"Total Eclipse of the Heart" began as a vampire song. Jim Steinman said so himself in 2002: "I actually wrote that 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." Listen to the lyric, he said, and the lines are about "the power of darkness and love's place in the dark."
The song found its singer because Bonnie Tyler went looking for Steinman. By the early 1980s she wanted to leave the country-rock sound of "It's a Heartache" behind, and she had heard what Steinman's songs did for Meat Loaf on Bat Out of Hell. In 1982 she visited him in New York. At their first meeting, Steinman played her two of his favourite songs, among them Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Have You Ever Seen the Rain?", which she went on to record for the album. Steinman wanted her voice because, as he put it, it sounded "ravaged." When he and the singer Rory Dodd performed the song for her, Tyler said, "I just had shivers right up my spine."
They recorded it in New York in 1982 with Roy Bittan on piano and Max Weinberg on drums, both from Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band. The album version runs almost seven minutes. Rory Dodd sings the answering lines, "Turn around, bright eyes", a phrase that came from The Dream Engine, a musical Steinman wrote as a student at Amherst College.
Meat Loaf later said the song should have been his. Tyler heard the story too: "Meat Loaf was apparently very annoyed that Jim gave it to me, but Jim said he didn't write it for Meat Loaf, that he only finished it after meeting me."
The video went to Russell Mulcahy, the Australian director of the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star", the first video MTV ever played, and of Duran Duran's "Hungry Like the Wolf." Mulcahy and Steinman egged each other on. "I'd say, 'Let's set it in a school and have ninjas in one scene,' and he'd say, 'Let's have a choirboy with glowing eyeballs,'" Mulcahy recalled in the oral history I Want My MTV. "Jim is fabulously, fabulously crazy."
The school was not a school. They filmed at Holloway Sanatorium in Virginia Water, Surrey, a Victorian Gothic hospital built by the wealthy patent-medicine businessman Thomas Holloway and opened in 1885 for middle-class patients with mental illness. The last patients had left in December 1980, and the empty building was soon in demand as a film location. Its staircase and vast Gothic hall became the boarding school of Tyler's dream, where she appears in white among choirboys, fencers, gymnasts and ninjas, doves, candles and wind machines.
The single came out in Britain in February 1983 and went to number one there. In America it topped the Billboard Hot 100 for four weeks that autumn, holding another Steinman song, Air Supply's "Making Love Out of Nothing at All", at number two. It was nominated for the Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.
Steinman never gave up on the vampires. In Dance of the Vampires, the musical he wrote for the stage, the melody returned as a love duet between the vampire Count von Krolock and the young Sarah.
The video found a second life on the internet. In 2009 a "literal video" version, which replaced the lyrics with a description of what happens on screen, went viral. In August 2017, during the total solar eclipse, Tyler sang the song aboard the Royal Caribbean cruise ship Oasis of the Seas as the moon covered the sun. The official video has passed a billion views on YouTube.
The video still makes no literal sense, and it does not need to. Steinman wrote a love song for vampires, Mulcahy gave it a haunted house, and Bonnie Tyler gave it the voice that made it last. She died on July 8, 2026, aged 75, and the headlines remembered her for this song.
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