| The Hunger | |
|---|---|
Theatrical release poster |
|
| Directed by | Tony Scott |
| Produced by | Richard Shepherd |
| Screenplay by | Ivan Davis |
| Based on | The Hunger by Whitley Strieber |
| Starring | Catherine Deneuve David Bowie Susan Sarandon |
| Music by | Denny Jaeger Michel Rubini |
| Cinematography | Stephen Goldblatt |
| Editing by | Pamela Power |
| Distributed by | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer |
| Release date(s) | April 29, 1983 |
| Running time | 97 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $10 million |
| Box office | $5,979,292 |
The Hunger is a 1983 British horror film and the directorial debut of Tony Scott. It is the story of a love triangle between a doctor (Susan Sarandon) who specializes in sleep and aging research and a 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 cinematography was by Stephen Goldblatt.
The film was screened out of competition at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival.[1]
Contents |
Miriam Blaylock (Catherine Deneuve) is a beautiful and dangerous immortal vampire, promising specially chosen humans eternal life as her vampire lovers. As the film begins, her vampire companion is John (David Bowie), a talented cellist she married in 18th century France. The films opens in a night club in New York to a live performance from Bauhaus. They live together in an elegant New York townhouse posing as a wealthy couple who teach classical music.
Periodically killing and feeding upon human victims, allows Miriam and John to possess eternal youth or at least that is what John was led to believe. John begins aging rapidly; he realizes that Miriam knew that this would happen and that her promise of "forever and ever" was only partially true. He will have eternal life but not eternal youth. Feeling betrayed, he seeks out the help of Dr. Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon), who specializes in the study of premature aging, hoping she will be able to help reverse his accelerating decrepitude. Sarah assumes that John is a hypochondriac or mentally unbalanced and ignores his pleas for help. As John leaves the clinic in a rage, Sarah is horrified to see how rapidly John is aging. She tries to help, at which point John rebuffs her.
In a last attempt to regain his youth, John murders and attempts to feed upon a young female violin student of Miriam's, whom she was grooming to be her next consort when she came of age, to no avail. As John's aging advances, he begs Miriam to kill him and release him from the agony of his decrepit body. Weeping, Miriam tells him that there is no release. After John collapses, Miriam carries him into the attic and places him in a coffin. There are stacks of other coffins and Miriam asks them all to "be good to him tonight.". Miriam's former vampire lovers are doomed to suffer an eternal living death, helplessly moaning and trapped in their coffins.
Sarah comes looking for John at his home but only finds Miriam. It becomes clear that the two women feel an attraction and Miriam acts upon this as she now feels alone after losing her lover and the young girl she was grooming. In a memorable scene during a piano adaption of The Flower Duet, Sarah says: "Are you making a pass at me, Mrs. Blaylock?" Miriam softly replies: "Miriam, please.". They have a sexual encounter during which, without Sarah being fully aware of it, Miriam bites her arm and a blood exchange occurs in which some of Miriam's blood enters Sarah's body. 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. Sarah's partner, Tom (Cliff DeYoung) arrives on Miriam's doorstep, trying to find Sarah. Miriam informs him that Sarah is in the upstairs bedroom. Sarah, starving and desperate, tries to resist the urge to kill Tom but gives in to temptation. Sarah then joins Miriam by the piano and Miriam assures her that she will soon forget what she was and come to love Miriam. As the two kiss, Sarah drives Miriam's ankh-knife into her throat, attempting to kill herself as she forcibly holds her mouth over Miriam's mouth, forcing Miriam to ingest her blood, possibly working on a hunch regarding the "blood borne metabolic aging disease" and "host" relationship she was told about affecting her blood. Miriam carries Sarah upstairs, intending to place her with her other boxed lovers. There is a rumbling and the mummies of Miriam's previous lovers emerge from their coffins. The mummies drive Miriam over the edge of the balcony. As she rapidly ages, the mummies fall and become dust, ostensibly providing the trapped souls with release.
As the film draws to a close, a real estate agent is showing the deserted townhouse to prospective buyers. Sarah is now in London, standing on the balcony of a chic apartment tower (one of the three towers of the Barbican), in the company of an attractive young man and woman. She is serenely admiring the gorgeous view as dusk falls. From a draped coffin in a storage room, Miriam repeatedly screams Sarah's name (an overlay of the audio from earlier in the film).
David Bowie himself was excited to work on the film, but was concerned about the final product. He said "I must say, there's nothing that looks like it on the market. But I'm a bit worried that it's just perversely bloody at some points."[2] The Hunger was not particularly well-received upon its initial release, and was attacked by many critics for being heavy on atmosphere and visuals but slow on pace and plot. Roger Ebert, of the Chicago Sun-Times, described the film as "an agonizingly bad vampire movie".[3] Camille Paglia writes that The Hunger comes close to being a masterpiece of a "classy genre of vampire film", but that it is "ruined by horrendous errors, as when the regal Catherine Deneuve is made to crawl around on all fours, slavering over cut throats."[4]
However, the film has 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[5] and inspired a short-lived TV series of the same name.
On September 23, 2009 Warner Bros. announced it planned a remake of the film[6] with the screenplay written by Whitley Strieber.[7]
|
|||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||