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.
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