FAQ

After a harrowing encounter with a bat in his bedroom, New York literary agent Peter Loew (Nicolas Cage) meets a woman in a nightclub. Later, in the course of love-making, Rachel (Jennifer Beals) suddenly reveals her fangs and bites him in the neck. Soon thereafter, Peter begins to believe that he, too, is turning into a vampire. He becomes sensitive to light, eats cockroaches and pigeons, buys himself a pair of plastic fangs when his vampire fangs don't come in, and turns his couch upside down so that he can sleep under it like a coffin. At work, he takes out his growing discomfort on his secretary Alva Restrepo (Maria Conchita Alonso), who knows only that she is growing increasingly afraid of her boss' strange behavior.

Vampire's Kiss is based on a screenplay written by American screenwriter Joseph Minion.

Most viewers believe that Rachel was a real person who met Peter in the nightclub and that she was not a vampire. Where they are split is on whether or not she ever went home with Peter.

Hard to tell. In the scene itself, Peter chases Alva into the basement. She pleads with him not to rape her and shoots at him with her gun loaded with blanks. That only reinforces Peter's belief that he's a vampire and can't be killed by bullets. He hits her to stop her hysterics, then rips open her blouse. She falls to the floor and he begins kissing her neck. Alva then becomes Rachel, and Peter crawls off into a corner, still fully clothed, and tests his theory that he's a vampire by firing the gun into his mouth. When it doesn't kill him, he crawls back to Alva, prods her back to consciousness, rips the crucifix from around her neck, and the scene ends. No evidence that a rape took place. Peter later admits to his psychiatrist, Dr Glaser (Elizabeth Ashley) that he "did rape someone a couple nights ago...a girl at the office." Whatever, Alva certainly feels violated.

Alva tells her brother Emilio (Robert Lujan) about Peter's attack on her. Emilio looks up Peter's address in the telephone book, and he and Alva drive over. Meanwhile, Peter is lumbering along the sidewalk, carrying a wooden stake and asking people to kill him, but they just move past him. He stops to see Dr Glaser to tell her that he wants to find real love, so she introduces him to Sharon (Jessica Lundy), the patient whose appointment follows his. However, the audience can see that his discussion with Dr Glaser is a delusion. In reality, Peter is talking to a cornerstone, his white shirt red with the blood of the woman he killed at the nightclub. As Peter enters his apartment bulding, Emilio and Alva arrive. Alva remains in the car while Emilio goes inside, carrying a tire iron. In the final scene, Emilio finds Peter lying under his makeshift couch coffin and lifts it off. Peter grabs his wooden stake and holds it to his chest. Emilio pushes it in.

It's both, but a third possibly might be "tragedy". The movie can be taken as horror since it features vampires. There are certainly many comedic scenes, e.g., Peter with his plastic fangs, eating a cockroach, and harassing Alva. After laughing themselves silly, however, most viewers find it sad to watch a man's descent into madness.

The story takes place in a large city where strange behavior is often overlooked or rationalized. For example, even though Peter browbeat Alva mercilessly, her coworkers simply called him "eccentric". Another example is where, outside of Peter's apartment, there are sidewalk performers pretending to be involved in an argument. In a city used to eccentricity and sidewalk performances, why would some man on the street pretending to be vampire be perceived as anything other than an eccentric or a performer?

The theatrical version lacks approximately 8 minutes of plot. In most cases, the missing footage is insignificant but longer dialogues with a length of one minute or a minute and a half are also missing. The UK DVD by contains the uncut version.