How the first “serious character” Eddie Murphy ever played caused a 30-year feud
In cinema, it’s often said that there isn’t as much of a separation between comedy and horror as you may think. This is why it’s easy for someone like Eddie Murphy to fall on the wrong side of the line, even while trying his best to play his first serious character.
In the mid-’90s, Murphy’s days as the box-office conquering behemoth of the ’80s were long gone. Though his films, such as Boomerang and The Distinguished Gentleman, weren’t flops, per se, they weren’t anywhere near as universally beloved as Coming to America or Beverly Hills Cop. In fact, when Murphy tried to bring motormouthed cop Axel Foley back for a third outing in ’94, it was resoundingly rejected by critics and audiences, who recognised it as the half-assed cash grab it truly was.
It was in the wake of this failure that Murphy realised he needed to change things up, and he knew just how he wanted to do it: he’d make a horror film. He wanted to push beyond comedy for the first time and had always dreamed of playing a villain, so to him, playing a vampire in a horror movie made perfect sense. “I love horror pictures,” he once said. “I was a big fan of Wes Craven.”
So, after cooking up a script with his brothers Vernon Lynch and Charles Q Murphy about an ancient Caribbean bloodsucker who seduces a half-vampire New York City cop, Murphy took Vampire in Brooklyn to Craven. The horror legend hadn’t yet revitalised his career with Scream, and his last two movies were only minor hits. Given the chance to work with a supreme star like Murphy was too big a chance at glory to ignore.
To Murphy’s chagrin, Vampire in Brooklyn continued his losing streak. Murphy was a unique figure in cinema, both universally loved but seemingly unable to catch a break in terms of ticket sales and returns. The damp reviews put any hopes of a fire in the box office out before they could catch ablaze. Critics took issue with the film’s confused tone: was it a comedy? Was it a horror? Was it attempting to mix the two genres but doing a really shitty job of it? Well, according to Murphy, he tried his best to ensure the lead vampire, Maximillian, was frightening, but (as he is wont to do) the other characters he played, such as an alcoholic preacher and a sweary Italian-American gangster, still gave him license to be funny. In practice, though, did Murphy’s schtick make the correct tone harder to strike? You bet it did.
“I kept encouraging Eddie to play it straight,” Craven told The Virginian-Pilot in ’95. “Horror is very close to humour. The thing is, I wanted the humour in Vampire in Brooklyn to come from the story…not from Eddie. I wanted Eddie to be essentially a serious character.” The worst possible outcome would have been for the movie to come across like Love at First Bite, a 1979 Dracula parody, because that style of comedy was far too broad for his tastes.
However, Craven’s memory of the shoot may have become fuzzy, because in later interviews, he contradicted himself wholesale. In 2015, he claimed that Murphy, “didn’t want to be funny at all,” which made it hugely difficult to “get the humour into it” that he envisioned. So, which was it? Did Craven want Murphy to play it straight, or go for the yuks? Answers on a postcard, please.
Regardless of whose recollection of Vampire in Brooklyn is correct, the movie was a disaster at the time of release.
So much so, in fact, that it led Saturday Night Live‘s David Spade to make an on-air joke at Murphy’s expense. “Look, kids, it’s a falling star!” he guffawed during a Hollywood Minute segment. “Make a wish!” Murphy, who was often credited with keeping SNL from being cancelled in the early ’80s, was decidedly unamused that a place he used to call home would publicly make fun of him in that manner. Furious, he vowed never to return to SNL to host or make a guest appearance, and this held up for nearly three decades, until he and Spade finally buried the hatchet in 2019.
