Released in 1995 by Paramount Pictures, Vampire in Brooklyn holds an unusual place in Craven's oeuvre, the vampire film resurgence of the 1990s, and in the filmography of its leading man, Eddie Murphy. On its release, just before Halloween, when horror films traditionally receive increased attention, the film barely managed to attract an audience—eventually recouping just $20 million dollars against a budget of $16 million—and earning many negative reviews. Murphy's career had been hamstrung by such previous, commercially unsuccessful projects as Beverly Hills Cop III (John Landis, 1994) and Harlem Nights (Eddie Murphy, 1989). Vampire in Brooklyn would not be the blockbuster that Murphy presumably hoped for, with The New York Times noting that his shift into the horror genre was an indicator of further decline: “Eddie Murphy as the living dead: that's not a bad description of his career, a situation Vampire in Brooklyn is not likely to change.”

However, Craven had also suffered from the vagaries of critical and commercial responses to his film work over the last decade, although, unlike Murphy, the social commentary that had punctuated his early work had not necessarily been diminished. In describing the subtext of The Last House on the Left (1972), Robin Wood summarised that not only was the commentary obvious, but it was also inescapable: “The film offers no easily identifiable parallels to Vietnam […] Instead, it analyzes the nature and conditions of violence and sees them as inherent in the American situation. Craven sees to it that the audience cannot escape the implications.” Indeed, a constant theme of Craven's work could be argued to be that the on-screen horrors are secondary to the social commentary underneath. For instance, the nuclear test is far more barbaric in and of itself than the mutants it creates in The Hills Have Eyes (1977), just as the conspiracy of silence in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) proves to be even more harmful, in the long-run, than the return of the film's iconic killer, Freddy Krueger, to slaughter a handful of teenagers. Craven's output in the late 1980s and early 1990s had continued this trend, with Shocker (1989) taking on the barbarity of capital punishment through the avatar of a killer who cannot be successfully executed, thus maintaining his profile and legend and leading to further trauma.