Nicolas Cage has never been better than he is in the pitch-black horror-comedy Vampire’s Kiss (1988), playing the role of a Manhattan yuppie convinced he’s been turned into an immortal bloodsucker. Cage acts in the film with feral sincerity, burrowing deep enough into the madness to find some childlike desire to be seen and loved. He also found the most unthinkable ways of delivering straightforward lines. “Am I getting through to you, Alva?”; “I never misfiled anything! Not once. Not one time!”. They’re inconsequential on paper, but by the sheer, weird force of how he said them, they’ve been immortalised in meme form.
Cage was born to play a vampire. Renfield, then, feels like the long-withheld fulfilment of a promise – the actor finally gets to play the biggest vampire of them all, Dracula. His performance is faultless. There’s an elegance in the Old World elongation of his vowels; a sense of camp in the way he pounces from line to line and emotion to emotion; and, most crucially, a real menace to his haughtiness. Though decades of pop culture may have rehabilitated the vampire as a tragic, marginalised romantic, it’s thrilling to see Cage return Dracula to his demonic origins.
