literary editor turned snarling beast, was the one that Nicholson had been working his way toward since the first day he raised an eyebrow on camera. And yet, at the same time, his role in Wolf feels like a shadow of those characters.
The ugly workplace ethics of the ‘80s on display in Vampire’s Kiss were not dealt with in any way in American society, and so, like a weed, this mentality used the blind eye turned to it to mutate into a philosophy that could stand in the light of the sun without fear of burning up. People were no longer simply ignoring bad office behavior, they were embracing it, claiming it as the one true way to climb up a corporate ladder and become Top Dog, a philosophy that Wolf wears on its sleeves whether or not it means to do so. Will Randall’s workplace ethics are not as overtly violent as Peter Loew’s, but they’re much more sinister. They’re brooding and bubbling right underneath the surface.
While much of Harrison’s carnal fury was scrapped for the final product, there are elements of unbridled nature in Mike Nichols’ Wolf. When we first meet Will Randall, it’s easy to see the invisible leash hanging from his neck. “What’re you? The last civilized man?” Laura Alden (Michelle Pfeiffer), the boss’s daughter, asks him early in the film. He’s the lapdog of many in his life, including his wife Charlotte (Kate Nelligan), his colleague Stewart (James Spader), and his boss Raymond Alden (Christopher Plummer). But aside from that, it seems that he’s a good man to work for. At the start of the film, it’s clear that Raymond is about to remove Randall from his position as Chief Editor at his publication, and all of his co-workers seem insistent on walking out with him if he’s fired. The only one in the office with a thirst for blood seems to be Stewart, manipulating Randall with charm before stealing his job out from under his nose.
All it takes for things to change is the bite from a wolf to begin awakening the hungry animal inside of him. Will Randall’s transformation in Wolf is much more overtly supernatural than Loew’s in Vampire’s Kiss. Mike Nichols had a fondness for The Wolf Man starring Lon Chaney, Jr., and he wished to keep a spiritual, mystical atmosphere about the film. When Will Randall sprouts fangs and hair all over, it’s not only in his mind; the others around him notice it as well. The remains of Harrison’s script feel apparent when Randall lets go of his inhibitions at work and begins literally marking his territory by pissing on Stewart’s shoes in the men’s bathroom at work or when he harasses an alcoholic co-worker because he can smell the tequila on his breath first thing in the morning.
While it was certainly in the film’s best interest to dial back the drunken philosophy of men wanting to “shed the shackles of society,” the end result is a mishmash of Harrison’s unbridled man of the wilderness and Strick’s more thoughtful, subdued take on the character, with a coat of Nichols’ love for Universal Monsters to help wash it down. Loew’s vampiric instincts are frenzied and uncontrollable. Will Randall is composed and calculated in his workplace rampage. He’s more than a parasite, he’s a predator. His newfound powers let him smell blood in the air and he circles his prey methodically until going in for the kill. As he discovers that Stewart is both trying to steal his job and having an affair with his wife, Randall makes the clear decision to fight Stewart’s fire with his own fire instead of integrity. A key subplot of Wolf perfectly illustrates the malicious intent behind Randall’s actions. After he finds out he’s losing his job to Stewart, Will begins gathering up all the authors he’s ever worked with, claiming that he’s going to start his own publishing house and bring the most successful writers with him. It’s a bold move and an admirable one. Randall doesn’t need someone like Raymond running the company, especially when it’s clear that he doesn’t care for the writers at all, calling them stupid for even considering leaving the company. But when Randall and Raymond sit down to settle their differences, it turns out that Randall was only using this threat as leverage in order to get what he wanted all along: to take back his position from Stewart and remain in the company while making his colleague suffer, rubbing it in with the aforementioned marking of his territory all over Stewart’s shoes and snarling that Stewart “got in his way.”
By the end of the film, Wolf feels closer to a superhero origin story than a harrowing tale of devolution. Harrison’s ranting id creates a man drunk on the power of wild animals coursing through his blood, taunting co-workers, twisting the world to his own will, and violently acting out against his wife and Stewart after finding out about their affair. Instead of counteracting this worldview with criticism or examinations of this dark behavior, Strick’s additions shockingly seem to validate this behavior. The new script gave Randall a love interest in Raymond’s daughter Laura, using his newly kindled romance with her as a goal he’s fighting towards. While there’s some dangerous tension between the two, specifically when Laura believes that Will may have murdered his wife, it all evaporates when the story pins the blame on Stewart, who, after being bitten himself, becomes Will’s supervillain archnemesis. It all builds to a fevered battle in which Will triumphantly defeats the evil Stewart and races off into the inky black night, where he waits for his true love, Laura.
It’s funny how Wolf had just about everything going for it while the tale of Vampire’s Kiss is that of a constant underdog struggle. Wolf had a better run at the box office and received generally kinder reviews from most critics and was even able to snag a few nominations and a win for Best Writing at that year’s Saturn Awards. Yet for all of this, Wolf doesn’t have the same staying power as Vampire’s Kiss. Wolf feels like a strange chapter in the lauded careers of its cast and crew. Although its revitalized interest began in the snarky world of “So Bad It’s Good” ironic movie love, sparking endless memes of bug-eyed Nicolas Cage reciting the alphabet, Vampire’s Kiss now wears its cult film status as a badge of pride as a critical reevaluation of Cage’s acting process has swept through film culture. Nicolas Cage is a bit of an Orson Welles figure. No one knew what to do with him at the moment, but the appreciation for his craft continues to age like a fine wine that not even Dracula himself could deny.
Although everyone is quick to throw around terms like “instant classic,” it’s been proven over and over again that time is the only deciding factor in what truly defines a classic, as evidenced by these two films. Yet there’s something even more interesting going on underneath the surface when it comes to how these two films stay relevant in the present. While both movies are overtly about “monsters,” only Vampire’s Kiss truly feels like a real monster movie, even though Peter Loew’s transformation is mostly psychological.
Regardless of any other factors that may apply, there is a powerful responsibility that comes with making a monster movie. We all have monsters buried away inside our hearts and minds. Monsters are the shadows that hide in the darkest corners of our minds. They stalk our conscious minds from the depths of the subconscious, whispering sweet nothings and tempting us to stray from whatever path we’re on. A truly great monster story is one that acknowledges the eternal struggle between humanity’s desire for love and happiness and the bloodthirsty animal instincts to claim it all for oneself.
Peter Loew and Will Randall are both inherently human. This is key for both stories to work. But the screenplay, direction, and performance given in Vampire’s Kiss make it clear that even though Loew claims to want nothing but love, he’s slipped down a slope impossible to climb back up. The film understands his plight but also that he’s reached the point of no return. No matter how much he wails for acceptance, he’s nailed his own makeshift coffin shut after days of workplace torture, violence, and assault against Alva. Vampire’s Kiss is a cautionary tale that knows redemption is no longer an option for the monster Peter Loew has become. Wolf’s justification of Randall’s corrupted workplace power plays feels as false as Loew’s imagined confession and forgiveness between him and his psychologist.
You can’t make a monster movie without danger. Your protagonist either finds a way to subdue said monster and learns how to move forward in life, or they let it consume them and drag them away into oblivion. Even positive alternatives on the tales of monsters include a bittersweet recognition that the pain never really goes away. Take, for instance, Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy, a triumphant tale of overcoming a fate supposedly written in stone. In the back of the protagonist’s mind, he knows he’s still cursed to fight back the forces of darkness and never truly rest, always wondering what could have been if he had chosen differently. That sentiment feels a little false coming from a film ending with a swelling score from Ennio Morricone while Michelle Pfeiffer and Jack Nicholson stare soulfully into each other’s wolfish yellow eyes after Nicholson has transformed into some kind of Werewolf Superman. Vampire’s Kiss understood the responsibility it had been given, while Wolf didn’t take this into account. Now Vampire’s Kiss lives on, continuing to haunt the afterlife of cinema, stalking through the aisles like Nosferatu the Vampyre, always on the hunt for its next inevitable follower.
Sources Cited
- Schonfeld, Zach. “Truly Batshit: The Secret History of ‘Vampire’s Kiss,’ the Craziest Nicolas Cage Movie of All Time.” The Ringer, June 13, 2019. www.theringer.com/movies/2019/6/13/18663380/nicolas-cage-vampires-kiss-breakout-performance-30-years
- Hinson, Hal. “Vampire’s Kiss.” The Washington Post, June 2, 1989. www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/vampireskissrhinson_a0a93e.htm
- Rausch, Andrew J. “Screenwriter Wesley Strick Discusses Mike Nichols’ 1994 Film Wolf.” Diabolique Magazine. May 19, 2021. www.diaboliquemagazine.com/screenwriter-wesley-strick-discusses-mike-nichols-1994-film-wolf/
