Because you’ve been so good this Halloween season, here’s an extra movie review for writers for your candy bag. Enjoy!
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.
We can't hide ourselves behind a door and in front of a computer or typewriter (for the old-schoolers out there) and just make stuff up. We must have a well to draw from. We must have experiences to inspire us. We must know emotions and intensity to write emotions and intensity.
You see, writers are a filter. Experiences are sifted through our word processors into fantasies for others to live through as well. Writers are a prism. We take in the life we live and refract it back in other shades and colors in ways that make it both fantastic and somehow more real.
It's a truth that changes Paolo's work. And it will change mine and yours too.
It's difficult to be a prism when you intentionally block the light source. It's nearly impossible to be a filter in a sterile environment without risk.
But, not only that, we're also fragile. Our egos, or at least our personalities need validation that these projects we spend our time and pain and love and energy on are, well, worth reading, worth having created.
While attending a post-performance party thrown by the head vampire, Xenia, a stage actress with a large following (and a bit of a diva), Djuna and Paolo tell her how much they enjoyed her performance. They tell her it has left them speechless, that they "have no words."
Xenia laughs politely, then smiles and instructs them both: "Use words. Use many, many words."
Like all artists, we writers crave recognition, even if we want to remain hidden from the public by our computer screens. It's why we push so hard to get reviews (and share so many memes about getting them). Even if we don't hear them face-to-face, we want the "many, many words."
We want to know that what we devote our attention and time to actually matters to people.
After all, it's hard work being a filter and a prism and turning all this life into stories. It's only fair, right?
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