The Hunger (1983) – Review

Thanks to the hyperbolic sight of Tom Cruise in aviator shades existing to the music of Kenny Loggins, Tony Scott took Hollywood by storm after helming Top Gun, however, three years earlier, he had tried to break into movies after a career in commercials with a very different result. In practically a tonal 180 degree shift from the glossy world of fighter jets and homophonic scenes of beach volleyball, Scott instead wove a dark tale of the glossy world of vampires and homoerotic scenes of Catherine Deneuve trying to make Susan Sarandon her blood drinking bae. The result was a movie that virtually torpedoed Scott’s career before it had even begun as it was declared by critics to be an example of style over substance that proved to be emptier than my wallet the week before payday.
However, as time went on, opinion started to change and while those accusations of an overabundance of style may actually be quite valid, how else would you shoot a film that features Deneuve and David Bowie as immortal lovers seducing victims at a live Bauhaus gig?

We’re are introduced to Miriam Blaylock, an impossibly classy vampire, as she selects a couple to feed on with her equally immortal husband, John. There’s no fangs and no capes, but after seducing the couple under the guise of swinging, they produce blades from their ankh pendants, slash their victim’s throats and drink heartily from the wounds before disposing of the bodies in a handy furnace they keep on their property. Yes, it really does seems that life as one of the immortal is everything as it’s cracked up to be, except that one day, John’s usual razor-sharp, flawless bone structure seems to be looking far wrinklier than usual which understandably makes him a little nervous.
Soon, after 200 years of youth, John starts to find himself aging at an alarming rate and in a few hours his features have visibly added a couple of decades. In desperation, he goes to visit Dr. Sarah Roberts, a gerontology researcher who is researching the effects of rapid aging in primates in the hope they could pass the benefits over to humans. However, John realises too late that the promises Catherine whispered to him back in 18th century France were only half true and even though he has been granted eternal life, he hasn’t been granted eternal youth and as he continues to gets older and older, Miriam is looking to move on to another companion.
She finds it in Sarah and starts the ball rolling with long chats, a spot of seduction and a little bit of surreptitious blood swappage and soon Sarah finds herself finding food repellent despite undergoing tremendous hunger. However, once she discovers what her new life will entail, she finds herself in something of a moral bind. But while Sarah finds herself balking at a life of murder, Miriam finds that a long existence of collecting lovers who are cursed to continuously wither forever will soon bite her on her immortal ass.

Maybe the realms of the action/thriller ultimately scored huge the day that The Hunger tanked, but I for one have always wondered where Tony Scott’s career would have gone if his bewitching, vampire, anti-love story of immortal codependency had managed to score at the box office. Considering the fact that the answer would mean we probably wouldn’t have gotten the like of True Romance, Crimson Tide and the hideously underrated The Last Boy Scout, I guess that’s a scab I wouldn’t want to pick at too freely – but it is facinating that Scott’s future cinematic endeavors never even came close to approaching horror ever again. It’s a grnuine shame, because despite its rather arty facade and it’s very post-modern look at vampirism, Scott is obviously having fun with the medium in multiple ways such as Miriam and John keeping their “fangs” (read: knives) hidden in necklaces that signify the Egyptian symbol for life, or the start of the film being scored by Bauhaus singing “Bela Lugosi Is Dead” directly into the camera.
Still, that doesn’t mean that the movie isn’t absurdly stylish for literally every single frame in contains and that means that the entire movie has been doused in a look that screams New Romantic meets Goth as its ridiculously hot looking leads prowl through this twisted love triangle. The film is obviously an allegory for something, but if you were to ask me what it is, I’d have to ask you to take your pick as Scott seems dead set on pumping his debut with so many themes, they tend to start getting entangled with one another. You could argue that Bowie and Deneuve’s predatory, bohemian couple are a critique of a flashy, cultured, upper class marriage that’s shiny and alluring to witness from the other side of a club, but rotted and riddled with lies the deeper you get. There’s also a lot here about the nature of codependency as Miriam may use up her lovers, she also genuinely does have love for them, even if that means boxing up their mummified husks to spend the rest of their undying existence doomed to be stored in an attic full of billowing drapes and fluttering doves.

Elsewhere, we also see the movie dipping it’s toes even further into the alt-lifestyle by placing a same sex relationship at the forefront of the film as Deneuve sets her sights on Sarandon’s sexy scientist. In some ways, you could suggests that the movie is playfully toying with the idea that Sarandon’s lure to vampirism is a metaphor for coming out much in the same way Nightmare On Elm Street 2 went on to do, but in a far more slinky form that vaguely looks like Robert Palmer’s video to Addicted To Love.
While the critics had their own fangs bared for The Hunger’s lush style back in 1983, these days letting yourself get swept up in glossy production values is all part of the fun – especially when they prove to be sharper than Deneuve’s right angle shoulder pads. Both she and Bowie prove to be as effortlessly ethereal as you’d expect in their blood drinking roles and it’s still oddly startling to see Sarandon juggling a scientist role, a vampire/bisexual transition and a crumbling relationship all at the same time, but it’s obvious that they’ve  totally bought into Scott’s occasionally wistful, frequently brutal vision. It also helps that The Exorcist’s Dick Smith is on hand to offer up some truly extraordinary old age makeups as John leaps from thirty-something to octogenarian in the space of a single sitting in a doctor’s waiting room (we’ve all been there), and the climax that sees Miriam’s past lovers rise from their tombs to dustily lash out at the object of their doomed affection feels like the end of an E.C. horror comic re-envisioned as soft core art.

While there was a danger there that The Hunger could have met the same fate as Miriam’s lovers – sentenced to spend eternity cruelly abandoned – its appraisal means that it’s risen from its resting place in a much better condition that John does. Still relevant, still gorgeously creepy and still looking like a million bucks, other 80s remixes of vampire lore might have gathered up the plaudits, but the weightier The Hunger feels more at home with other, similarly stylish fare such as Paul Schrader’s Cat People remake, or even Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
You thirsting for stylish, sexy vampires caught in a literal thirst trap? Hunger no more.
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