By Ben Bussey
Halloween tends to be a time when the older, more established horror movies we often roundly label as ‘the classics’ get picked up, dusted off and sent on the rounds. It was no doubt with this in mind that our friends at PR company Fetch Publicity got in touch with us with a proposal from Warner Bros Home Entertainment to revisit a horror title from the studio’s DVD back catalogue as a Halloween special feature. This, naturally, posed quite the quandary. Warners have given us (and/or own the rights to, in many instances via their ownership of New Line Cinema) a number of the best known horror titles of all time: The Exorcist, The Shining, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Poltergeist, The Lost Boys, Beetlejuice, Interview with the Vampire, plus more recent hits like The Conjuring, Annabelle, Oculus and of course this generation’s Halloween classic Trick ‘r Treat. (And no, before anyone asks, The Devils was not among the titles offered to us.)
Perusing the long list, I pondered long and hard over which to choose. So many esteemed and iconic titles, and a fair few indisputable classics. But piling further praise on films that don’t really need the attention isn’t really our bag at BAH. I doubt I can say much about The Exorcist or The Shining that hasn’t been said innumerable times already. Better, surely, to revisit a comparatively lesser-known film that perhaps doesn’t get the attention it deserves. And so it was that my pick from the Warner Bros DVD catalogue (though an MGM production, the rights presumably sold due to that studio’s well-publicised financial difficulties) is the 1983 feature debut of director Tony Scott, and one of the most unusual vampire movies of that decade – The Hunger.
This is one of those films I vividly recall sitting up to watch on late night TV aged 12 or so, when my love of horror was really taking hold. Up to that point my experience with vampires on film was primarily Dracula (the Christopher Lee and Duncan Regehr versions) and The Lost Boys. Blood, fangs, stakes through the heart: all very crash-bang-wallop, and easily digested by my young mind. However, having also recently seen Hammer’s Twins of Evil (an enduring personal favourite) and caught clips on TV from Bram Stoker’s Dracula which had opened in cinemas to huge publicity that year, I was slowly getting some some vague grasp of the erotic overtones of vampires.
Obviously, at that age my sense of what constituted cinematic eroticism was somewhat limited; generally, I just thought it meant you got see some tits. And lo and behold, there are indeed tits within the first five minutes of The Hunger as the enigmatic and alluring David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve take a couple of new wave punks back to their fancy pad for something other than coffee. However, as these seduction scenes are juxtaposed with Bauhaus performing their eerie Goth classic Bela Lugosi’s Dead, with sudden jarring cuts both in the visual and the audio, images of screaming monkeys, and then the inevitable gruesome bloodletting as the vampires let rip not with fangs but daggers hidden inside their ankh necklaces, it’s fair to say my young self was left with what I believe is generally referred to as a confused boner. The spectacle is arousing, unnerving and bewildering – and, although it seems hard to fathom why, it all works.
Revisiting The Hunger now, it doesn’t seem quite so willfully obtuse as it once did. Once we get past the arty flourishes, it’s actually a pretty straightforward story (based on a Whitley Strieber novel, which I should point out I’ve never read). Deneuve’s Miriam is a master (mistress?) vampire of unspecified age, potentially upwards of a thousand years old, whilst Bowie’s John is her most recent companion in vampirism, converted a couple of centuries back in a time of powdered wigs. However, it seems the notion of vampirism as literal immortality doesn’t quite ring true in this world, as out of nowhere John suddenly starts ageing rapidly, with even fresh blood proving useless to stop it. We soon learn John is not the first of Miriam’s lovers to suffer this fate, and in search of a solution they become fixated on a brilliant young doctor, Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon), who is leading ground-breaking research into life extension. However, once she and Sarah meet, it becomes apparent that it isn’t simply her medical expertise that Miriam is interested in – and rather than finding John’s salvation, she may instead have found his replacement.
The Hunger, along with such others as Paul Schrader’s remake of Cat People, embodies a distinct breed of erotic horror which I’m not sure managed to endure beyond the early 80s: highly stylised, oozing with overt sexuality and moments of genuinely quite shocking gore, but also with a curiously intellectual bent. Most crucial, however – and the key reason it largely went over my head on first viewing – is that it’s genuinely adult horror, tackling very grown-up concerns about mortality, sexuality and relationships. More than once John reiterates Miriam’s early promise that the two of them would be together forever, literally forever and ever – but ultimately they both know that can simply never be, even for vampires (a word which, not for nothing, is never used in the film). That anxiety over the knowledge that, one way or another, eventually one partner must leave the other behind is something that anyone who’s ever been in a long-term relationship will be acutely aware of.
It’s not hard to read The Hunger as a midlife crisis film – in which case, it’s rather refreshing to see that it’s the woman who opts to abandon her no-longer desirable other half in favour of a pretty young lady. And looking at Sarandon here, you really can’t blame her. Equally, who could possibly blame Sarandon’s Sarah for wanting to get with Catherine bloody Deneuve? Okay, so lesbian vampires may have long since been a massive cliche, but The Hunger presents us with one of the most well-realised displays of undead sapphic desire, with as much emphasis placed on the emotional states of the characters as well as the actual, physical act of lady love. Still, it’s hard not to giggle just a little at the love scene played out to The Flower Duet from Lakmé, given that very same piece has since been used to sort-of similar effect in the now-legendary sexy mermaid sequence of Piranha 3D.
However, in the midst of all this raunchiness, there’s still no forgetting that The Hunger is indeed a horror film. The bloodletting scenes, as previously stated, are genuinely quite startling, and the finale in which Miriam’s romantic history literally comes back to haunt her is a masterclass in cinematic Grand Guignol which leaves one somewhat regretful that the late Tony Scott never made another movie in the genre (indeed, it’s very hard indeed to compute that Scott’s next directorial effort after this was Top Gun). Most happily, The Hunger also gives us some of the best ageing effects ever. As we’ve seen in many films to this day, filmmakers often struggle to convincingly age actors on screen, but the work here from Dick Smith and Carl Fullerton – given the rather nice screen credit of ‘make-up illusions’ – is tremendously effective, and one can imagine that the eternal chameleon Bowie must have been enthralled at seeing himself go through several stages of degeneration.
No, The Hunger isn’t necessarily the best film to put on in the background for shits and giggles at a Halloween party, but if you’re after something that bit more cerebral and a whole lot more unique in its atmosphere, then it most definitely makes for some good midnight hour viewing. Watch, be hypnotised – and prepare to have Bela Lugosi’s Dead on earworm for days.