Songfacts®:

• "Bloody Kisses" is a rather intense song about the death of a loved one, but it's not mourning a person but rather Peter Steele's cat, Venus.
  
  The Type O Negative frontman, who died of heart failure in 2010, often laced his music with wry humor, but he really did love his cats and it seems he was serious here. Losing Venus was like a death in the family. He told Revolver: "No one wants to hear a guy who's six-foot-eight with long black hair and fangs crying about his f--kin' cat, so I had to make it extremely metaphorical."
• Running 10:56, this dirge is the title track to the third Type O Negative album. There seemed to be just a tiny niche audience for this kind of foreboding rock music, but the album got a lot of attention and went on to sell over a million copies. Steele kept his somber veneer even after it took off. There was always a touch of satirical humor in his music, but unlike most other purveyors of horror rock, he really did scare people, in part because of his striking appearance but also because he was impossible to read and had little patience with interviewers who tried. It was a sharp contrast to, say, Ozzy Osbourne, who was a lot funnier than he was frightening.