The Hunger (1983)

In all the years I’ve spent not watching ‘The Hunger,’ despite all of the reasons I should have seen it (the David Bowie, the Bauhaus, the 1983 of it all), I somehow missed the fact that it’s a Tony Scott film.  In fact it's his first feature-length film and his first for Hollywood after a long stint directing commercials in Britain.  He was part of the wave of British directors that found success in Hollywood around that time alongside his older brother Ridley Scott, Alan Parker, Hugh Hudson, Adrian Lynne, and others.  Although he’d done a number of shorts this was his first piece of longform narrative fiction and unfortunately it shows.  It’s got style to spare and each individual shot and scene are amazingly constructed but as a story it falls rather short and once more we have a vampire film that falls apart at the end.

The movie is based on the book of the same name by author Whitley Strieber, who in certain circles is far more well known for writing the book Communion.  It was adapted by James Costigan and Michael Thomas, the first of whom had been writing for tv since the 50’s and the second of whom was just starting out and would follow this up with ‘Ladyhawke.’  It stars Catherine Deneuve, who’d long since become a central figure of French cinema, David Bowie, who had been David Bowie for some time by that point and would continue to be David Bowie for decades more, and Susan Sarandon, who eight years removed from ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ was a well-known actress but wasn’t quite Susan Sarandon yet.  Dan Hedaya shows up in a minor role and Willem Defoe has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it minor role.

The approach this movie takes towards vampires is an interesting one.  The actual word is never uttered but it doesn’t really have to be.  They aren’t hurt by the sun, there’s no indication that garlic or crosses hurt them, and the stake through the heart thing never comes up.  These vampires also don’t have fangs or nails to get access to the blood, instead preferring some decorative ankhs they wear around their necks that end in short blades.  They do have greatly extended lifespans, have to regularly drink blood, and have the usual vampire whammy that I’m starting to recognize as the very useful tool that is it for screenwriters to stitch plot points together.  How do we get from point A to point B?  Uh, the vampire uses their mind powers to get the character to do something?  Bingo, problem solved.

The central conceit about how ‘Our Vampires are Different,’ aside from acknowledging that since the vampires are played by some of the sexiest people to ever live they are also super sexy in-universe, is that there’s really only one vampire, the character of Miriam played by Deneuve, and everyone she turns are only temporary vampires.  They get a few centuries of the good vampire life before rapidly aging and becoming desiccated quasi-corpses she stores in boxes up in her expansive attic where they’re still awake and alert but unable to move.  The first half is watching as her current companion John, played by Bowie, starts to age and tries to do something about it by visiting Sarandon’s doctor character, Sarah Roberts, currently doing the rounds promoting her new book about the link between sleep and aging.  The second half is watching Miriam attempt to turn Sarah into her new companion and how that doesn’t end up going great.

My biggest problems with the movie stem once again from introducing some great ideas and then just never doing much with them.  The central conceit, that an ageless vampire keeps creating temporary companions, loving them for centuries, then tearfully sealing them up to suffer for thousands of years as conscious but unmoving corpses, is fascinating for what it says about Miriam’s character.  Although she cries and seems genuinely upset when she realizes that John is starting to age she immediately starts paying attention to Sarah and turns her mere days after boxing up poor John.  This has happened before and she fully intends for it to happen again.  It’s never even clear that she can’t kill her companions instead of imprisoning them, the ways she talks about it it seems she just doesn’t want to.  Couple that with the fact that we see her commit murder on screen a couple of times and carefully feeds Sarah’s boyfriend to her and this is not a great person we’re talking about.

Which would all work really well in justifying Sarah’s rejection of the offer of eternal life but none of that’s ever really connected.  Technically Sarah could have probably put all the facts together to figure out what happened to John and how it’s connected to what’s going to happen to her but the movie never really interrogates any of that.  It’s like the first and second halves are connected by the character of Miriam and vampirism and that’s about it.  Once we get to the sexy lesbianism the movie doesn’t really want to focus on anything else.

Which is a shame because once the movie stops teasing it and fully commits to it the lesbian angle takes over the entire movie.  Which in 1983, sure, that’s going to be the headline-making part of the story, and kudos to Sarandon for fighting to make it as explicit as it needed to be for the story to make sense, but it comes at the expense of giving any kind of depth to the relationship between Miriam and Sarah.  For the time it was such a taboo topic that you can tell the movie is paying so much attention to just the existence of lesbianism that it doesn’t bother using that existence to further any storytelling ends.  It’s like it’s so distracted by the sexy that it forgot the rest of the plot exists.  The movie does do a pretty good job of showing Miriam and John’s life together, what it’s like and how it works, and although we do see Miriam’s seduction of Sarah and while Sarah certainly seems into it that’s about all about her that we get.  Once the vampire stuff comes into it she’s just portrayed as a jonesing druggie and her eventual rejection of Miriam basically comes out of nowhere.

In fact infamously the ending doesn’t really make sense, and now that I’ve seen it I agree with Sarandon’s take that it should have ended with her character refusing to drink any more blood and dying while Miriam continues on, forever.  Instead what happens is that Sarah’s boyfriend comes to Miriam’s looking for her.  He’s told she’s upstairs where he finds a collapsed, hysterical Sarah who tells him to go away.  He doesn’t and eventually Sarah uses the ankh now around her neck and kills him.  She appears downstairs to Miriam, blood covering her neck and chin.  They talk and start to kiss when Sarah stabs herself in the throat and forces the blood into Miriam’s mouth.  She then collapses to the floor and is carried upstairs by Miriam, apparently to be placed in one of the boxes, because since she stabbed herself she can’t recover?  After the entire house inexplicably tips at an angle the boxes shift and suddenly all the undead corpses are up and around and shambling after her.  She runs away, falls over a railing and down to the ground floor, where she’s suddenly thrashing and rapidly aging.  The corpses all turn to dust and after a brief Dan Hedaya scene we’re somewhere else where a fully recovered Sarah is now the prime vampire, apparently, sexily hanging out with a young couple while a desiccated Miriam is stuck in a box, yelling Sarah’s name.

None of that makes sense and none of that is a satisfying payoff.  That’s just ‘Daughters of Darkness’ all over again.  None of that was set up earlier.  Is the idea that vampires can’t feed on other vampires?  Is Sarah going to get a few hundred years and then die, or is she somehow the new Miriam?  If John knew he was eventually going to age and die why did he wait until he started showing the signs of it to go looking for scientific help?  When you start nitpicking the logic of the plot it means the movie has let you down elsewhere, and primarily with this movie it’s the characters.  If you took all of the various shots of blowing curtains, fluttering candles, artfully staged tableaus, and instead took that time to establish motivations and actual characters this movie would have connected with me a lot more than on a stylistic level, which admittedly is great.

It's also goth as hell, which needs to be acknowledged.  By 1983 the goth movement was at the height of its powers.  You don’t get Bauhaus to sing ‘Bela Legosi’s Dead’ while the characters dance at a goth club to open your movie without knowing exactly what you’re doing.  Goth culture is bisexual as all get out, so it works for that too.  Also you’ve got David Bowie right there.  My little teenage goth self would have eaten all this entirely up.

In the end this movie was fine but didn’t really work for me.  The ideas and setups are all there for a pretty interesting vampire story focusing on the eternal vs. extended life thing, maybe expanding the part of Sarah where she really wrestles with the morality of it all, maybe focusing on John as he struggles with losing his youth and then embracing it before the end, or maybe really digging in to what it might be like inside Miriam’s head, how absolutely bonkers insane you must be after thousands of years of acquiring and then storing lovers and companions and dragging their still-living corpses along with you from century to century.  Any of these would have been a better story but Tony Scott movies are primarily known for their visuals, and that’s where all of the attention was paid.  I’m glad I finally watched this but a little disappointed that the movie is almost entirely style over substance, even if it looks as good as this does.