Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #109 The Hunger (1983)

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I wrote up one of David Bowie’s signature roles as a vampire faced with the stark existential terror of aging and death after centuries of feasting on the blood of mortals as an ageless, deathless creature of the night in The Hunger for my First and Last column over at TCM Backlot not too long ago. 

If I recall correctly, I was overwhelmed by its sheer, oppressive Tony Scottness and underwhelmed by it as the whole. Re-watching it for this column, however, my opinion changed dramatically. This time around Scott’s arty erotic drama of the impossibly beautiful and undead had me in its spell from first frame to last. 

What changed? Well, Bowie died for starters. It’s a testament to how devastated we were, individually and as a culture, by Bowie’s premature passing that it had the shattering cultural impact of a rock god dying at 27 at the height of their beauty, popularity and creative powers despite Bowie nearly making it to 70, which is a little old for a dramatic early death. 

Watching the seemingly ageless rock god die onscreen was never easy but Bowie’s dramatic real-life passing makes it exponentially more painful. As John Blaylock, a centuries-old vampire staring down his imminent demise, Bowie spends most of his all too brief time onscreen dying an agonizing death that robs him of his youth, his beauty and his immortality in rapid succession. 

Over the course of a few hours the cursed blood-sucker devolves from being an impossibly beautiful man in the robust prime of his life to being a feeble old codger with seemingly more wrinkles than skin. The vampire ages so dramatically and quickly that at various points he comes to resemble Crocodile Dundee star Paul Hogan after melting in a giant microwave oven and, if I might get a little local here, the fake old dude who used to dance with the energy of a much younger man in those old Great America commercials. 

Bowie’s deeply sad performance captures the unbearable loneliness of being a vampire as well as the incredible sense of neediness, vulnerability and ache that defines his spiritual and emotional connection with soulmate Miriam Blaylock (Catherine Deneuve), a millennia-old queen of the damned who turned her much younger lover and protege into a vampire sometime in 17th century France. 

Miriam is John’s whole world. He’s as dependent upon her as a newborn baby is reliant upon its mother. When Miriam cannot save him from the ravages of mortality and the horrifying finality of death he is utterly, completely lost, overwhelmed, a man adrift, a tragically, hopelessly solitary figure. 

The Hunger opens in the most 1983 manner possible, with special guests Bauhaus howling “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” behind a cage in a goth disco where John and Mariam are hunting for prey, looking for taut young bodies to bleed and feast upon. 

At home a conquest played by a young Ann Magnuson writhes erotically for her predator’s amusement, all mascara and black leather and smoky sensuality while Mariam prepares to feast on a young stud. 

The relentless Tony Scottosity of The Hunger turned me off the first time around but I nevertheless found myself won over by his style-as-substance approach. Of course it does not hurt that The Hunger was Scott’s directorial debut so his patented stylistic tics hadn’t yet devolved into groan-worthy cliches. In The Hunger, Scott’s tricks were new and novel and fresh in a way they would never be again. 

The Hunger is such a visual tour de force that it could probably lose every last bit of its dialogue and be twice as good. The Hunger doesn’t need words. It doesn’t need banter. It does not need story or plot or character development, really. All it needs is its impossibly gorgeous stars and a beautifully sustained mood that hovers somewhere between a dream and a nightmare, between languid fantasy and visceral horror. 

John and Miriam enjoy a furtive, nighttime life together feasting on sexy young mortals and teaching music to children like Alice Cavender (Beth Ehlers), a tomboy who takes a liking to the glamorous European couple without knowing of their secret lives. 

Then one awful day John finds himself aging at a horrifying clip.  He ages years over the course of mere hours, decades in a day or two. Nothing in his long, strange life has prepared him for the hideous onslaught of age hitting him all at once so he seeks out Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon), a top gerontologist studying rapid aging in primates with her boyfriend Tom Haver (Cliff DeYoung). 

Sarandon brings to The Hunger the same mesmerizing combination of doe-eyed, All-American innocence and smoldering sexuality that she did to her ingenue role in Rocky Horror Picture Show. 

In both films Sarandon is an American innocent defiled by the androgynous, rapacious sexuality of a worldly European libertine with a secret. But in each films she actively wants to be seduced. 

Sarah hungers for Miriam sexually, leading to what I imagine was one of the most heavily re-wound sex scenes of the 1980s. The Hunger represents a distinctly heterosexual and male conception of lesbian sensuality. But if the legendary sequence where these two beauties make sweet love before Miriam turns Sarah into a vampire is unmistakably powered by the male gaze, Scott’s singular eye for aesthetics makes The Hunger the rare erotic drama that is genuinely sexy. 

The most Tony Scott gif imaginable.

John’s story essentially ends halfway through The Hunger, when his tragic romance with Miriam is replaced by Miriam’s tragic romance with Sarah. 

In The Hunger, style is substance and image is everything. Like John Woo, Tony Scott’s movies are strictly for the birds, and I mean that in a good way! Woo has his beloved doves flying every which way and being all atmospheric and shit. Scott is equally enamored of birds as random eye candy as well as heavy curtains, drapes, blinds and other ways of diffusing light until it becomes soft, dreamy and cinematic in that distinctive Tony Scott fashion. 

Scott’s obsession with production design and lighting over storytelling and plot works infinitely better within the context of a moody, dreamily allegorical arthouse horror movie than in the cartoonishly macho action movies that followed, randy celebrations of testosterone and being a bro like Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop 2, Days of Thunder and Man on Fire, which was sadly about a man on fire metaphorically rather than literally. 

Scott would make his name as a crass, box-office-minded vulgarian cranking out increasingly oppressive action thrillers but I quite like the arthouse Scott of The Hunger. The pacing of Scott’s films got faster and faster as he got older but the pace of The Hunger is languid and unhurried in a manner befitting its dreamy ambiance.

The Hunger would be worth seeing for Bowie’s quietly heartbreaking performance alone. Like The Man Who Fell to Earth and Labyrinth, The Hunger had the good judgment to cast Bowie as an otherworldly, larger-than-life mythological figure who exists in a realm beyond us mere mortals. 

Bowie may be a monster in the conventional sense of the word here but his loneliness and desperate need for connection and salvation register as all too human. 

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