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How “Total Eclipse of the Heart” turned out to be a vampire love song

Chris Well

Eclipse? More like a STAKE through the heart…

Bonnie Tyler’s classic pop hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart” sounds like a heartbreak song for regular people. But it turns out that the song was written about vampires…

So, in 1982 Bonnie Tyler met with songwriter Jim Steinman (1947-2021) because she needed songs for an upcoming album for a new record deal. Over the years, Steinman had written a number of top radio its, but is probably most famous for his work with the performer Meatloaf.

“Total Eclipse of the Heart” was a song that Steinman had been carrying around for years. Tyler loved it and recorded it for her 1983 studio album Faster Than the Speed of Night.

Here’s why we have to talk about the song here at Monster Complex: Steinman had originally written “Total Eclipse of the Heart” it for a musical based on the 1922 vampire movie Nosferatu.

“I once worked on music for Murnau’s famous Nosferatu,” the songwriter said on his website, “and have always known that vampires would make an ideal subject for an opera or a musical. In fact, I wrote ‘Total Eclipse Of The Heart’—probably my most successful song ever—as a tribute to Nosferatu.”

The songwriter told Playbill that if anyone listens to the song’s lyrics, they’re really like vampire lines. “It’s all about the darkness,” he said, “the power of darkness and love’s place in dark.”

While I can’t seem to find online whether that Nosferatu musical actually got put together, the song was revived a number of years later for another stage musical about vampires. Steinman had written the music for Dance of the Vampires, a musical adaptation of the 1967 Roman Polanski film (which is also known as The Fearless Vampire Killers). And somewhere in the complicated staging process, he revised “Total Eclipse of the Heart” into being…a love duet.

The stage show had productions in Europe and Japan, before coming to Broadway—where it, apparently, did not go well. Wikipedia offers a very long story about the show’s complicated opening (and short run).

Of course, what’s important to our topic here is that there was a point in the process of Dance of te Vampirs that Steinman pulled in an update of “Total Eclipse of the Heart”…

“I had only a month and a half to write this whole show and we needed a big love duet,” Steinman told Playbill. “I remembered I actually wrote [“Total Eclipse of the Heart”] to be a vampire love song. Its original title was ‘Vampires in Love’ because I was working on a musical of Nosferatu, the other great vampire story.”

Oh—and it turns out that the official music video for Bonnie Tyler’s version is also all vampirey…

Bonnie Tyler - Total Eclipse of the Heart (Video)

By the way, the hit single “Total Eclipse of the Heart” became Bonnie Tyler’s biggest career hit. In fact, on the United States charts, the single spent four weeks at the top—keeping another hit that Steinman wrote—“Making Love Out of Nothing at All” by Air Supply—from reaching the top spot. Around the world, the song has sold more than 6 million copies.

In the video below, find out even more details abut the making of the hit single and the music video…

Nobody REALIZES This All Time 80s SINGALONG #1 HIT is About VAMPIRE SEX? | Professor of Rock

“Though it may not seem possible, the video is even more over the top than the song is,” notes the Professor of Rock in the video. “Add to that a cast of curious characters that include dancing ninjas, tuxedo toasters, gymnast fencers, leather-jacket rockers, high school swim team, gridiron football players, and a laser-eyed boy choir—you got one hell of a backdrop for one of the most epic showpiece singles ever written or filmed.”

Thanks to the Professor of Rock for offering the info in your video (and for inspiring this post on Monster Complex)!

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