BEST POST MODERN VAMPIRE FILM
The Vampires of The Hunger Haunt Eternity in Endlessly Considered Glamour

A little hydrogen peroxide will get that right out.

Photo: MGM/UA Entertainment Company

By Rina Nkulu
Vampire Week

Tony Scott’s The Hunger, his 1983 adaptation of Whitley Strieber’s 1981 book of the same name, opens in the most perfect way a vampire movie can: Catherine Deneuve’s Miriam Blaylock and her husband, John (David Bowie), are cruising for snacks in a goth nightclub, Bauhaus is performing “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” everything is glowing blue and cloaked in shadows. Miriam’s smoking a cigarette in a pillbox hat and cat-eye frames, John’s in a tailored black shirt with a stand collar and teashades. Strobe lights shrink into the reflections of their sunglasses. The pair spots a couple dancing together and all they have to do is wave. Soon, the woman’s leather jacket has been pried open to expose more neck and more collarbone; the man’s T-shirt collar has been cut off to reveal the same. They look a little less polished, and a lot more vulnerable. After slashing their victims’ throats with blades hidden in matching golden ankh pendants, John and Miriam drink them up and immediately burn the remains in a basement incinerator. Clean eating.

The Hunger was Tony Scott’s feature film debut after 15 years of making commercials for his brother Ridley Scott’s production outfit. Reviewers decried its slickness, but never failed to make note of its incredible sense of style. Scott enlisted master costumer Milena Canonero, of A Clockwork Orange and The Shining, who imbued the Blaylocks with a relentless cool. The word “vampire” is never once uttered in the film; every little thing hinges on knowing it when you see it. Thus, the Blaylocks check a multitude of boxes that one would expect from immortals of a certain class position: They have an enormous Manhattan townhouse filled to the brim with antiquities once-contemporary to them, they give private classical music lessons, they spend their days “mostly idle” in head-to-toe couture. (Deneuve was outfitted by friend and collaborator Yves Saint Laurent.) They wear what looks good and do what feels good, and once a week, in order to sustain their lifestyles and lifespans, they feed on human blood. Everything feels apparent in the film’s supernatural, slightly knowing sense of chic.

At the beginning of the movie, John is beginning to find that Miriam’s promise of eternal life is true, but the guarantee of eternal youth holds only for her. Catching a glimpse of himself in a Polaroid, he notices some new wrinkles, not in his crisp beige suit but in his face. In just one day, John ages 170 years — courtesy of the excellent special-effects makeup done by Dick Smith, of The Exorcist and The Godfather — unknowingly doomed to the same fate as Miriam’s previous lovers: mind intact and body rotting, locked away in a coffin in the attic. In a last-ditch effort to find something resembling a cure, he pursues Dr. Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon), a researcher studying rapid aging in chimpanzees.

Bowie does a lot with his limited screen time, and John’s decay is wonderfully grotesque. As his age catches up with him, his movements grow clumsier, everything once-instinctual becomes torturously labored. He hesitates to draw his blade in a men’s restroom. He tries to kill a roller-skater in Central Park but only manages to cut him. When he does claim one last victim — one of the couple’s classical music students (and Miriam’s intended replacement for him) — he makes a big, sloppy mess of her. As his youth slips away, so does his power. And you can see it: The sleek, strong lines of his double-breasted jacket, one of inscrutable age that he wore as a young man just the day before, seem to rumple and collapse under the weight of his circumstances. So quickly does he become a withered old man in a withered old suit, pathetically begging his partner of 200 years for one last kiss.

Though Sarah initially dismisses John as an old crank, she takes him seriously after witnessing him age multiple decades in two hours. But it’s too late. After John is laid to eternal restlessness in the attic, Sarah shows up feeling guilty at the Blaylocks’ front door, where Miriam casts a glamour spell. The next time that Sarah shows up on that doorstep, she doesn’t really know why she’s there, but Miriam invites her in anyway. Sarah peers around and lingers in front of a sculpture. “This is real, isn’t it?” she asks, to which Miriam responds, yes, it is 2,000 years old. “You’ve got so many beautiful things,” Sarah goes on to say, and Miriam’s response doesn’t warrant any questioning: “Most of it comes from my family.” After living through centuries of trend cycles, it’s easy for one’s tastes to become frighteningly refined.

The two women talk over glasses of sherry. Miriam’s in a structured black dress with shoulder-pads and a plunging neckline, hair sculpted into a perfect chignon; Sarah is in a blazer and a plain white T-shirt. At some point, Sarah takes the blazer off. She seems a little overwhelmed, though not unnerved, by this beautiful woman and all her beautiful things, by the ankh pendant resting between her breasts. Miriam sits at the piano and plays the Flower Duet from Léo Delibes’s Lakmé, bluish, diffuse light comes through the sheer curtains and bounces off her jewelry. It gives her a cold, glimmering aura — everything about Miriam and her surroundings is a reflection of 2,000 years of practice, an opulence only attainable with an excess of time.

When Sarah asks Miriam what she does in her leisure and Miriam says, “My time is my own,” Sarah fantasizes out loud for a moment: “That’s great,” she says. “Plenty of time for your friends, lots of lunches and dinners, cocktail parties at the Museum of Modern Art …” She lounges in a chair behind the piano and listens. The sleeves of her T-shirt are rolled up, she isn’t wearing a bra, you see the smallest glimpses of some nondescript post earrings and a smart-looking watch. Her look is emblematic of the increasingly-casual ’80s, her fantasies are those of the proto-yuppie who’s not quite there yet but definitely on her way.

Sarah asks if Miriam is lonely, now that her husband is away, then spills sherry on herself. Miriam helps Sarah take her T-shirt off, and the two have sex, Miriam giving Sarah the gift-curse of everlasting life in the process. At dinner that evening with her boyfriend, Tom Haver (Cliff DeYoung), Sarah is unfocused and shaky, barely able to look at him. She stares at women swimming in the adjacent building’s pool. She orders a rare steak and can’t eat a single bite. And she’s wearing an ankh pendant of her own. Tom is immediately suspicious: “You just met her and she gives you a present?” he asks, and Sarah is immediately defensive. “She’s that kind of a woman. She’s European.”

At night, Sarah is restlessly, ravenously hungry, vomiting nonstop. Tom forces her to get a blood test, and they find two different strains of blood fighting for dominance in her veins. One is nonhuman and “stronger than ours,” and when Sarah asks who’s winning, there is no response. A furious Sarah storms over to Miriam’s building, clammy-skinned and slightly delirious in a weakly billowing trench coat. Miriam is honest about her “gift,” the fact that the second strain of blood is hers. “You belong to me. We belong to each other,” Miriam says, as she has repeatedly done for centuries. (There’s an older interview with the vampiric designer Rick Owens that I think about a lot, published in DM Magazine in March 2002. He’s asked about “the persistent allure of vampires” and responds: “Well, we know it’s about sex. Most everything is. The idea of devouring, consuming, possessing someone we desire.”)

Sarah flees, but, experiencing a supernatural withdrawal, soon returns sweating through her clothing. Miriam then initiates her into the ranks of the immortal aristocracy, her baptismal drink coming from Tom when he shows up at the townhouse looking for her. Sarah must get used to the role of Miriam’s lover. “Soon you will forget what you were,” Miriam says. As the two kiss, Sarah rejects Miriam’s “gift,” reaching for the ankh pendant and stabbing herself in the throat, her blood spurting into Miriam’s mouth. Miriam begins another mournful march into the attic, but as she lays Sarah down, wood creaks, doves fly, and the rest of her legion of undead lovers climb out of their coffins to confront her. She screams in horror as they descend upon her in a flurry of rotting limbs and tattered fabric, tulle veils and lace skirts falling apart as they grab at her.

Fashion loves vampires and vampires love fashion. Like Harry Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness and Jean Rollin’s Fascination before it, The Hunger depicts both a designer’s ideal subjects and ideal clients: undying, inhumanly beautiful beings who possess endless time and money. (Alexander McQueen’s Spring/Summer 1996 collection, best-known for featuring a clear bodice full of live worms, was named after it.) The Hunger stands apart in how immediately seductive its modern-day vampires were — the look and feel of the film directly influenced the aesthetic of Propaganda, Fred H. Berger’s foundational goth zine. It’s fun to imagine how these supernatural elites adapt to each era; if your body remains forever young and your mind contains an endless number of referents, the distinction between contemporary and retro and vintage and even antique ceases to matter when you’re sustained by an infinite supply of new blood.