On his website, Jim Steinman explains the song's inception as him imagining a "woman lying on the ground looking at the moon like a sacrifice." He was working then, according to a later interview with Playbill, on a "Nosferatu" musical. He also incorporated a line from "The Dream Engine," a previous musical he had written — "Turn around, bright eyes" (via Amherst).

Though Tyler thought of the ballad as "purely a love song," according to her remarks to Genius, for Steinman, the association with vampires continued. Years after the song became a hit, Steinman placed his song in a different vampire musical — his stage adaptation of the Roman Polanski movie "Dance of the Vampires." "If anyone listens to the lyrics, they're really like vampire lines," he said in the Playbill interview. "It's all about the darkness, the power of darkness and love's place in dark."

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