The Hunger is a 1983 English language
horror film. It is the story of a
bizarre
love triangle between a doctor
(
Susan Sarandon) who specializes in
sleep and aging research, and a stylish
vampire couple (
Catherine Deneuve and
David Bowie).
The film is a loose adaptation of the 1981 novel
of the same name by
Whitley Strieber, with a screenplay by Ivan
Davis and Michael Thomas.
The Hunger was director
Tony Scott's first feature film. The
cinematography was by
Stephen Goldblatt.
The Hunger was not particularly well-received on its
release, and was attacked by many critics for being heavy on
atmosphere and visuals but slow on pace and plot.
Roger Ebert, for example, described it as "an
agonizingly bad vampire movie". However, the film soon found a
cult following that responded to its
dark, glamorous atmosphere. The
Bauhaus song "
Bela Lugosi's Dead" plays over the
introductory credits and beginning. The film is popular with some
segments of the
goth subculture, and
spawned the short-lived
TV anthology
series of the same name.
The film was screened out of competition at the
1983 Cannes Film Festival.
Plot
Miriam Blaylock (
Catherine
Deneuve) is a beautiful yet dangerous
immortal creature that preys on the lifeforce of
humans, inviting a chosen few to be her human lovers, promising
them eternal life... with a price. As the film begins, her current
companion is John (
David Bowie), a
talented
cellist she married in 18th century
France.
In
the present day, they live together in an elegant New York
townhouse
posing as a Goth Rock
couple.
Before long, John begins to experience the price of his eternal
life... human companions of Miriam are doomed to suffer a living
death. Where Miriam herself is truly ageless, her human lovers,
only experienced prolonged youth for a century or two before they
begin to age rapidly, eventually deteriorating into withered,
corpse-like figures. The true horror of this
situation is that these vampire/human hybrids age but cannot die.
John begins to age rapidly and seeks out the help of Dr. Sarah
Roberts (Sarandon), who specializes in the study of aging
disorders, hoping she will be able to help restore his
health.
When John visits Sarah's clinic, she dismisses his claims of rapid
aging as
delusional. She leaves him to sit
in the waiting room, where he ages decades in just a few hours.
Sarah is appalled when she sees what has happened to John, but it
is too late to help him. On his way home, the increasingly frail
John tries to approach several men to stab them with a diminutive
pendant blade and suck out their blood, but either the opportunity
is lost or the victim is stronger than him and he has to run away.
When he gets home he finds his music pupil, the
androgynous botticellian teen beauty Alice Cavender,
practicing the violin. In a last desperate attempt to revert the
non-stop aging the now-ancient John grabs the girl from behind and
stabs her in the throat, but her blood doesn't save him from decay.
When Miriam comes home he begs her to kill him. She tells him that
she will not, and overcome by the suffering of old age he
collapses. Miriam places him in a coffin in the attic alongside
several of her other former lovers, all of whom are still
"alive".
Sarah, intrigued by the medical miracle of John's rapid aging,
comes looking for him at his home. Miriam decides to take Sarah as
her new companion. She seduces the doctor and, after having sex
with her, cuts herself and Sarah. They drink one another's blood,
initiating Sarah's transformation into a vampire.
Sarah returns home to her boyfriend Tom (
Cliff DeYoung), not realizing what Miriam has
done to her. She begins to feel increasingly distracted, and
experiences a hunger that cannot be sated even with raw
steak. Sarah returns to Miriam's house and demands an
explanation.
Miriam attempts to initiate Sarah in the necessities of life as a
vampire, but Sarah is repulsed by the thought of subsisting on
human blood. Still reeling from the effects of her vampiric
transformation, Sarah allows Miriam to put her to bed in a guest
room. When Tom comes looking for Sarah, Miriam sends him up to find
her. Sarah, crazed with hunger, kills Tom and drinks his
blood.
Once she has finished feeding, Sarah goes downstairs to find
Miriam, who is pleased that Sarah seems to have finally come
around. Whoever or whatever Miriam may be, she has been around
almost as long as time itself, taking lovers and feeding as early
as the
Egyptian era. Miriam makes it
clear that she is unstoppable and intoxicated by her invincibility.
Yet Sarah, overcome with grief at murdering Tom, has decided that
she will not continue being a vampire. Sarah discovers that her tie
with Miriam has exposed a mysterious vulnerability in Miriam's
power. While kissing, Sarah cuts her own throat. This powerful
sacrifice reverses the vampirism in a way that even Miriam herself
thought wasn't possible. Mysteriously, and unintentionally, Miriam
loses her powers over to Sarah. Miriam carries Sarah upstairs to
the
attic, hoping to conceal Sarah along with
the rest of her conquests. Yet Miriam's fate has now been sealed;
Stripped of her powers, Miriam is helpless, and her former lovers,
including John, are now able to rise from their coffins. It appears
that the shrivelled beings (still desperately in love with Miriam)
attempt to embrace her. Repulsed, Miriam falls down the stairs as
they project their own misery into her. Her former lovers are now
freed of the curse and crumble into dust. Miriam is punished for
her crimes, and as she screams, turns into an ancient, shrivelled
body who will herself be forced to live out eternity as a living
corpse.
As the film draws to a close, a real estate agent is showing the
deserted townhouse to prospective buyers.
The final scene is completely out of character and was only tacked
on (post-production) to allow for the possibility for a sequel
(Tony Scott and Susan Sarandon discuss this in the commentary on
the DVD—Sarandon, at least, is highly critical of this ending).
Sarah is now in London, standing on the balcony of a chic apartment
tower, in the company of an attractive young man and woman. She's
serenely admiring the gorgeous view as dusk falls. From a draped
coffin in a storage room, Miriam repeatedly screams Sarah's name.
Sarah marks the birth of the new vampire in the mold of Miriam,
with Miriam representing her first conquest, certainly to be
followed by more.
Cast
Behind the scenes
The meaning of the film's ambiguous ending has been a subject of
some debate. It differs from that of Strieber's novel, which has
Miriam move on to a new city and take up with a new lover. The
studio insisted upon the change, feeling that audiences would want
to see Deneuve's character punished. In the film's
DVD commentary, both Scott and Sarandon express some
dissatisfaction with the ending (Scott originaly wanted to keep the
original ending in the book as the ending for the film.)
Susan Sarandon talks candidly about the
lesbian seduction scene in the documentary
The Celluloid
Closet.
Explanation of the difference between Miriam and her
lovers
The movie neglects to explain the difference between Miriam and her
lovers, and why she continually outlives them, one of the more
common questions posed by viewers. According to the novel, Miriam
is of a species that
evolved separately
from humans, and is quite probably the last of her kind. They have
an indefinite life span, with Miriam herself being many thousands
of years old.
Miriam's lovers, including John and Sarah, are regular humans that
have been transformed after receiving a transfusion of Miriam's
blood (or an ingested exchange, as in the movie). Their
physiology remains human, but Miriam's blood
takes over their
circulatory
system, repairs tissue and offers resistance to disease and
aging. Unfortunately, the effect only lasts a number of centuries,
before the human tissue ages rapidly. The individual remains alive
and aware, despite being trapped in a decrepit corpse.
Differences between the movie and the novel
As is the case with most movie adaptations of novels, the story was
changed for successful cinematic adaptation, while some changes are
substantive, the film makers adapted the plot to fit its new
narrative format, creating a subtly different narrative that
retained the story of the novel:
- In the novel, Miriam has been studying Dr. Roberts' anti-aging
research long before the story's narrative begins, with the aim of
avoiding having John die like her other lovers before. Miriam had
not told John that he would eventually age and die, but rather led
him to believe that he would be truly immortal. This leads to a
subplot where, shortly after John discovers the truth, he escapes
from Miriam and plots his revenge on her for misleading him.
- One major difference between the plots in the movie and the
novel is that in the novel it is Miriam, rather than John, who
approaches Sarah at a sleep clinic, where Sarah researches aging
(Sarah is a specialist on sleep
disorders). Rather than being rebuffed by Sarah as John was in
the movie, Miriam is admitted as a priority case, claiming that she
suffers from night terrors (a form of
nightmare), and Sarah is assigned to
assess her case. It is while under observation that Miriam begins
her direct seduction of Sarah, and many of Miriam's physiological
characteristics are explained while Sarah and Tom's scientific team
are observing her. John otherwise spends much of the novel feeding
and plotting his revenge against Miriam for leading him to believe
he was truly immortal.
- In the novel, Miriam spikes Sarah's coffee (sherry is used in the movie), and transfuses a portion of her own blood
directly into Sarah's bloodstream while she is unconscious, using a
custom-made device, as opposed to Sarah and Miriam simply ingesting
one another's blood as in the movie.
- The subplot of the investigation into the disappearance of
Alice Cavender by Lieutenant Allegrezza did not appear in the
novel. Miriam receives a phone call from Alice's father informing
her of the girl's disappearance, causing Miriam to realize that
John had fed on her, but the plotline is not developed
further.
- In the novel, the escape of Miriam's captive lovers is John's
attempt at revenge for the aforementioned deception about his true
nature, hoping to use them to attack and overwhelm Miriam. However,
Miriam, having anticipated this move earlier, times the situation
so that Tom is ambushed by the cadavers when he attempts to
retrieve Sarah from Miriam's house. Tom escapes the house, after
which Miriam locks John in his coffin. Tom later returns for a
second confrontation resulting in his death, which plays out much
as it does in the movie.
- At the end of the novel, Sarah attempts suicide as she does in the movie, but the loss of
blood effectively "kills" her, trapping her in her lifeless body,
much like Miriam's lovers. Miriam encases her in her own coffin amongst
her collection, and leaves New York to avoid
potential investigation into the disappearances of Sarah and
Tom. She settles in San Francisco and starts a new
life.
Remake
On 23 September 2009
Warner Bros.
announced it planned a remake of the movie with the screenplay
written by
Whitley Strieber.
See also
References
- The Hunger - Chicago Sun Times, May 3, 1983
- The Hunger Remake Coming From Warner Bros.
- Gersh Agency books Whitley Strieber
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