31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 20: Near Dark

Day 20: Near Dark (1987), dir. by  Kathryn Bigelow

Streaming Availability: MovieSphere, whatever the heck that is

Vampires are the upper class of movie monsters. The Nosferatus are members of the nobility, old money, so elegant and refined as to be anachronistic in any era. They love big castles and tailored suits and real leather. But let's toss all that away. No cape, no veil, no art collection, and no haunted houses. In Near Dark we have a gang of dirty homeless vampires. They're scumbags barely scraping by.

And are still incredibly cool. Upper class, lower class, a vampire is always in style.

I do need to complain right now about how difficult Near Dark is to find. The DVD and Blu-Ray options on Jeff Bezos' evil website are all PAL format and Region 2. It's not available on streaming except on Jeff Bezos's evil website through a $4.99 upgrade service called MovieSphere, that I have never heard of and am not risking my credit card number for. It was on Shudder - briefly. This also means the absolutely legal, completely legitimate way I watched this movie was a terrible 480p rip. 

What is going on with Near Dark that it has been so poorly treated? This is a pretty beloved movie. Meanwhile, garbage (lovable trash, mind you) like The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf is up on Tubi and has great a Blu-Ray with a ton of special features! Near Dark is often on lists of the greatest vampire movies ever made, and the march of time has made it more obscure than a so-bad-its-good B-movie with a lot of nudity. This is a scandal.

So I do need to caveat this review by noting I did get the best viewing experience possible. The "dark" part of the title is not lying, Near Dark is a very dim movie and so a low-quality stream makes the night scenes very hard to see. I'd have enjoyed the film a lot more if the lights and shadows could have popped properly and the gloomier scenes were not reduced to a pixelated haze. I should be deep in the vibes of a Tangerine Dream score, feeling the sweaty humidity of a night where anything is possible, and instead it just looks... purple. I'm mad.

Near Dark opens with our young red-blooded truck-driving cowboy-hatted youth, Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) seeing a young woman in the distance, sucking on an ice cream cone. Leaving his two dumbass friends behind, Caleb shoots his shot and takes this girl, Mae (Jenny Wright) out to a secluded patch of nowhere in the American Southwest. Mae, staring up at the night sky, becomes philosophical. "The light that's leaving that star right now will take a billion years to get down here. You want to know why you've never met a girl like me before? . . . Because I'll still be here when the light from that star gets down here to earth in a billion years."

Caleb is not exactly against a billion years with a short-haired blonde with fair skin, so before long, he is a vampire. And he's joined Mae's crew of vampire outlaws, populated mostly by the Space Marines from Aliens. (Speaking of Aliens, eagle-eyed viewers will spot it on the marquee of a movie theater.) We have Bill Paxton as the wacky Severen, we have the great Lance Henriksen as the leader, Jesse, and his mate is Jenette Goldstein as Diamondback. Also in the crew is a little boy named Homer (Joshua John Miller), who is the oldest vampire of them all, and referred to as "the old man". These bloodsuckers are full of danger and charisma, especially Paxton who is pure chaos in this movie, he's so much fun. But they're also deeply vulnerable.

Sunlight has always been the vampire's greatest weakness. Usually they have coffins in mountain lairs, guarded by human familiars, so daily rest is not a problem. That's not the case in Near Dark. These vampires are hiding out in abandoned shit holes, spray-painting the windows of the various old cars they're stealing. They're a fun gang of hardass immortal gunslingers, but they're also constantly losing track of time and getting caught out in the sun. There's a lot of great effects work done in Near Dark to show the vampires' bodies smoking, then burning. It looks great. They fucking explode if overcooked. I love the dark burn make-up and sooty after-effects from sunlight. The vampires look like striking comic book characters, but I gather they do not smell all that great.

Also, no fangs. Why not? Nobody says the word "vampire" at any point, like they're ashamed of it. I believe this is our first movie to not mention or reference Dracula in anyway.

Near Dark is more often an action movie than a horror film. The best sequences are in the second act, especially the scene where the whole crew terrorizes a bar in middle of nowhere. They're invincible fuckers out to ruin some days and slice throats. Bill Paxton gets all the best looks, he's got a face covered in some poor bastard's blood and sunglasses, or later half-burnt while trying to kill a truck. There's a moment when this nomad vampire lifestyle looks so cool, you're indestructible, you got a found family, and the world is nothing to you. That is until the Sun comes up.

If Near Dark has a flaw, it is Caleb himself. I'm sorry, all humans reading this, but I was rooting for the vampires. Cabel cannot bring himself to kill people, and it is a constant problem. His love affair with Mae is little under sold. I get why he's down bad for her, I don't get the why she's wants him. Worse, Caleb's father and little sister return to the story, rescue him from the bad crowd he's fallen into, and magically return him to humanity thanks to a blood infusion. (How does that make any sense, really? Vampires are always drinking blood!) So the conclusion of the film is an action spectacular which is legitimately cool, but Caleb wins and turns Mae back to humanity and they all live happily ever after.

Boo. What happened to all that stuff about starlight and billions of years?

Hey, I'm unhappy with the plot choices, but Near Dark is still a special movie. All the vampires are great - save Homer, they just do not get the performance they need out of the child actor there. Lance Hendrickson and Jenette Goldstein go out in an Armageddon of fire in one last ride for glory, that's way more romantic than Caleb and Mae having to get a job or something tomorrow. There's too much cool stuff in Near Dark to not recommend it. Also this movie is too amazing for it not to have the best possible 4K restoration available everywhere, if not even a whole Criterion release. Somebody fix that.

Next Time! From homeless vampires to Yuppie vampires and back to homeless again. Vampire's Kiss.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 19: Fright Night Part 2

Day 19: Fright Night Part 2 (1988), dir by Tommy Lee Wallace

Streaming Availability: N/A (Atchway ityay onyay Outubeyay)

Superheroes do not exist, but if you're in a superhero movie, you do not care. The impossibility of a Spider-Man is not something MJ is worried about. In fiction, anybody can believe in a Batman, yet nobody believes in a man that turns into a bat. The impossibility of vampires is a core issue in most of these films. There's always a moment when the heroes have to overcome the friction of non-belief. Most of the time, characters think vampires are too silly to be possible. Even back to 1931's Dracula, Van Helsing has to overcome Jonathan Harker's credulity to save Mina. The Professor reflects "The strength of the vampire is that people will not believe in him." Decades of vampires as cinema icons only have made them more preposterous. 'You mean those old cornball movies with the funny accents? You really think that's what's killing people?'

Fright Night Part 2 is a direct sequel to the original Fright Night, starring the same lead character so it has its work cut out for it if it wants to be a movie where people do not believe in vampires again. Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale) killed the vampire next door only three years ago. Out of pure reverence to the tropes, Fright Night 2 decides Charley now believes Jerry Dandridge was was a serial killer cult leader... and somehow exploded when exposed to sunlight. We meet up with him having just made great strides in therapy, having been fully gaslit by his psychiatrist, Dr. Harrison (Ernie Sabella). Never mind how little this makes sense, the plot needs Charley in a vulnerable enough state of skepticism so that way when the next batch of vampires comes through, he's stupid enough for a movie to happen.

As a sequel, Fright Night 2 is a decent enough replay of the original. Most of the plot choices are the obvious move, they're the safe picks. Charley has graduated high school and now attends college. He's still friends with the recently-defictionalized vampire killer, Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowell). Only this time, vampires are moving into Peter Vincent's apartment building. Replacing an alluring male vampire we have a gorgeous intensely erotic female, Jerry's sister, Regine (Julie Carmen). Instead of Charley losing his friends to sensual darkness, his friends lose him, as Regine seduces our hero.

Also, things did not work between Charley and his the his girlfriend in the first movie, Amy, apparently. Amanda Bearse's face full of teeth might be on the poster since they rather cheaply reused Part 1's artwork, but she's not in Fright Night Part 2. Replacing her is Alex (Traci Lind), a serious psychiatry student, who impressively can read all 400 pages of Bram Stoker's Dracula novel in about three hours. This proves very helpful because she remembers a detail that vampires are weak to roses - which is a new one for me. I know Charley says he wants Alex, but considering how down bad he is for Regine, this may not be working. The one time he's really into making out, it's because Regine is resting on the car in a blue dress with a lot of cleavage, magically impressing Charley with her sexual energy.

I mean, Regine is the kind of undead babe that catches you asleep, kisses your neck, and very slowly scrapes one fang against your flesh. Nobody does foreplay better than that. She's also a fantastic dancer, so talented she even steals Peter Vincent's show and becomes the new host of the show Fright Night. They do not give Julie Carmen as much material as Chris Sarandon, so she makes an inferior villain, but she's solid as a sequel monster.

Also speaking of negatives, Fright Night 2 does not have the same special effects wizardry that the first one did. That had all these great transformations and melting scenes, it was a feast of Eighties horror tech. Fright Night 2 eventually gets its huge gore moments, and they are great, but in terms of monsters, you get one surfer dude werewolf. Later on, holy water pours out a dude's throat, and the insect-eating Renfield of Regine's crew (Brian Thompson) dies with many pounds of worms crawling out of his chest, which is fucking awesome.

That's just how things were back then, sequels get cheaper, and usually also get wackier. Fright Night 2 is not quite Gremlins 2 in terms of going for full gonzo comedy. (God, if only.) But we do now have a vampire on roller skates, that's the kind of tone we have now. Where Fright Night 1 was a winking mixture of a teen movie and horror, Fright Night 2 goes for outright gags. Vampires leave the stage with joking quips upon their death. When Charley's now-vampiric psychiatrist is stabbed through the heart, the stake does not quite get to the organ, so he stumbles around for a minutes, before he politely finishes himself off. There's also a recurring bowling alley gag. Characters always need to go bowling to feel better.

This includes the greatest scene of this movie, the vampire bowling scene. It's just vampire dudes being dudes, bowling strikes, and at one point, pulling a decapitated head out of the ball return machine. Honestly, it's heartwarming. Everybody deserves some nice clean decapitation fun.

Fright Night Part 2 is a not classic like the original. I'd take it over the remake, at least. But it does deserve better than its current status of being more or less totally forgotten. It is not available on streaming right now, possibly due to disinterest, possibly due to rights issues. This could have been a bigger movie. Fright Night 2 got lost in the shuffle when Part 1's distributor, Columbia Pictures, lost interest, and it was instead given a limited release by a company called New Century Vista, which I think was a piece of Carloco Pictures. (The story is pretty hard to follow since it requires a lot of knowledge of Eighties Hollywood insider politics that I do not have). Any hopes for a Part 3 died shockingly when New Century Vista's chairman, José Menéndez, was murdered by his two sons, Lyle and Eric which became one of the biggest tabloid stories of the late 20th century.

On the other hand, more sequels might have meant that Fright Night was going to turn into full trash like The Howling franchise did very quickly. Even I can admit Fright Night never actually needed even one sequel, let alone many. Tom Holland, the creator of the first movie has been pitching a Part 3 for decades and it's never gotten any traction. Personally, I think we have gotten as much Fright Night as you could ever want.

Next Time: We've had vampire horror, kung-fu, romances, teen comedies, blaxploitation, and even experimental art films. But have we had a vampire western yet? Nope! We fix that with Near Dark.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 18: Fright Night (1985)

Day 18: Fright Night (1985), dir. by Tom Holland (not that one)

Streaming Availability: AMC Plus

Half the reason I do these big Spooky Month reviews is to finally cross off a ton of movies on my To Watch List that I would never get around to otherwise. This year has been a goldmine: Martin, Herzog’s Nosferatu, and The Last Man on Earth have been on my radar for years. So I feel bad that today we’re reviewing a movie I’ve seen somewhere between twelve and twenty times now and already have a 100% solid opinion about. In fact, the original Fright Night could very well be my #1 favorite vampire movie of all time. I could have written this review without bothering to watch it again.

On the other hand, who can turn down an excuse to rewatch Fright Night? This movie fucking rules.

By 1985, the old run of Hammer Horror Dracula films had been hokey and lame for at least fifteen years - longer than they had ever been cool in the first place. Of course, nothing ever stays dead (least of all the undead), fashion always turns around again. If you inhabited the United States in 1985, you could not admit to enjoying Disco music without suffering the wrath of Rock'n'Roll's secret police disappearing you to a Hair Metal Black Site for reeducation. Cut to thirty years later, and Disco is a beloved classic genre with a rich history. The same would happen with vampires. What’s old and corny one decade is suddenly the tip of the spear of huge YA franchises like Buffy and Twilight.

One of the very first YA vampire stories is today's movie, Fright Night, a film that stands at the transition point between the past and future of vampire fiction. Our protagonist is the teenage horndog Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale) introduced necking with his girlfriend, Amy (Amanda Bearse) while watching old vampire movies hosted on the in-universe show Fright Night.

Oh, it is 2022, I guess I have to explain what that kind of show this even would be. Fright Night is a fictional version of horror programs that reran old B-movies, these used to be institutions on television. Just about every regional station had them, usually featuring iconic hosts like Svengoolie or Elvira. I think Joe Bob Briggs’ program on Shudder is the last surviving show of this type. Before VHS and movie rentals became common, this is how a lot of classic horror managed to find new generations of audiences. The host of Fright Night is Peter Vincent (the great Roddy McDowall), an aged star who once hunted vampires in dozens of movies, who so inhabits the character we never learn the actor’s real name. He's basically a sillier, more nebbish take on the great English vampire hunters played by Peter Cushing and Vincent Price. (Get it?)

Anyway, Charley becomes distracted from the prospect of scoring with Amy when the big spooky, very Salem’s Lot-esque house next door suddenly has a new resident. Charley’s new neighbor needs to be carried in via coffin. Good heterosexual sex is suddenly broken by the mysterious presence of two strange men, and Amy runs off in a huff. Romantic tension between the two will be a major running theme, but also a certain lack of tension.

The queer subtext of Fright Night is screaming louder than the various victims of the vampire next door, so let’s get into this. Our new villain is not a foreign sophisticate like Dracula or a bestial Nosferatu, he’s a handsome, affable seemingly normal adult, Jerry Dandridge (Chris Sarandon) who seduces just about everybody in this movie. He also has a live in “carpenter”, Billy (Jonathan Stark), who is his less affable but still relatively normal human familiar. Jerry and Billy are basically married, sharing knowing smirks and how casually resting on each other’s shoulders. But it goes further. Peter Vincent is an utterly sexless character, a strategy employed by many 20th century gay men in the public eye. (McDowall was a closeted gay man in real life.) Then there’s Charley’s cackling twerp of a best friend, “Evil” Ed (Stephen Goeffreys), whose sexuality is never made clear, but he does seem a bit jealous of Amy. That is until Jerry transforms Evil into a vampire, whispering “You don't have to be afraid of me. I know what it's like being different.” Not sure if this is even subtext anymore.

Frankly, Fright Night is another example of good human hetero sex beating bad vampiric gay sex, though it does complicate things. The most intensely erotic scene would be where Jerry seduces Amy at a dance club. I am personally obsessed with that sequence, all the neon club colors, I have the music stuck in my head right now while writing this. I love how Jerry can magically hairspray Amy’s hair between cuts. The choreography is fanstic. (This is why Dracula A.D. 1972 needed Christopher Lee on the dance floor!)

There’s also the level of sympathy Fright Night has for its monsters. This is most especially seen during Evil Ed’s heartbreaking death scene, where Peter Vincent is utterly in tears watching the young man suffer. A movie that just wanted to condemn everything queer would not have these two characters suffer together in tragedy as the older man cannot help a younger gay man.

Besides a few swings towards successful drama, Fright Night is mostly just fun. It’s a horror comedy that masters both tones so well. Jerry the Vampire in full monster form is caught scared like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar when Charley’s mom wakes up. Peter Vincent is a ridiculous coward underneath all the purple prose bluster of the character he plays. It’s a teen romp self-aware of the horror tropes it’s playing with, winking at exactly the right times just as Scream would with slasher movies a decade later.

And I cannot end without talking about what an effects masterpiece Fright Night is. This is the most impressive vampire film yet on a technical wizardry level. They all have monstrous transformations, fulling showing-off what Eighties puppetry and latex could achieve. Evil Ed turns into a werewolf for additional goopy body horror swag. 

But this is all pure ideology to me. Something you have to admit that you cannot be a fully objective critic. I grew up with this movie and Eighties films just like it, a core part of my brain was programmed believing this is what horror effects are supposed to look like. I swim and breathe in these morphs and slimes and colors, all other atmospheres are alien to me.

Which is why I think the 2011 remake’s effects are vastly inferior. And I think the remake is worse in every single way, even after giving it my best attempt at a fair review during last year's Spooky Season. But hey, I’m just me. Fright Night (1985) is a wooden stake dangerously close to my heart.

Next time! There’s a direct sequel to Fright Night that nobody ever talks about. Fuck it, Dude, let's go bowling in Fright Night Part 2.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 17: Lifeforce

Day 17: Lifeforce (1985), dir. by Tobe Hooper

Streaming Availability: Rental

The only thing anybody remembers about Lifeforce is Mathilda May as a Space Vampire Girl walking buck and indeed butt naked around London. She nudely struts in the full monty in her birthday suit bare, completely exposed, stripped, starkers, disrobed, undressed, and in the altogether. Let your monocles pop, your bowties spin, your socks get knocked off, and your wigs fly into the air as you double-take to the camera with eyes bigger than dinner plates and anime blood pouring out of your nose.

With a premise that utterly ridiculous, it is amazing how dry Lifeforce is. Lifeforce almost never winks at the audiences, and it looks awkward the few times it tries. It’s full of serious men in serious suits, very seriously discussing the matter of national security for Her Majesty’s government.  This movie is an adaptation of a book called The Space Vampires, it should be tongue-in-cheek. Lifeforce, instead, is this retro Fifties SciFi pastiche. Not since Night of the Lepus, a movie about giant adorable bunny rabbits attacking a town, has a horror movie’s grave tone been more a mismatch for its bonkers material. 

Sure, the serious men will stammer something like “She was the most overwhelmingly feminine presence I have ever encountered”. Sometimes security guards will nearly fall over in their chairs. But wow is this movie nowhere near bawdy enough for the material. Lifeforce was considerably dryer than I remembered this watch, and that is because I chose the nearly director's cut version. The theatrical version is fifteen minutes shorter and fifteen minutes better.

It is worth noting that Mathilda May’s nudist jaunt is only a few minutes of Lifeforce. It might be all you remember, but most of the film is about her disappeared, becoming a psychic body snatcher traveling from mind to mind, just in case Naked Space Vampires are not weird enough for you. This becomes occasionally amazing, such as the scene where the Space Girl possesses Dr. Armstrong (Patrick Stewart). Through Stewart’s body, she has a psycho-sexual confrontation with our protagonist, ending with our lead locking lips with Picard. (Dr. Armstrong later will have all his flesh sucked out his face, forming a kind of blood golem in the Space Girl’s shape in a truly amazing scene..)

Again though, Lifeforce is weirdly nonplussed about all this. How is it that Lifeforce’s most stiff organ is its upper lip?

Luckily for me, I do like Fifties SciFi movies, so Lifeforce is not boring. If you loved say, Quatermass and the Pit, this movie does have a similar vibe. Lifeforce spend far too much time in boardrooms until it ends on a fiery apocalypse of psychic alien chaos in London just like in Quatermass. The Prime Minister eats his secretary and we're off to the races to truly weird stuff. When Lifeforce opens a huge orchestra playing over a deep space mission to Haley’s Comet, complete with cornball narration, I am here for it.

The plot is surreal in a way that really only Silver Age SciFi ever could achieve. The Space Girl is a member of a bat-like vampire race living in the comet, who occasionally come to Earth to suck out our energy. The leader of the mission, Colonel Carlson (Steve Railsback) is trapped in a psychic hold together with the Space Girl, who is not actually a woman at all, bur rather an energy being sculpting herself to be his perfect pin-up fantasy. Carlson takes the Space Girl and two naked male vampires back to Earth, only for his space shuttle to turn into a celestial Demeter from the novel Dracula, with every crewmember dying mysteriously on the way home.

Also, those male vampires? Never hang dong on camera. (Crowd boos.)

Finding nothing but a ghost spaceship, the British government brings the naked bodies back to London. This leads the Girl to come to life, sucking bodies down to emaciated corpses (which come back to life in astonishing puppetry effects). She very nakedly escapes, spreading a fangless energy-sucking vampiric plague across England. Our heroes, including British secret service member Colonel Caine (Peter Firth), and the local Van Helsing, Dr. Hans Fallada (Frank Finlay) try to stop the plague before it overtakes us all. This all leads to a MCU-ass giant blue light in the sky pouring out of St. Paul’s Cathedral, as the aliens try to take home a rich harvest of every soul in London.

The problem for me is that again, none of these heroes are characters. A lot of Eighties SciFi was retro, and indeed, the decade was obsessed with the an imagined Fifties, considered Reagan and how they let the Beach Boys have a number one hit in 1988. But usually when the Eighties cinema was remaking the Fifties, it was not just to apply new special effects technology onto old corny stories but also to update the drama. One of the classic examples is The Thing from Another World. That starts as a goofy 1951 movie about professional men dealing with a big clumsy spaceman, and it becomes John Carpenter’s The Thing, where a gang of blue collar misfits struggles to survive the most horrible alien nightmares you could ever imagine and also their own paranoia. Lifeforce adds nudity (so much nudity) and great gore effects to a Fifties script, but misses the part where audiences want to see, you know, relatable drama. 

It’s interesting how flawed, yet wonderfully wacky Lifeforce is, considering it should have been an easy hit. It is directed by Tobe Hooper, who we last saw kicking ass in Salem’s Lot. It was written by Dan O’Bannon, whose previous credits include Alien. So you have somebody who made a great vampire movie and a guy who wrote a great space SciFi movie, and somehow their space vampire movie is sterile and strange in often unpleasant ways. I don’t think of either of these guys as dreadfully serious. O’Bannon would continue his nudism fetish with the extremely silly Return of the Living Dead. Hooper would go on to make The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, which has a chainsaw fight in a theme park volcano. Maybe these two Americans were trying to be more British than the British. 

Still, between the screaming mummies and thoroughly bonkers decisions, Lifeforce is not a failure. Nobody has made a better naked space vampire psychic virus apocalypse movie yet. I’ve been fascinated by Lifeforce for decades. Certainly not an easy movie to forget.

Next Time! Sadly, people wear clothes this time. But can a retro-flavored vampire movie be done with a little more personality? Welcome to Fright Night.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 16: The Hunger

Day 16: The Hunger (1983), dir. by Tony Scott

Streaming Availability: HBO Max

You ever start watching a movie and within the first five minutes think “holy shit, is this the greatest movie ever made”? I was in a manic state for awhile, ready to declare The Hunger the single best movie made by either of the Scott brothers, Tony or Ridley. I've cooled a bit towards a less hot take, but on the right day, in the right mood, I still could make the argument.

The opening of The Hunger is a non-linear montage of mood and feeling, erotic danger to pure horror. Goth rocker Daniel Ash of Bauhaus sings into the camera through a cage on stage. We see our beautiful vampire couple, decked out in their finest, picking up two swingers in a hot NYC club. David Bowie has on a black wig and round sunglasses. Catherine Deneuve has retro Fifties glasses and a matching smile. The tableau of a car driving over a bridge in the early morning light is magnificent.  The swingers’ home is an ivory art deco lair of seclusion. Lust and sex floats up in the air like the puffs of noir cigarette smoke in every scene. Lips meet, heavy breathes, longing. Then our heroes take out their hidden knives in their ankh necklaces, to stab victims' necks. The caged frame for Bauhaus’s music video is replaced by a monkey in a cage in a science lab, tearing its mate to pieces. The vampires make love in a shower, both perfect, both so much in love. The camera leers at a naked ass, and you’re so enraptured in bisexual allure, you don’t care who it belongs to.

The unholy curse of the undead has never looked better. Tony Scott sells it so well. John (Bowie) and Miriam (Deneuve) seem like one soul in two bodies, murdering their victims in perfect parallel. In the shower, John whispers “forever?”, knowing the answer will be “forever and ever”. They have had an eternity of nights like this, a hunger for hot blood and hotter sex that never fades. Centuries will pass, a never-ending love affair of style and pleasure.

Except all things do end. The Hunger opens by selling us entirely on the possibilities of immortality, who wouldn't want that kind of vampire life? Then cruel reality snaps it away. In the morning, John awakes alone, too early. Something has severed him from his synchronization with Miriam. There is something going horribly wrong in his body. The descent is rapid, disturbing. In the first half of The Hunger, we see David Bowie, one of the most beautiful people of the 20th century, who that point in 1983 appeared immortal himself considering how little he had visibly aged since entering public life, become reduced to first a withered old man. Then little more than a husk.

It's the kind of thing that makes you count gray hairs in the mirror after watching.

I would call the filmmaking on display in The Hunger little more than utter perfection. It is a gloriously beautiful movie, matched by creative editing. Most scenes are filmed in dark rooms with seemingly natural light coming in from outside. The film is full of silhouette and delicate light dancing in through bare windows or flowing white curtains. John and Miriam live in high luxury, the kind of home that deep pockets of old money buys. As in the opening I described, there is an impressive use of montage, cutting between scenes and to non-linear events. For instances we see John and Miriam first coupled in Ancien Régime France. Or we see Miriam, alone, in Ancient Egypt, howling as she becomes something other than human. 

Many critics at the time (or even now) found The Hunger confusing, an exercise in artistic style over the substance of story. But I’ve always contended that style is a substance all its own. And there is very little lacking in the story or substance of The Hunger. This is a great romance, this is a great horror movie.

Admittedly, this film does lose quite a lot once David Bowie decays into rather impressive old age make-up. (It is not quite convincing as real elderly flesh, but the effects are impressive for the time, and the gradual transformation is very impressive.) Miriam reveals to John that she has had dozens of mates over her thousands of years of life. She claims she loves them all, but also cannot help any of them. Their kind does not die, it suffers a horrible fate of continued decay into mummification, like poor Tithonus from Greek mythology. Replacing John is Dr. Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon), a scientist working on the mysteries of aging, who owned the monkeys from the opening. She cannot help John, but she does find the immortality she searches for – of sorts.

The Hunger also belongs in that tradition of smutty lesbian vampire movies. The second half of the film is practically a sped-up replay of Daughters of Darkness with Miriam playing the Elizabeth Báthory role. We get a deeply explicit sex scene between Miriam and Sarah, and I am not complaining about that. It is the same battle between an older, elegant European vampire bitch against a completely clueless slab of beef of a husband, in this case Tom (Cliff De Young), who never really stands a chance. It would all be a great lesbian adventure, if not for the fact that Miriam is an emotional vampire as much as a blood one. Her victims are not just the horny swingers she picks up, she’s also metaphorically eating her mates, whom she consumes and disposes of over a longer timeline.

Sarandon is great in this movie, her very short haircut is a choice I do not disagree with. However, nobody can compare to how good David Bowie is in the first half. He’s just extraordinary. There's a reason why so many clips from The Hunger were used in that recent Bowie documentary, Moonage Daydream.

The movie starts to break down more in the climax. We sort of fall into Italian horror logic as the many ghouls Miriam has sealed away in her attic come back to life to devour her. Why not become a zombie movie suddenly, it worked for Fulci’s The Beyond, after all? This is nightmarish – and features a lot of doves flapping in slow motion as in a John Woo movie – but does it make the most sense? ...not really. 

Nor do I particularly care. The Hunger is an exercise in style, after all. Why not just go full fairy tale in the end? I cannot tell you why Sarah gets to be the Lead Vampire after that. Does not really matter. Was this a beautiful journey from seduction into queer romance to disturbing body horror? Absolutely.

So therefore, The Hunger slaps so hard. The title is misleading, I am totally full after this meal.

Next Time: Nudist psychic vampires from outer space! Lifeforce.