I had been meaning to watch The Hunger for a while ever since I saw its poster art for the first time. It’s immediately eye-catching in its style and simplicity. With its name and look, you can immediately tell it’s a vampire movie with David Bowie and Susan Sarandon. However, it’s also mysterious enough that I didn’t really know what to expect when I decided to watch it. What I did end up seeing was something that was rather unique and that used storytelling techniques that are far less common these days.

Plot

Pardon the redundant phrase, but let me be honest. There’s not really much of a plot to The Hunger. There are certain character arcs that progress and conclude. Yet, there’s nothing really in the form of a detailed storyline.

If you look up the synopsis on IMDB, you won’t get an accurate description either: “A love triangle develops between a beautiful yet dangerous vampire (Catherine Deneuve), her cellist companion (David Bowie), and a gerontologist (Susan Sarandon).” While Miriam (Catherine Deneuve) is indeed a beautiful and dangerous vampire accompanied by her companion John (David Bowie), the elements of a love triangle never really manifest. When suggesting there’s a “love triangle,” usually there’s a conflict between two specific sides. Here, Sarah (Susan Sarandon) doesn’t interact with John after she’s met Miriam, so the triangle never really takes shape. If anything, the movie is mostly an allegorical representation of drug addiction.

What does happen is Miriam and John kill a few goths after a night out at a club, relishing their immortality. Only, John starts to lose his hair and begins to feel the weakness of age after Miriam notices Sarah on television, discussing her new book and scientific theories about aging. It’s never explicitly said, but it’s implied that the source of John’s immortality is not just drinking blood, but Miriam’s affection for him. Through a few flashbacks, we learn that John met Miriam several hundred years ago and she turned him into a vampire with the promise of everlasting love for him. Now that she’s found some new young thing that she’s interested in, John rapidly begins to age and decay. When he finally becomes too old to move on his own, she confines him to a coffin in the attic of her home with many of her other previous lovers she’s had over the centuries.

With John indisposed, Miriam has moved on to Sarah and puts her under her spell with the intent of transforming her into a blood-sucking creature. With a very strategically placed bite to her arm during a sensual vampiric sequence, Sarah very soon begins to go through the rough side effects of becoming a vampire. The bitemark itself resembles that of an infected spot a heroine addict might have after too many needle injections. Likewise, the behavior of Sarah mimics that of someone who is addicted to a drug as well.

That’s more or less the overall sequence of events without getting into the details. The horror of the film is mostly around how the main characters are willing to do terrible things in order to satiate their bloodlust and helplessness. It’s a character drama without getting too overly complicated or treading into something as familiar as a love triangle trope.

What Makes it Special?

The Hunger comes across as a unique vampire movie for a few different reasons. There’s a lot of weird charm to it to make up for the lack of a plot. The story behind who Sarah was or why her research was important never really culminates in anything significant. We also don’t get many glimpses into who John or Miriam are beyond their affinity for music. These are things that I think, if done properly would have been nice to have, but the lack of them adds a little mystery as well. You can view it as an overall positive or negative and I wouldn’t say either perspective is wrong.

It’s a film that doesn’t have an agenda, without coming across as aimless. If anything, it seems like a piece of art that is attempting to praise or respect the artists or specialists of their own trade, while showing how addiction can destroy the most refined and respectable individuals. This I see in David Bowie’s character in particular.

David Bowie was able to project a distinct amount of eloquence in any role he had, even when he’s got blown out hair and has a massive codpiece in tights while surrounded by puppets in a Jim Henson movie. Bowie is the perfect pick for a vampire because it’s the type of horror creature most recognized as something posh and refined. It’s part of the vampire charm for them to be attractive aristocrats with their monstrous nature hidden underneath. So, when we watch John engaged in playing his cello alongside Miriam and a young violin prodigy, we get a glimpse at his pleasure in the arts, as well as understand his personal tragedy when his hunger ultimately causes him to kill an innocent.

The Hunger was directed by Tony Scott, who may not quite have had the phenomenally artistic eye of his brother Ridley, but he was still capable of creating films with some impressive visual aesthetics and decent action scenes. The Hunger is a slower film than some of his more recognized films like Top Gun or Days of Thunder, but there are still some shots where things are close up and edited quickly that manage to raise the tension without losing focus. If there was something that Tony Scott was really good at, however, it was creating movies that would be embraced by certain sub-cultures. Top Gun went over well with the gay community for obvious reasons, for example. Likewise, The Hunger has become something of an iconic film for the goth community. Within ten minutes, you’ll understand why.

One of the things I enjoyed the most was just how the film was willing to hint at things and leave them ambiguous. For example, there’s vampire lore in every vampire movie because the rules around how vampires work often changes from story to story, even within the same franchise. Are they sparkly, or do they fear running water? Do crosses matter? What about sunlight? In most cases, these weaknesses and details around the undead are spelled out so the audience is able to follow along and be able to understand the stakes (heh) that are being raised with the blood-sucking predators on the prowl. This is something that has become all too common in every type of movie these days because it seems like most filmmakers think the average audience member is too stupid to use their eyes and come to their own conclusions without being told every excruciating detail.

The Hunger, however, tends to just show certain details without getting too deep into specifics. For instance, the vampires each wear an Ankh necklace that has a small hidden blade within it, which they use to slice open the throats of their victims. Why not just use their fangs? Well, because they don’t actually have any. The film doesn’t make an effort to spell this out. It also doesn’t seem to make a deal about sunlight or crosses or any of the other usual things associated with them. There’s no need because the focus of the film is on the themes of addiction and the fear of death. We’re just allowed to watch and form our own conclusions about everything.

The last thing I want to call out is just how good the make-up and prosthetics look in this movie. Basic eye and face makeup on Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve look good, but the effects used to make David Bowie look older as he rapidly aged is what really caught my eye. The aging done to him looks realistic and accurate to his facial structure. You can recognize him up until the point in which he’s unrecognizable, wearing a prosthetic mask. Even when he has on the prosthetic, however, he’s still able to emote without making the effect look cheap or fake. If Guy Pierce had gotten this treatment in Prometheus, it wouldn’t have saved that film, but it would have at least removed one significant blemish that people like myself use to pummel it.

Pros

A slightly different take on vampires without getting too bloated with exposition or lore; uses subtlety to create its mythos
Make-up effects are extremely well done
Stylish look to the film

Cons

Lack of a real plot with some plot points around characters that don’t go anywhere
An ending that was clearly added after a screen test with audiences which goes against the theme of the movie

TL;DR

If you haven’t seen The Hunger, and you’re a fan of anything related to vampires, I recommend giving it a shot. I doubt it will blow you away, and it doesn’t have any sort of crazy action or horrific moments to draw you in. However, it is a unique sort of film that does some interesting things that manage to set it apart from other vampire movies.

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