Movie Reviews for Writers: Kiss of the Damned

First off, Kiss of the Damned is a brilliant and beautiful arthouse vampire film. There’s no denying that. It’s obviously an homage to the surreal, dreamlike Eurosleaze of Jean Rollin’s films. And like Rollin’s work, this flick transcends the exploitive surface plot to say something deeper and at times rather profound about humanity — through the metaphor of blood-sucking ghouls. 

Djuna is a solitary vampire who satiates her cravings with animal blood and uses her isolation to avoid her impulses to hunt. She’s part of a new world order of vampires trying to create a new way of living for her kind without the fear of being hunted. Thankfully, her job as a translator allows her to maintain her solitary lifestyle.

Enter Paolo, a screenwriter who is both rocked by and rocks Djuna’s world. Their attraction is instantaneous and undeniable. They are match and gasoline. And, wouldn’t you just know it, he’s not repulsed by the truth. Instead he welcomes her inviting him into the club. (Not a spoiler. It’s literally in the first ten minutes of the movie.)

Enter Mimi, Djuna’s sister. She’s a bit more… let’s say feral. She lives to hunt and uses sex as bait to attract her prey. And she’s the monkey wrench thrown into Djuna and Paolo’s little slice of vampiric heaven. 

When the film begins, Paolo is staying in town to get away and have undisturbed time to work on his new script. But he’s way too much in his head. Even his agent tells him that he’s too wrapped in writing something cerebral, something lifeless. Paolo treats his work as if he was above his audience in many ways. He’s too smart for them. 

After he moves in with Djuna and begins their new life together as creatures of the night, his writing improves drastically. Where he once spent too much time in his own brilliant thoughts, he now writes with visceral intensity, even to the point of replacing introspection for action, something he had previously avoided because he couldn’t write the adventure of living, just the analysis of it. 

When the agent visits, he is amazed by the change in Paolo’s work — for the better! This is something he can sell. This is something that is charged with emotion, with life. 

He learns this simple truth about what writers need. 

Writers must live. 

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