Weirdhouse Cinema: The Hunger

In this special Valentine’s Day episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss the 1983 goth LGBTQ vampire horror film “The Hunger,” directed by Tony Scott and starring Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie and Susan Sarandon.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob.

Speaker 3 (00:13):
Lamb and this is Joe McCormick.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
Happy Valentine's Day, everybody here in today's episode. You know,
I really wanted to cover a paranormal love story of
some sort for the holiday, and I gave myself this
task and probably spend a little bit too much time
looking at different films. I'm trying to figure out what
would be what felt like the right fit. I looked
at a few different, very well regarded films that seemed

(00:37):
to fit the mold, but ended up being drawn into
today's selection. The highly stylish nineteen eighty three erotic horror
film The Hunger, a movie that was really only on
my radar for being a film in which David Bowie
plays a vampire. But it's actually so much more than
just that. It's become a cult favorite with many do

(01:00):
it's heavy goth vibes, it's LGBTQ themes, and it's absolutely
bursting at the scenes with visual and sonic pizazz. And
I tell you, I hope you like Venetian Blinds, because
there are a lot of them in this movie.

Speaker 3 (01:14):
Yes, and doves, JJ was reminded. JJ also watched the
movie this week and we were talking about it off
Mike before we started this. JJ reminded me that there
are just doves in their house all the Time's full
of birds. They have like an open air attics, just
birds coming and going all the time. Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
Yeah, I watched this one with my wife, and in fact,
it was partially her suggestion. I was brainstorming all these
ideas and she pulled up some lists online of paranormal
horror films and she was like, how about The Hunger
And I was like, oh, well, you know, The Hunger
has been on my radar a little bit. We've it's
come up in passing on the show before when we've
discussed David Billie films, And so she watched it with me.

Speaker 3 (01:54):
She really enjoyed it.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
She loved all the like the gothy eighty eighties vibe
to it. But also she pointed out, like, this feels
like a feature length music video, and in many ways
that is absolutely accurate and one of its strengths.

Speaker 3 (02:08):
Yeah, yeah, turn around Bright Eyes for ninety minutes or
a hundred or so. It's but don't let don't get
the wrong idea from that. I do think this is
actually a very strong film. I liked it a lot,
despite the fact that critics apparently largely did not appreciate
it when it came out. But I get the feeling
this one has has gotten a critical reappraisal, like a

(02:31):
lot more people like it now than did when it
first released.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah, and I believe that the cult following for it
was really building up, you know, within the decade following
its release, so you know, kind of a slow build there,
but I think it achieved cult status by at least
the nineties, as we'll discuss now.

Speaker 3 (02:49):
One thing I want to say close to the top
of this episode is despite the fact that The Hunger
is not especially plot driven, I'd say it's more of
a mood driven or character driven, it does have some
major surprises in store, and we're gonna have to talk
about those surprises in the episode, So please be forewarned

(03:10):
if you want to see The Hunger without having anything spoiled,
and I would recommend that a good time to pause
and go watch the movie would be Now.

Speaker 2 (03:19):
That being said, this movie is so committed to style.
I feel like It's one of those where if you're
spoiled on it, you can still really enjoy it.

Speaker 3 (03:27):
So rob like you. I had never seen The Hunger before,
but I found it very, as I said, surprising, but
also delightful, interesting, different. It felt fresh at its core.
I think you could call this kind of a tainted
love tale. It's a story primarily about romantic relationships, but

(03:47):
one in which it is not all you know, steamy
arrows and desire and lust like a lot of vampire
love movies are. It's also not rom com energy. It's
all cute, falling for you kind of moments. And it's
certainly not the case that this is full of feel
good morals about the eternal and all conquering power of love.

(04:09):
This movie, like other tainted love tales, is about the
ambiguities and contradictions of romantic love, the sort of vast
gray space that defines a lot of what love is,
where people might feel one way but act another, where
it's impossible to put your emotions into words, you don't
know how to talk about what you're feeling or what

(04:33):
your frustrations with your love. Are situations in which people
genuinely love one another, but also cause each other pain,
where love just gets smashed into a million pieces against
the surface of problems that cannot be fixed. And strangely,
once I realized that was the kind of movie this was,

(04:56):
it helped resolve something curious I noticed while watching The Hunger.
Despite the fact that this movie has a different writer,
a different director, totally different plot, and for much of
its runtime a different star, I really kept being reminded
of the other big David Bowie movie we have watched
on the show, which was The Man Who Fell to

(05:16):
Earth from nineteen seventy six, directed by Nicholas Rogue. That
movie stars David Bowie as a tragic alien agent on
a mission to Earth to secure water resources which could
save his home planet. But of course, that ultimately is
a story about failure, you know, about distraction and the
inability to sort of stay on task and getting led

(05:38):
astray by television and alcohol and love and all.

Speaker 2 (05:42):
That and table tennis right.

Speaker 3 (05:43):
Exactly, Yes, So I was thinking while I was watching it,
why did these movies feel so similar despite all the
totally different creative inputs. Could it just be that the
power of David Bowie is so strong that it paves
over everything that might be a little part of it,
but I really think there are some other truly strong
similarities in that both stories involve these tainted love themes.

(06:08):
They're both love stories that have genuine feeling and passion
in them. They're not just about people using each other
for sex or for power or whatever. They are love stories,
but they're also tragic love stories that cannot possibly have
happy endings, in part because of the sci fi or
supernatural mechanics that are operating in each story, and in

(06:29):
part because of the kinds of human failings and contradictions
that are present in all relationships of mortal humans, not
just aliens and vampires. And I guess, since it's been
a while, just a refresher. The love story central in
The Man Who Fell to Earth is the one between
David Bowie's alien character and an earthling played by Candy Clark.

(06:49):
That story is at once both genuine and doomed, doomed
by Bowie's alien mission and then by the pressures of
money and betrayal and alcoholism. In The Hunger, I think
one of the central thematic tainted love questions is what
if you could only be with the person you love

(07:11):
by dooming them to a fate worse than death if
you choose to do it anyway, if you choose to
be with them knowing that your love is an unspeakable curse,
could it really be love? But at the same time,
could it really be love if you could stand not
to be with them in the first place. I guess
we'll have to answer those questions as we go on

(07:31):
throughout the episode. But another similarity I would say between
The Men Who Fell to Earth and The Hunger is
certain the presence of certain cinematography choices. Both of them
are very mood driven, and they both have a kind
of dreamy, elegic editing style with a lot of slow
motion and lingering on wistful and melancholy scenes featuring two

(07:55):
subjects who are suffering but who are unable to fix
one what's wrong between them?

Speaker 2 (08:01):
Yeah, it's worth noting. In the commentary track which I
listened to, part of the director Tony Scott does mention
Nicholas Rogue, the director of The Man Who Fell to Earth,
being one of his inspirations, though he singles out the
film performance more than anything. But of course the Man
Who Felt to Earth is still in the mix. There somewhere,
I imagine.

Speaker 3 (08:22):
On the other hand, I would say The Hunger does
not have like the comic elements that we got in
The Manufeld to Earth when he's watching all the TVs
and screaming, get out of my mind.

Speaker 2 (08:34):
Yeah, there's not really much in the way of humor
in this picture, and I think that's one of the
things that the critics kind of picked up on. They
thought it was like too self serious, which I don't know.
I feel like, if you're dealing with a story like
this and you're dealing with, you know, these all these
gothic vibes on top of it, like, I don't know,
I don't think I really was wanting any comic relief

(08:55):
in this picture.

Speaker 3 (08:56):
I certainly was not hurting for want of comic relief.
And no, this movie doesn't need that. It's just not
its style. It's not what it's about. Another surprising element
I found about The Hunger, at least a violation of
my expectations going in, was the relatively grounded science fiction subplot.

(09:17):
Did not think it would have that kind of thing happening.
So this will require some discussion of the plot, but
I guess it's good to lay out a bit of
the premise here at the top, because we can refer
back to that as we talk about the cast and
so forth. So two of the main characters of this
movie begin the story as vampires, as vampire lovers, and

(09:38):
they are faced with a unique consequence of their condition.
In the lore of this movie, the vampires spawn enjoys
a long life of suspended youth and vitality for perhaps
hundreds of years, but at some point it all comes
crashing down as a kind of rapid degenerative aging disease,

(10:02):
where the vampire spawn suddenly grows old and withers into
a powerless but still conscious, crumbling husk over the course
of a few days or weeks. So in the movie,
Catherine Denov plays a sort of vampire queen of ancient
but otherwise uncertain origins named Miriam, who is in a

(10:25):
centuries long love affair with her vampire spawn, John played
by David Bowie. Originally a man, she turned into a
vampire sometime in Europe in the seventeen hundreds. There's like
a scene of them kissing in a barn in powdered wigs,
and so the situation is while they seem to have
been happy and ageless, hunting for blood together for hundreds

(10:50):
of years. Suddenly, in the modern day setting of the
film in New York in the nineteen eighties, John finds
himself rapidly aging, and he seems to know this was
something that could happen to him one day, but obviously
it leaves him greatly demoralized and distressed. So this brings
him into contact with another one of our major characters,

(11:12):
Sarah Roberts played by Susan Sarandon, who is a research scientist.
She's a gerontologist studying diseases that cause accelerated aging, and
her work provides some hope of a way to stop
the advance of the cellular clock and arrest the rapid
advance of age and decay, and so as John desperately

(11:35):
seeks her help, she becomes entangled in the lives of
these vampires. She doesn't initially know their vampires, of course,
and it becomes more than just the kind of mechanical
science fiction connection to the story, like she becomes romantically
involved as well. But it was so strange to me
that the movie ended up having so much having as

(11:56):
much science fiction as it did, and also the form
the science fiction, because it was not the kind of
you know, the kind of loose fantasy science fiction that
you get in The Man Who Fell to Earth. It's
instead a story about like research scientists in their lab
doing experiments on monkeys. And we can come back to
that later. But like some of the goorioesst and grossest

(12:17):
stuff in the movie is not from the horror premise.
It's from the sci fi premise.

Speaker 2 (12:23):
Yeah, yeah, it's so as we'll get to in more
detail in a bet. This is based on a novel,
a nineteen eighty one novel by Whitley Streiber, And it's
my understanding that the original novel is essentially one of
these kind of like how would this work treatments of
vamporism with sci fi elements bag backing it up, And
I'm to understand that the script for the picture ended

(12:46):
up drifting somewhat away from that vision, and then Tony
Scott's direction and the work of all the other talented
folks involved in like the visual and sonic flare of
the picture are able to bring it into more of
a territory. So, you know, it's kind of an interesting
trajectory to like maybe start in something that's a little
more grounded in the sci fi and ending up via

(13:09):
a curve, ending up with something more surreal and ambiguous,
but the sci fi roots are still present.

Speaker 3 (13:15):
Yeah, totally. But it creates such an an unusual and
interesting millage of themes. It's just it doesn't really feel
like any other movie I can think of.

Speaker 2 (13:26):
Yeah, it really does stand apart. And I think that's
one of the reasons that it just so instantly captivated me.
Because some of the other pictures I was checking out,
they they felt more like a definite artifact of their time,
and or they fit more clearly into genres that we're already,
you know, more familiar with on the show. And this one, Yeah,

(13:47):
it really stood out. It seemed to have a different
vision and exist in its own sonic and visual universe.

Speaker 3 (13:54):
Now, another big surprise that this movie had for me
is that I really expect there to be more David
Bowie in this David Bowie movie. He almost gets the
treatment of Steven Sagall an executive decision. Maybe that's a
horrible comparison, Maybe more like Drew Barrymore in Scream or
Samuel L. Jackson in Deep Blue Sea. Though of course

(14:17):
all of those characters, what happens is they die. The
fate of David Bowie's character in this movie is even
more tragic and horrifying than death. But I think it's
interesting that I don't know if there's a formal showbiz
term for this, but I would call it like a
meta shock. You know, it is a violation of your expectations,
which are established. Those expectations are established not through the

(14:40):
narrative of the movie itself, but through your real world
and knowledge of the movie's marketing context. So, for example,
it is a surprising move to kill off the character
played by the big star, the presence of whom ostensibly
brought people into the movie theaters in the first place.
That's always a surprising move. It's a bold and gutsy

(15:03):
move usually, though I think it's a lot less gimmicky
in The Hunger than it is in most of these
metashock deaths you get in the film industry. In this movie,
it it feels less like a gimmicky attempt at surprise,
and instead it emphasizes the movie's kind of shadow themes

(15:23):
of unfairness and the injustice of love and of real life.

Speaker 2 (15:28):
Yeah. Absolutely, and I do want to stress for anyone
out there who happens to be interested in The Hunger
primarily because of David Bowie, still valid reason to be
interested in this film. David Bowie will not disappoint you.
The role. May have less screen time than you expected,
but he still makes the most of that screen time.
So definitely worth checking out for Bowie fans.

Speaker 3 (15:50):
Though also for some of the screen time he does have,
he looks like Richard Lynch or he looks like he Oh,
this is an unkind comparison, but he looks like a
better version of Guy Pearce and the old man makeup
in Prometheus.

Speaker 2 (16:04):
Yeah, that's a great observation. But you know, Prometheus didn't
have Dick Smith. As we'll be discussing special effects makeup master.
Dick Smith is largely responsible for the aging of David
Bowie in this picture. And I think it was Tony
Scott on the commentary track pointing out how or maybe

(16:25):
it was a maybe with Susan's frand and somebody's pointing
out how he's under so much makeup for parts of this.
But Bowie would just go to sleep in the chair
like he was like super easy going while they were
applying you know, hours upon hours of makeup and yeah,
and nobody did it better than Dick Smith.

Speaker 3 (16:38):
It is really great old man makeup, way better than
all the other examples I can think of.

Speaker 2 (16:44):
All right, well, more on that in a bit, but
first let's go ahead and roll out the elevator pitch.
As the song will play a huge role in the
opening sequence of a picture. I'm just going to quote
a few lines from the nineteen eighty two goth rock
hit Bela Lugosi's Dead by Bowhouse with one pronoun change
to make it fit better. The virginal brides file past

(17:04):
her tomb strewn with times, dead flowers, bereft in deathly Bloom,
alone in a darkened room, the.

Speaker 3 (17:12):
Count bereft in deathly Bloom. Yes, exactly. Oh what a delivery.
Who's the singer of bow House.

Speaker 2 (17:21):
That's Peter Murphy and we'll sleep. We'll see Peter Murphy
in the opening sequence.

Speaker 3 (17:25):
Here, tremendous flat delivery there, very good.

Speaker 2 (17:29):
Yeah, I mean, it's a class it's it's probably one of,
if not the best known, you know, goth tracks out there.
Like if you're going to do a goth dance night
at a club or something, they need to play Bella
Lugosi's dead at least for a little bit. Maybe not
the whole with like nine and a half minute runtime,
but even still, like, yeah, go ahead and do the
nine and a half minute runtime, because the whole song's tremendous.

(17:51):
All right, we'll come back to bow House in a bit,
but first let's go ahead and listen to a little
bit of trailer audio from The Hunger.

Speaker 4 (18:04):
Sarah Roberts is in jeopardy.

Speaker 3 (18:06):
Hey lady, how about it?

Speaker 4 (18:07):
Stay with her? Help her, for she has begun to feel.

Speaker 3 (18:12):
The awful horror of the Hunger.

Speaker 4 (18:16):
John Blaylock, the Hunger has given him everlasting life until now.
Pray for him. Miriam Blaylock. She feeds one day in
seven on the unsuspecting, and soon she will turn into
something that you will never be able to forget, no
matter how hard and how long you try fear her?

(18:39):
What have you done to me.

Speaker 3 (18:43):
For her life? Signs terminate right here?

Speaker 4 (19:08):
Haunting, mysterious, sensual, strange, perverse, riveting The Hunger?

Speaker 2 (19:24):
All right, Well, if you would like to watch The Hunger, well,
luckily for you, it's widely available on digital formats as
well as home video formats. There's a Blu ray, and
I was gonna rent the Blu ray, but it was
checked out when I dropped by Video Drum, so I
ended up having to make do with the DVD version,
which was also solid. I believe both the Blue and
the DVD feature the same commentary track, which is a

(19:47):
bit dry but still informative, featuring both Tony Scott and
Susan Sarandon, though it sounds like maybe they weren't in
the same room, like they recorded them separately and kind
of like splice them in. So if you like a
nice boisterous commentary track, that maybe this one isn't the one,
but it's still a lot of great info in it.

(20:15):
All right, Well, let's run through the people involved here,
or at least some of them. We can't touch on
everybody as usual. But the director is, of course Tony Scott.
As previously mentioned, he lived nineteen forty four through twenty twelve,
the late younger brother of Ridley Scott, who like his brother,
came up through British TV commercial production before branching out
into films, and this was his first feature theatrical film,

(20:40):
and it really throws everything at you from a stylistic standpoint,
it's flashy, it's sexy, it's daring, it's somber, it's serious.
It delivers all the flare of a music video or
a high end commercial, and as we alluded to at
the time of its release, it was not a success.
Critics panned it, including Roger Ebert, who called it quote
an agonizingly bad vampire movie, circling around an exquisitely effective

(21:04):
sex scene.

Speaker 3 (21:06):
Which sex scene.

Speaker 2 (21:07):
I assume it has to be the big love scene
between Sarah and Miriam, which I mean, it's almost I
think a disservice to call it a quote unquote sex
scene because it's so stylish. It is like like the
like the bed is glowing. I think one point, you know,
it's like it's it's very surreal. It's not it's not

(21:31):
raw or explicit, but it is still you know, highly
erotic and just. And to Ebert's point, it is effective.
But I also don't feel like it comes off as
an oasis in a desert in this film or anything
to that extent.

Speaker 3 (21:44):
No, I just would not agree with Ebert on this one.
I think the film overall has a lot more to offer. Sorry,
just now that we're on the subject, of Tony Scott.
I was repeatedly thinking to myself while watching, I can't
believe this is made by the same director as Top Gun.

Speaker 2 (22:01):
I mean, it is crazy to think about this, right
because Top Gun, which was his follow up, what four
years later, that was the next time that the studios
gave him a shot at.

Speaker 3 (22:11):
A film, like three years later.

Speaker 2 (22:15):
We always say, well, what this one's eighty would have
been made in what an eighty two and either yeah,
three or four years, so he didn't have to wait
that long. But still he was kind of shut out
for a little bit there. But then he comes out
of the gate with again with Top Gun, which of
course is a massive hit. It was the highest grossing
film domestic or otherwise for nineteen eighty six. That's a

(22:37):
film that cemented Cruise's ascension into long lasting fame and
established Scott as not a director of erotic horror, but
as an action and thriller director. You know, because when
you think about Tony Scott, those tend to be the
films you think about. You think about things like eighty
seven's Beverly Hills Cop two, nineteen nineties Days of Thunder,

(22:58):
ninety three's True Romance, Crimson Tied ninety eight, Enemy of
the State, two thousand and four's Man on Fire, or
his final film twenty ten's Unstoppable. But yeah, compare this
film to top Gun and I'm yeah, like, what connective
tissue is there? Really? I mean, I'm sure you could

(23:18):
probably get down and point to some of the stylistic
touches that are distinctly Tony Scott, But it does kind
of feel like a complete at least in my eyes,
it feels like a complete restart of his cinematic trajectory. Now.
Tony Scott would return to horror twice in the late
nineties for two episodes of an erotic horror anthology series

(23:40):
titled The Hunger, very much spinning off of this film.
Like I said, this is one of the reasons I
think we can assume that by the late nineties there
was a cult following for this picture, because they decided
to produce forty four episodes of a spinoff series on it.
The first season was hosted by Terrence stamp Oh general, Yeah,

(24:00):
he was your sexy cryptkeeper for the first season, and
then you're a sexy crypt keeper for the second season.
Was none other than David Bowie.

Speaker 3 (24:07):
Got to see this now. Well.

Speaker 2 (24:09):
The two episodes directed by Tony Scott were The Swords
from season one and that starred Balthazar Getty, Amanda Ryan,
and Timothy Spall. And then there was a season two
episode titled Sanctuary starring Giovanni Ribisi and Lisa Repo Martel.
I've never watched it again. They made forty four episodes.
Russell McKay directed like six episodes of it, and the

(24:32):
cast is pretty extensive as well. Gen Carlo Esposito plays
a vampire in one of them. I don't know if
it's a major vampire role or a small one, but
he's in there. Daniel Craig shows up, Margo Kidder, Lori Petty,
David Warner, Jason Fleming, among many others. I don't know
where off the top of my head, I don't know
where this aired. I'm guessing it maybe showed up on
USA Network at some point, but I I have no

(24:56):
memory of this at all.

Speaker 3 (24:57):
Sounds tremendous.

Speaker 2 (24:58):
Yeah, so yeah, by the late nineties, I feel like
people were coming back around to this film. It's become
a cult classic for a variety of reasons. It's style,
it's cast, it's goth vibes. It's LGBTQ elements. Now Tony
Scott sadly passed away in twenty twelve, but fourth noting
that this film and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner from the

(25:20):
previous year were both dedicated to their older brother Frank,
who had passed away in nineteen eighty all Right, I
already mentioned that Whitley Streiber is the author of the
original novel upon which this is based, came out in
eighty one, the first of a trilogy of vampire novels,
and these were a follow up to his nineteen seventy

(25:40):
eight where Wolf novel The Wolfin, which was also adapted
into a film nineteen eighty one's Wolfen starring Albert Finnie.

Speaker 3 (25:47):
Which I always confused with the movie Wolf starring Is
it Wolf starring Jack Nicholson.

Speaker 2 (25:52):
Yeah, Wolf is the one with Jack Nicholson. Wolfin is
the one with Albert Finnie. And then there's the howling,
you know, the Ocasionally there's a big werewolf bump in
the horror industry and you get several different horror horror
films about werewolves more or less at once.

Speaker 3 (26:11):
Yeah, we go through monster waves, don't we.

Speaker 2 (26:14):
Yeah, there have been several werewolf films recently. We're kind
of experiencing a werewolf bump right now.

Speaker 3 (26:20):
That would make sense. Yeah, but I feel, you know,
we had like zombies in the two thousands, and then
you had a vampire craze after that, and I don't
know what we're in right now. I think we had
a witch craze for a bit.

Speaker 2 (26:32):
Yeah, it's got to come out mummies again, but I'm
waiting on it anyway. This author has written numerous books,
including The Coming Global Superstorm, which was written with Art
Bell of all People, and adapted into the two thousand
and four film The Day After Tomorrow.

Speaker 3 (26:47):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (26:49):
He's also well known for his nineteen eighty seven ufology
book Communion, which was adapted into a nineteen eighty nine
film in which Christopher Walken plays Whitley Stripe.

Speaker 3 (27:00):
I've never read that or seen the movie, but I've
had general cultural awareness of them. For some reason. For years,
I had in my mind Whitley Streiber categorized as somebody
who is like a promoter of UFO encounter is more
than like a novelist.

Speaker 2 (27:18):
Well, I think he's apparently both like he definitely he
claimed very much claims to believe in UFOs and communion
is presented as a work of nonfiction, but then he
also has written a lot of fiction as well. I don't,
as far as I know, he doesn't actually believe in
the reality of vampires and werewolves, So that's separate from

(27:40):
the aliens. Okay now, and as far as the screenplay
goes here, James Costagan, writing as Ian Davis, is one
of the credited writers. He lived nineteen twenty six through
two thousand and seven. Emmy Award winning screenwriter for fifty
nine's Little Moon of alban seventy six is Eleanor and
Franklin and seventy five's Love among the Ruins. Who was

(28:00):
also a writer on nineteen eighty five's King David, in
which Richard Gear battles George Eastman. And then we also
have Michael Thomas credited on the screenplay, screenwriter, perhaps best
known for his work on nineteen eighty five's Lady Hawk
as well as twenty eleven's The Devil's Double. All right, now,
getting into the cast, starting at the top, this film

(28:21):
stars Catherine Daneuve, who mentioned her already. She plays Miriam Blaylock.
This is Our Vampire Queen and Yeah, Daneuve very very
talented actress here obviously born nineteen forty three. I'm not
sure I had seen her in anything before. French actress
who has only appeared in a handful of genre pictures

(28:44):
during the course of her long career. They include nineteen
sixty five's Repulsion, seventy seven's Lost Soul, seventy nine See
Here My Love, in eighty eight Frequent Death. She's probably
best known for such films as sixty four As The
Umbrellas of Herborg, sixty seven's The Young Girls of Rockfort,
and nineteen seventies Donkey Skin. This is based on the

(29:07):
Donkey Skin fairy tale, which I think has come up
on stuff to blow your mind episodes before the fairy tale,
not the movie.

Speaker 3 (29:13):
Oh yeah, well, I think we might have talked about
covering the movie.

Speaker 2 (29:16):
Yeah, okay, I.

Speaker 3 (29:17):
Think it's supposed to be pretty weird.

Speaker 2 (29:19):
Yeah, well, I'm all for it. You know, if it
has been move in it, I'm certainly worth another book.
She also appears in two thousand Dancer in the Dark
and lends her voice to two thousand and sevens animated
film Persepolis, based on the graphic novel She was nominated
for an Academy Award for her leading role in nineteen
ninety three's End of Chime. So yeah, I think she's

(29:41):
terrific in this, as we'll discuss. While her character certainly
has plenty of like fim fatale elements, she's never presented
as like a cold, unfeeling vamp, and certainly Miriam could
have been presented in that way. Like her passion is real,
her love is real. I believe these things when when
when I experience her character on the screen, all this

(30:04):
despite the tragic, supernatural ramifications of that passion and that love.

Speaker 3 (30:09):
Yeah, she's a very ambiguous character, is I mean, is
she the protagonist of the film or is she the
villain of the film? Should we think of should we
think of John and Sarah as the kind of trading
off protagonists of the film and in a way to

(30:29):
move as the villain or in a way it's more
her story than it is anybody else's.

Speaker 2 (30:35):
Though, Yeah, it does make me wonder who might be
the the central protagonist of the novel, because there does
seem to feel it feels like there's maybe a certain
amount of confusion with this with this story as it's
as it's presented in the film, like, yeah, whose story
is it? And you know, some would argue, you know,

(30:55):
rather strongly, that a film does need one key protagonist.
There may essentially be two, but there needs to be
in the writing of the thing, there needs to be
like one central protagonist. The writer needs to know who
that is.

Speaker 3 (31:07):
I guess you could argue then it might be Sarah,
but Sarah also is never She's never really made fully
aware of the whole emotional arc of the story. The
only character who really knows everything is Miriam, and so anyway,
I guess we can talk more about that in the

(31:29):
plot if necessary, But either way, I agree with you.
Danov is wonderful in the movie. I mean, there is
I think a kind of coldness to her, but it
doesn't come off as cruelty necessarily.

Speaker 2 (31:43):
Yeah, I think that's the key coldness, but not cruelty.

Speaker 3 (31:47):
Yeah, she is somebody who's projecting. I mean, I guess
this is a problem in a lot of vampire movies
because you have these characters who are supposed to have
lived many, many lives. You know, they've been around for
hundreds or thousands of years in her case, and it
always raises the question that the normal kinds of performances,

(32:07):
of human feelings and thoughts and intelligence and memory and
everything that we get in the film in films is
based on the arc of a normal human lifetime. Like
you know, part of playing a character is what it
means to play a character in their youth or in
middle age or something like that. Vampires achieve a kind
of age that no human ever does, and so that

(32:31):
raises questions of like, how does that age manifest in
their character? How should it manifest in their emotions and
how they react to things and what their philosophical outlook is.
And I feel like Danuve contains a lot of that
mystery in her performance. There is something that feels unreal
and a little beyond human about her, and a lot

(32:53):
of times it's because she is difficult to read in
situations where otherwise an actor might be more inclined to
portray something very clear and overt.

Speaker 2 (33:04):
Does that make sense, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. You know,
there are these scenes I think, in particular about some
of the scenes where David Bowie's character John is like
trying to discuss not only his his aging, his illness,
if you will, with her, but also like the ramifications
of it, and you don't get the sense that she's

(33:26):
you know, unfeeling to it. But also she doesn't fully
engage with him on it either. She's in walking this
line where it doesn't it doesn't come off entirely like
she's completely blowing him off or like, well, that's your problem, John,
you solve it. But she's she's also not fully embracing him.
She is to some degree distancing herself from his suffering,

(33:49):
but in a way that also feels more real and
more mortal, and is not like just this vamp queen
who's like, I am done with you. You know, you
have served your purpose or something like that.

Speaker 3 (33:59):
I agree, Again, it's a different take on the vampire
character than I'm used to seeing.

Speaker 2 (34:04):
We'll have more to say about this character as we
get into the plot a bit later. Now moving on
to David Bowie, who lived nineteen forty seven through twenty sixteen,
again playing John Blairlocke. So far in Weird House, we've
considered films where Bowie plays a space alien and the
changeland king of a Goblin realm, so it's only natural
that we now consider him as a vampire instead of

(34:24):
covering all the main notes of his career will couch
this instead in terms of where he was with his
music and acting career at the time. So we're only
six years out from The Man Who Fell to Earth,
and I believe the only other feature film he'd appeared
in in addition to The Man Who Fell to Earth
at this point was seventy eight, just a Jigglo. So
he really only had one what we would consider now

(34:46):
iconic film role in his filmography at this point, and
I think was far from established as the cult film
icon that he would later become and certainly would be
cemented in following his passing in twenty sixteen. Musically, this
film falls between Scary Monsters and super Creeps from nineteen
eighty and Let's Dance from eighty three, both massive critical

(35:08):
and commercial hits, and by the way, Let's Dance includes
a track he did with Giorgio Moroder for the nineteen
eighty two it Route a car of film Cat People,
which of course is a remake of the nineteen forties
Cat People, except with Malcolm McDowell turning into a cat.

Speaker 3 (35:23):
I've seen the original Cat People years ago, and I
remember I quite liked it, So we may want to
come back to that on the show one day. But
the remake I have not seen, I'm to understand it
goes a little bit harder.

Speaker 2 (35:35):
Yeah, And I don't know. I don't know if I
want to watch Malcolm McDowell turn into a cat every
time he orgasms, But I don't know. It's a product
of the time, I guess. As for Bowie in this film, though,
I think he's terrific. As well. As always, Bowie excels
at playing the outsider, and here he's kind of a
double outsider. He's a vampire, thus set apart from the

(35:57):
mortal world and a stranger to many aspects of but
he is also, as we come to realize, something of
a thrall uninitiated into all the intricacies of vampiric existence.
Much of John Blaylock's journey is one of struggling with
aging immortality, which Bowie handles with a kind of kind
of like a quiet anxiety that feels very palpable on

(36:18):
the screen.

Speaker 3 (36:19):
Even though at some points I think we referred to
his performance in The Man Who Fell to Earth as
kind of quailudic he he also did have outbursts in
The Man Who Filled to earth. Like there were moments
where his performance got quite big, kind of like the
pressure came up and blew the top off and he screams,
get out of my mind, or when he like smacks
the tray of cookies in the air. I recall less

(36:43):
of anything like that in here. This is a much tighter,
more subdued, controlled performance throughout, despite the fact that we
can see his character is suffering immensely. John Blaylock is
a character who, you know, he weathers his suffering with
a kind of with a kind of quiet, melancholy and

(37:07):
indignant resentment. Like there there are parts where you can
see his ego is wounded, but it but it never
turns into a big reaction. Instead, he just kind of
he subsumes it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (37:20):
Yeah, Like there's a scene in the picture where he's
he's significantly aged and this this this youth that's been
coming to the apartment for you know, like music lessons
and and and so forth thinks that he is the
father of John, and she's like, oh, you know, I
thought that because you have the same eyes. And yeah.

(37:41):
His response is so haunting. He's like he's like he's
says something the effective well that's that's that's interesting. I've
known him for so long and I never realized that,
you know, I don't know. The little moments like that
are just so well executed, all right. And then we

(38:04):
also have Susan Sarandon playing Sarah Roberts, as we mentioned earlier.
Born nineteen forty six, she's the first of three Rocky
Horror Picture Show connections in this film. Susan Sarandon's career
entails a great deal of mainstream dramatic success, obviously, but
for many of us, I think she's always going to
be a legend for her performances. Janet Weiss a heroin

(38:26):
in the nineteen seventy five film Rocky hor Picture Show.
Her screen and TV credits go back to nineteen seventy
and include such titles as seventy four as The Satan Murders,
eighty seven's The Witches of Eastwick, ninety one's Film and Louise,
ninety five's dead Man Walking, and twenty twelve's Cloud Atlas.
One time Oscar winner for dead Man Walking and five

(38:46):
time nominee, including a nomination for Film and Louise. And
you know, I also have nothing but great things to
say about Sarandon. In this picture, she's sporting a great
androgynous look with short red hair. She is essentially most
of the film our protagonists. I guess you could argue
a gerontologist whose obsession for her works and transforms into

(39:07):
an obsession for the mysterious Miriam Blaylock. And while our
bisexual vampire duo here more stated with Miriam and implied
with John, are maybe a bit more cliche in their
depiction of bisexuality, you know, their indiscriminate supernatural beings the
vampires here, I do feel like Sarah is presented in

(39:28):
a especially for the time like refreshingly believable light. So
her attraction to Miriam, despite her character having a boyfriend,
is not presented as something that is in and of
itself alarming or something that would otherwise be inconceivable for
this character, you know, without the supernatural intrigue. So I

(39:49):
applaud that in this film for sure.

Speaker 3 (39:51):
Oh, that seems to me to be just kind of
an understood part of her character, Like they don't really
discuss it explicitly, but like, for example, her her kind
of jerk boyfriend is suspicious of her when he learns
that she spent the whole afternoon with this mysterious, beautiful woman.

Speaker 2 (40:08):
Yeah yeah. And the fact that it is understood without
being like really called out in a way where like
there's no scene where she explains it to him or anything.
You know. Again, I think that's quite refreshing.

Speaker 3 (40:21):
I think Susan Sarandon's performance here is great, especially in
the way that in the way that it changes over
the course of the film, because when we first get
to know her, she is in work mode. She is
fully a professional, and all we're seeing is her interaction
with the research that she does, like her engaging with

(40:43):
the topics of her work as a professional, and even
when she first meets John Blaylock played by Bowie, it's
in that context. It's like a work thing. And then
there is the strangest and most surprising shift, as like
she is brought into the vampire characters' lives, that her

(41:05):
role turns into an emotional and erotic one, and that
she instead we instead learn about what she wants and
what she feels, and her desires and her suffering, which
was not really part of the character at all when
we first met her, except insofar as like her desires
and suffering related to her struggles with her research. That's

(41:27):
a weird kind of arc to pull off within a story,
and I think a surendum handles it so well.

Speaker 2 (41:33):
Yeah, a lesser film and a lesser performance, it would
have been the character taking her glasses off, you know
that sort of thing. Yeah, where it's just a complete
shift and you just kind of roll with it because
that's just how movies do it. But her performance brings
those two sides together and make them both believable parts
of the sane human character. Now we mentioned the jerk boyfriend.

(41:55):
The jerk boyfriend is Tom have Her played by Cliff
DeYoung born nineteen forty five, a sixties rock star. The
group was Clear Light. I'm not familiar with him Turn
Broadway actor. He was in Hair Turn film and TV actor,
and he absolutely played Brad Major's and Farley flavors in
nineteen eighty one Shock Treatment, Richard O'Brien's follow up to

(42:16):
Rocky Horr. So in this de Young would be was
taking over the role from Barry Bostwick, who played Brad
in the original Rocky r Picture Show. Clifty Young's other
credits include nineteen eighty nine's Glory, nineteen ninety two's Doctor
Giggles and nineteen ninety six is The Craft.

Speaker 3 (42:33):
Don't forget also that he was in the nineteen eighties
or maybe early nineties film called Pulse, which is an
all appliances attack film. Like an evil I don't know,
alien virus or something gets into the power lines and
it makes the toasters go crazy and try to kill people.

Speaker 2 (42:50):
Oh Man, maximum overdrive. Yeah, all right, we mentioned the youth.
This is the character Alice Alice Cavender played by Beth
Ellers nineteen sixty eight, a child slash youth actor at
the time, but she'd go on to a long and
award winning career on the soap Opera's Guiding Light and
All My Children.

Speaker 3 (43:10):
Very tragic, innocent character. When you first meet her, you're
just like, oh no, I think she's gonna get her
blood drank.

Speaker 2 (43:17):
And yeah, now when vampires start drinking folks blood, you know,
occasionally the law starts sniffing around. In this film. That
character is Lieutenant Ali Greza played by Dan Hidea for
nineteen forty. We reference him all the time. I feel like,
but this is actually our first Dan Hidea film.

Speaker 3 (43:36):
I was shocked how cute Dan Hidea is in this movie.
I think of him as, oh, you know, a perennially crusty, mean, gristly,
cantankerous old dude, or like the villain in Commando. But
either way, a kind of perpetually older seeming character actor

(43:58):
who just has a different energy than the Dan Todaea
we get in this film. I think the major difference
being this is one of the only times I've ever
seen him with his hair grown out this long, and
he looks positively scruffy as a police detective, which is
against type anyway. So I don't know what's going on,
but strange different turn for Dan. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (44:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:17):
If you're not familiar with Danaday, a memorable character actor
with a real talent for playing often sleazy characters, villains
and so forth. Be it the vengeful husband in nineteen
eighty four's Blood Simple from the Cohen Brothers, or Richard
Nixon in nineteen ninety nine's Dick. He's been active on
screen and TV since the mid seventies, and let's see,

(44:39):
at this point in his career, he had just appeared
in Alan Rudolph's cattle mutilation thriller in Dangered Species.

Speaker 3 (44:45):
Now this just came up recently. That's different than the
cattle mutilation movie that we did with Martin Landau.

Speaker 2 (44:51):
Correct, Yeah, different film. This one is more of a
conspiracy thriller and it's quite good. So I recommend it
if if you need to have a viewing party back
to back cattle mutilation films, you know, watch those two.

Speaker 3 (45:05):
Also, though dan Headea's character, correct me if I'm wrong,
But I don't think the police make any progress one, no.

Speaker 2 (45:12):
Progress at all. He's completely ineffective. He doesn't even get killed.
Like when he showed up, I was like, oh, he's
getting the psycho treatment. This guy's going down the stairs.
But no, there's just like nothing comes to the investigation.
And then he comes up, comes back at the end
of the picture and just kind of pokes around a
little bit and figures out nothing.

Speaker 3 (45:30):
Why would they make him cute like this if Catherine
Danube's not gonna drink his blood.

Speaker 2 (45:34):
I have no idea. Maybe they had to drop a subplot.
I don't know, all right, I said there were three
rocky horror reference points in this picture. Well, the third
is the actor Rufus Collins, who lived nineteen thirty five
through nineteen ninety six. He plays the character Charlie humphreyes.
He's one of the other research scientists that Sarah is

(45:55):
working with.

Speaker 3 (45:56):
Yeah, so with Susan Sarandon, Clifty Young and Rufus Collins
together are the three gerontologists who were working in this
lab brutally rotting monkeys alive in order to discover the
secret of aging.

Speaker 2 (46:08):
Yeah, it's a stop motion effect. By the way, when
we see that monkey rot it's pretty pretty nice. But yeah,
Rufus Collins New York actor who started out in a
living theater, which is an experimental acting troop of the day.
He worked in the UK as well, which maybe why
he's in this film because most of it was filmed
in London. But he has some wild credits, including Andy
Warhol's Batman Dracula from sixty four. I'm not sure what

(46:32):
that entailed. I've seen it referenced almost as like a
lost film, so some sort of experimental Warhol project. But
he's in both The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Shock Treatment,
playing an uncredited, uncredited Transylvanian. In the former, if you
look in the background, there's like at least one black
Transylvanian with like really cool hair and sunglasses. That's Rufus Collins. Yeah,

(46:56):
and then he plays a member of the camera crew
in the latter picture.

Speaker 3 (46:59):
He wears like neon sunglasses indoors in this movie. Lots
of characters wear sunglasses indoors in the Hunger, but he
is one of them, and his sunglasses are cooler looking
than most.

Speaker 2 (47:11):
Yeah, they're a whole sit in. My wife and I
were coming on this. There's a scene later on where
I believe a Jigglow is brought back by Miriam purely
for the purpose or mostly for the purposes of blood.
And he's wearing sunglasses, as is she. She's a vampire,
so we're like, okay, she can wear sunglasses at night,
but this dude's wearing sunglasses at night anyway. And the

(47:32):
apartment is so dark. Is anyone seeing anything? But yeah,
everybody's wearing sunglasses. Everyone's smoking like a chimney, all right.
And finally, it's worth noting that we have little more
than a cameo here, very bit part. But Willem Dafoe
pops up playing second phone booth youth and he was

(47:53):
like he was twenty seven or twenty eight at the time,
and it is this is the youngest I've seen Defoe
in a motion picture. This was only like his fourth
screen or TV appearance. Dude, he is smooth, Yeah, like
he you know, you think of Dafoe or you know,
or I think of William Dafoe. I think of like
that rugged face, you know, you know, a very very
handsome face, but very rugged. The lines are important to

(48:15):
the overall work, and it's almost a little jarring to
see him this young. He doesn't have much to do here.
He doesn't drink blood nor get his blood drink, but
this would This still qualifies as the first of five
Willem Dafoe vampire films that I know of, alongside two
thousand and one Shadow of a Vampire, twenty ten, Daybreakers,
two thousand and nine circ To Freak the Vampire's Assistant,

(48:36):
and of course twenty twenty four is Nosferatu.

Speaker 3 (48:39):
He doesn't play a vampire in this, but he looks
like a vampire in his regular human makeup. In Streets
of Fire.

Speaker 2 (48:47):
Oh yeah, yeah, that would be that. And I guess
like eighty five's Roadhouse sixty six and To Live and
Die in La were really those are more of the
launching points of his career, so he was really under
the radar at this point.

Speaker 3 (48:58):
Have you never seen Streets of Fire and you want
to have a good time, Just look up Willem Defoe
screaming streets of Fire. That's that's a good face.

Speaker 2 (49:06):
All right, Really, I'll try and speak this along. I
realized we're taking a while on the connections here, but
we mentioned Dick Smith. Make up illusions is what he's
credited with here. Lived twenty two through twenty fourteen. You know,
a host of talented makeup artists were involved in bringing
these characters to life, but Dick Smith played a key
role in David Bowie's on screen aging effects. We previously

(49:29):
discussed Smith in our episode on Scanners, which features a
number of amazing body horror effects, but he was also
legendary for his aging makeup effects, most famously that of
f Murray Abraham's Saliari in eighty four Zama Dais, which
earned him an Academy Award. His other credits include seventy
three's The Exorcist in nineteen eighties Altered States.

Speaker 3 (49:50):
Oh does he do the just the de I wonder
if The Exorcist was just demon makeup or if he
also was making Father Maren look older.

Speaker 2 (50:00):
And yeah, I'm not entirely sure, but you know he was,
you know, clearly he was skilled beyond mere aging effects,
but he became well known for it. And to your
point earlier about Prometheus, yeah, I feel like there are
plenty of examples of movies that probably had more money
in behind them than films that utilized Dick Smith that

(50:21):
ended up being less convincing in their aging makeup. He
had a true gift for this sort of thing. Tony
Scott mentions in the commentary track that that Smith was
disappointed that the lighting wasn't more intense in some of
these scenes where David Bowie is aged and you know,
and you know, Tony's you know, basically saying, well, you know,
that's part of it. You also, it's not just the makeup.

(50:44):
You got to have the lighting, and you know, it
makes it more effective if things are not maybe completely
in focus or completely lit. But it's kind of telling
like that's how strongly Dick Smith believed in his makeup effects.

Speaker 4 (50:55):
Here.

Speaker 2 (50:55):
It's like, shine the lights on him. They can go
out in the sun.

Speaker 3 (51:00):
Oh, he's good. I understand why you had the confidence.

Speaker 2 (51:02):
Yeah, costume, we don't always mention costuming, but Molina Canna
Narrow was the costume and key to the costuming here.
Born nineteen forty six, another legendary behind the scenes figure
and thirty three time Oscar winner. Where do you even
keep all those trophies? I'm not sure? But there's this
one story, and this is one that that Tony shares

(51:24):
on the commentary track. She's famously fled the set of
the film one day and they were like, where is she?
Where'd she go? Nobody knew. Turns out she flew from
London to Rome just to get the right cloth for
like a pocket square on David Bowie's costume. She was like,
there's nothing here in London, I have to go to
Rome to get it. So she just just flew in

(51:44):
her own dime and came back with it.

Speaker 3 (51:46):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (51:47):
She's worked with such directors as Stanley Kubrick, really Scott Francis,
Ford Coppola and Wes Anderson, some of them you know
multiple times. We're talking such costume rich films as seventy
one's o' clockwork, Orange, nineteen nineties Dick Tracy and nineteen
ninety nine's Titus.

Speaker 3 (52:02):
Those are all eye popping films. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:05):
The director of photography was Stephen Goldblatt born nineteen forty five,
South African born cinematographer who worked on such films as
nineteen eighty one's Outland, eighty five's Young Sherlock Holmes, and
nineteen ninety seven's Batman Forever, for which he was nominated
for an Oscar.

Speaker 3 (52:20):
That was the one. Yeah, it's boy Ling acid.

Speaker 2 (52:29):
I'm gonna mention the editor. We don't always mention the editor,
but the editing in this film, I feel like, is
something else. There's some very alarming editing choices at times.
Pamela Power born nineteen forty two. She worked with Ridley
Scott multiple times on seventy seven's The Duellist, his Apple
Mac commercial from eighty four, eighty five's Legend, and ninety

(52:50):
seven's gij Okay. Now we get to the music, and
there are several people to mention on the musical note here,
so much like the editing, the music is pretty wild.
We have a mixture of needle drop classical tracks, experimental
electronic sounds, and then a riveting opening performance by Boohause.
Howard Blake born in nineteen thirty eight was the musical

(53:12):
director on the film. He also served in this role
on nineteen eighty's Flash Gordon, which we previously talked about.
Let's see that multiple classical tracks are used here. There's
also a score by Guiney Jaguera, who also did the
theme song for TVs. The Powers of Matthew Starr, and
Michael Rubini, who also worked on Matthew Starr but also

(53:35):
went on to score the likes of nineteen eighty four
is What Waits Below, nineteen eighty six is man Hunter,
and ninety two's Nemesis.

Speaker 3 (53:42):
Oh, it's been a while since I've seen it, but
I remember Man Hunter having intriguing music.

Speaker 2 (53:46):
That's the stylish picture. Yeah, all right. And then finally,
David Lawson or Dave Lawson is credited with performer, Additional
Electronic Music and Effects, Composer, Additional Electronic music and Effects
uncredited on that latter pump point. But this guy's pretty
interesting as well. There are a number of weird supernatural
synth flourishes in the film, and when I heard them,

(54:08):
I was like, this sounds like Jim Henson's Labyrinth. You
know these sort of there's sort of like cascading synth
waterfalls of supernatural intrigue, and they happen a lot in
this picture, and they happen periodically in Labyrinth, and sure enough,
I mean the same guy was involved in both of
these pictures.

Speaker 3 (54:28):
Oh wow.

Speaker 2 (54:29):
Yeah, So let's see he did supply. He supplied synthesized
electronic sounds for The Dark Crystal in eighty two and
also contributed to the Labyrinth score. Otherwise, he has a
handful of film credits on the major databases, though sometimes
he's not credited on the film, but if you look

(54:49):
up the score album elsewhere, you can find that he's credited.
Let's see, he worked on ninety four as Frankenstein. He
worked with Trevor Jones on such films as Angel Heart
in eighty seven Mississippi Burning in eighty eight. So he's
a British keyboardist who was a member of the UK
progressive rock band green Slade. I was unfamiliar with Greenslade,

(55:10):
but I pulled them up as I was working on
notes here and I like what they're laying down. It's
kind of a neat prog rock sound with some synth
in there. You know, maybe feels a little old fashioned,
but in a good way, you know. Okay, so he's
something of a synth legend. He played on the soundtrack
for seventy six. Is the man who fell to Earth
and worked with the likes of Jimmy Page and Kate Bush.
Said to own one of the largest synth systems in Europe.

Speaker 3 (55:33):
The largest synth systems. What does that mean, like the
physically largest.

Speaker 2 (55:37):
I guess it's kind of like, I think, maybe a
collection of synths, but they're active and all like hooked together.
I don't know. I found some There's a Psychedelic Baby
magazine has an interview with him from twenty twenty three.
It includes a number of photographs of him back in
the day and in present times. And yeah, the ones
from the seventies are pretty great because here's this like

(55:59):
long hair dude, you know, of course, surrounded by synths
and keyboards and all looks like he was quite the
synth wizard of the day.

Speaker 3 (56:09):
I was trying to see if I could recognize any
brands to know what his style was. But I do
not know what these are.

Speaker 2 (56:14):
I mean, yeah, even when I hear guys like this
talk about their gear, I'm just not a gearhead for
this sort of thing. So all the names of these
various devices and innovations just go completely over my head.
But I love the results. So you definitely hear his
influence on the sounds of the Hunger. But again it's

(56:36):
kind of all over the place. You have electronic, you
have classical, and also some I guess more traditional score
hidden in there as well, in addition to contemporary tracks
like the Bauhause track that opens up the picture.

Speaker 3 (56:55):
Okay, well, is it time to talk a bit about
the plot?

Speaker 2 (56:57):
Yeah, I let's jump in.

Speaker 3 (56:58):
So this is not one of those movies where we're
going to do a kind of chronological scene by scene
talk through the plot like we often do. Sometimes it
just doesn't feel right with what the movie is. I
think this is one of those cases. I've already described
some of the plot, but here I think maybe we
can do a kind of general overview and then talk
about some specific scenes and elements and themes. So at

(57:20):
the beginning of the story, John and Miriam Blaylock. That's
David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve. They live in a house
in New York City, and they have seemingly been together
for hundreds of years. Miriam is some kind of ancient
being we see brief flashbacks of her in what appeared
to be palaces and maybe ancient Greece and certainly ancient Egypt.

(57:43):
There are these different kind of costumes. I think we
see some kind of Egyptian priesthood paraphernalia. I don't know
if you had any particular observations about the ancient flashbacks,
but I couldn't detect a lot of plot from them.
They were not full of information. They were more full
of vibe.

Speaker 2 (58:02):
Yeah, these are not flashbacks in the Highlander sense where
it's like, all right, we're going back now, and here's
a definite time stamp of where we're going and when
we're going to. It's presented very surrealistically and jarringly. There
are multiple times like this in the picture where you're like,
what's happening? Is this is the past? Yes, it must
be the past, and then you kind of piece it
together later. But yeah, Greco Egyptian is about the most

(58:25):
I could make out of it.

Speaker 3 (58:26):
Though you could be forgiven for being confused when we
cut to these palaces of the past, because in the opening,
John and Miriam live together in this beautiful house in
New York City that is very old world like they
are apparently fabulously wealthy, and their home is full of
magnificent art. It's full of marble statues that they say

(58:47):
are thousands of years old, and it's got these big,
spacious Baroque rooms and musical instruments and stuff. So it
seems like the kind of place you might suddenly go
around a corner and be in a room that looks
like it is a palace in ancient Egypt.

Speaker 2 (59:00):
When I am in New York and I get to
walk around New York and I see a home where
people live, I just assume these are sorts of people
that live there, and this must be ancient vampires with
you know, generational wealth and supernatural blood.

Speaker 3 (59:14):
So the flashbacks they showed that, but they also show
us Miriam and John falling in love when John was immortal,
And I believe this is supposed to be somewhere in
Europe in the seventeenth century. I think I read somewhere
it said France, but I don't recall the movie saying France.

Speaker 2 (59:29):
It feels very French.

Speaker 3 (59:31):
So they are falling in love in powdered Wigland, and
she promises him eternal life and eternal love, and they
drink one another's blood to turn John into her youthful
vampire lover for ages to come. And there's something about
this scene where you know they promise, the promise is forever,

(59:52):
and this promise of forever is repeated later in the story,
like I think I'm remembering this right. There are scenes
of them early the film, in their nineteen eighties New
York phase where they're still trading these reassurances, Like there's
one part where I think they're in the shower and
John just asks forever and she says forever. Now, maybe

(01:00:13):
here we should do an aside on the opening sequence,
because that gives us a flavor of part of what
they do in their nineteen eighties New York life. Before
seeing this movie, I really did not know what it
was going to be like, but I guess I assumed
that the whole thing was going to be a lot
more like the first ten minutes. This was not the case,

(01:00:34):
But the opening sequence rocks strictly in terms of what happens.
It's just our two original vampires, Miriam and John. They
go to a goth club, they pick up a couple
of dates. They bring them back home, and they drink
their blood. But the sequence is so fun everybody. So
there's the goth clothing, all this dark leather, people wearing

(01:00:54):
sunglasses inside in the dark, and Bauhaus performing apparently inside
some kind of animal cage.

Speaker 2 (01:01:01):
Yeah, you will observe many things in this film through slits, slats, blinds, cages,
and of course translucent black capes and drapes and veils.
And again, I also, I hope you're not trying to
quit smoking while watching this film, because there's a lot
of cigarette smoking. Yes, But yeah, that's Bowhouse lead singer
Peter Murphy performing in the goth club himself looking like

(01:01:23):
some sort of an undead creature, and they're performing their
biggest tip, Bela Lugosi's Dead. I do wish they'd included
all nine minutes and thirty four seconds of the track,
because it's a tremendous track. I got to see Bowhouse
perform at Coachella back in two thousand and five, and
they opened with Peter Murphy performing Bela Lagosi's Dead whilst

(01:01:46):
suspended upside down on stage. It was pretty great. So here, yeah,
we get these scenes of the club, Peter Murphy, our
vampire couple strolling in, but then we get also we
can also get some like crazy cuts. This is where
we first st start getting hit with like crazy cuts
to them like driving and stuff later on, and then
we keep cutting back to Peter Murphy's performance during the

(01:02:10):
vampire blood drinking scene that shortly follows.

Speaker 3 (01:02:14):
That's right, So Miriam and John they both pick up someone,
they bring them back together to their home, and they
start like they're going to have sex, but instead they
end up, of course, cutting them and drinking their blood.
We'll talk more about the mechanics of the blood drinking
in a moment, but we do see here something that
is I think. While a lot of this movie is

(01:02:35):
different than other vampire movies and very fresh and unusual,
a common convention you see in vampire films that's also
present here is that some of the most erotically charged
imagery is used in the lead up to blood drinking
rather than to sex. This does imply a kind of
blurring of the lines between like the vampire's carnal desires

(01:02:59):
and appetite. It's like, to them, is the blood sexier
than sex? And if so, how does this affect the
way we should think about the vampire's love stories.

Speaker 2 (01:03:10):
Yeah, this is a great point. Yeah, multiple points in
the film, including some very subtle moments, it's clear that
the desire to feed is also the desire for sex. Yeah,
and one, I don't know, I got the impression that
maybe the one is not merely a stepping stone for
the other, like it, Like, I didn't get as much
the idea that it's like, oh, well, only they only
do sex because they just want to do blood. Like

(01:03:31):
the two seem inseparable.

Speaker 3 (01:03:33):
I guess you're right, Yeah, they are kind of the same.

Speaker 2 (01:03:35):
Yeah, there's a great scene later on where John is
aging rather rapidly and he's in I guess it's so
just a restroom, but it feels like a locker room,
and there's like a shirtless man like splashing his face
with water next to him, and he's like eyeing the
guy's throat. And that too, is also a very like

(01:03:57):
less overt, more subtle moment where there's a feeling of
the desire both for flesh in the sexual sense and
also blood in the vampiric sense.

Speaker 3 (01:04:07):
Now a note on the vampire mechanics here. The vampires
in this movie do not, I believe, have fangs, or
at least I don't recall ever seeing them. I don't
know what the novel describes, but I don't think we
see fangs in the movie, and that would make sense
because instead they slice. The way they get the blood
from their victims is they attack with a particular dedicated tool.

(01:04:32):
They slice their victims' arteries with this little ank blade
and then like they wear it around their neck like
a crucifix, except it's an Egyptian style onc and then
they cut the neck and then they drink the blood
like you would from a water fountain.

Speaker 2 (01:04:48):
Yeah, yeah, I believe you're right. No fangs. I never
saw any things. And their tool users and they're feeding.
There's a really fun Key and Peel sketch from years
back about or where they discuss how vampires make too
much of a man when they feed like they bite
and then there's just blood everywhere and they're not getting
enough of the blood into their mouths. Well, this vision
of vampiorism at least excuses all the gushing and mess

(01:05:09):
making because they don't have like dedicated like feeding mouth
parts so much. They have to they have to stab,
They have to allow for there to be a gush
and then feed on it as best they can.

Speaker 3 (01:05:21):
I feel like the movie also takes seriously the mess. Yeah,
like you see them cleaning up afterwards.

Speaker 2 (01:05:27):
Yeah, cleanup seems to be a big deal. And there's
some hauntingly beautiful and very powerful scenes. I'm thinking, particularly
after the first killing, we get the scene of the
two bloody aunks landing in the sink during the wash up,
and then of course we see the incineration of the
corpses of the drained victims and they're like wrapped in

(01:05:49):
black garbage bags, and then they're placing the incinerator in
the plastic is like, you know, melting around. The bodies,
all very well executed.

Speaker 3 (01:05:59):
The police do not seem concerned by the fact that
John and Miriam have an incinerator in their basement.

Speaker 2 (01:06:04):
I guess it's like only murders in the building, Like
all these buildings in New York have powerful incinerators that
just completely adamized bodies. So I guess they're just used
to it.

Speaker 3 (01:06:15):
So I wanted to pause for a moment here and
explore the question of what other powers or limitations do
the vampires have within the lore of the film. So
we've established that they have arrested, aging or unnaturally prolonged youth,
perhaps eternal youth in Miriam's case. Unclear. I was wondering,

(01:06:37):
are they supposed to be invulnerable or resistant to regular injuries?
I really don't think so. In fact, several things happen
in the movie that made it seem like the vampires
can be harmed by standard physical forces. I get the
impression that in this world, like you could really wound

(01:06:58):
a vampire. A human, regular mortal could really wound a
vampire as easily as they could wound another human. But
maybe I'm forgetting something to the contrary.

Speaker 2 (01:07:06):
Yeah, I think I think that's right.

Speaker 3 (01:07:08):
Yeah, the vampires do need to drink blood. In fact,
they have this insatiable craving, and that is really framed
more I guess this is actually quite common, but it's
framed more as a weakness than a power. You know.
It's like they need, they need to say this hunger,
and it causes them to do things that are in

(01:07:28):
some cases destructive to their own well being.

Speaker 2 (01:07:31):
Right, right.

Speaker 3 (01:07:32):
Vampires in the movies often have a kind of super strength.
I think Miriam does have super strength because at one
point we see her throw Sarah clear across the room.
Does John have in human strength. I don't recall ever
seeing in any evidence of that.

Speaker 2 (01:07:48):
If he does, he never employs it. So it's if
he has that supernatural strength, using it is not really
a part of his character. But I guess I'm inclined
to think that maybe he doesn't have it, like maybe
that's one of the limitations of him being the vampire spawned,
the vampire thrawl, or a half vampiric being, however you
want to describe it.

Speaker 3 (01:08:07):
Yeah, Now, there's no problem with them going out in sunlight.
They venture out in the daytime throughout the film, and
they don't have to sleep in coffins or in their
native soil. They sleep in a big kind of you know,
a wind blown music video bed.

Speaker 2 (01:08:22):
Yes, yes, I mean I get the impression they sleep
in a lot, but it's not like they can't go
out in the sun.

Speaker 3 (01:08:29):
Yeah. I don't recall any apparent influence of religious imagery
or material.

Speaker 2 (01:08:34):
I think there's one. I think one of the phone
booth guys, not Willem Dafoe, but the other guy maybe
has a cross on, But it's ambiguous if it actually
has any effect on the vampirically affected character who views it.

Speaker 3 (01:08:49):
Yeah, so maybe Miriam has super strength, and unclear if
John does. But apart from that, really, the only great
kind of power we see of the vampire, I think
is just the fact that they live eternally or so
called eternally, that they do not age, they can maintain
youth for a long time. Would you say that there's

(01:09:12):
any other apparent power on display?

Speaker 2 (01:09:15):
I think that's mostly it now. Miriam in particular is
quite seductive and charismatic. People are drawn to her, but
I never thought that this was presented in a like
definite Dracula's gaze sort of way, like she to Yeah,
to an extent, you could say she casts a spell
on Sarah, but I don't think in the literal sense,

(01:09:36):
not in a way that overrides Sarah's agency in the seduction.

Speaker 3 (01:09:40):
You know, Yeah, Sarah doesn't seem like hypnotized. She seems more,
I don't know, encouraged to give in to something that
she does want.

Speaker 2 (01:09:50):
Yeah, it'd be more like being starstruck, except you know,
it's like the vampiric version of that, I guess.

Speaker 3 (01:09:55):
Yeah. So anyway, worth noting that the vision of va
emperorsm in this film is quite mechanically limited, Compared to
most vampire lore, many of the standard horror tropes do
not apply.

Speaker 2 (01:10:10):
Yeah, no garlic in this picture, No steaks, nothing like that.

Speaker 3 (01:10:14):
There is steak in the picture.

Speaker 2 (01:10:15):
There's a steak. Yeah, there's rare steak.

Speaker 3 (01:10:17):
Of course, a quite significant steak scene where after Susan
Sarandon has been turned, she's like at a restaurant trying
to eat some steak and just like yuck, only want blood.

Speaker 2 (01:10:28):
Yeah yeah, And he's like, I can't believe you spent
three and a half hours with that woman. You need
to go to a doctor.

Speaker 3 (01:10:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:10:34):
I think you have bisexual ititis or something. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:10:38):
Anyway, So to come back to our sort of zoomed
out overview of the plot. In the opening again, John
and Miriam they're living this apparently fabulous life. They live
this big, beautiful house in New York. When they're not
hunting for victims at goth clubs, they appear to spend
a lot of their time on artistic leisure. They are
both musicians. I think Miriam plays the piano and John

(01:10:59):
play the cello, and they like to play music with
a talented young teenage violinist from the house across the
street named Alice. Does she take music lessons from them?

Speaker 2 (01:11:10):
I was unclear on that if if she just jams
with them or she takes lessons at any rate, it's
you know, it's probably fine. This is probably totally okay
that she's coming over here and hanging out with these
two ancient vampires.

Speaker 3 (01:11:23):
Yeah, not going anywhere good. Anything else to say about
their apparently somewhat happy life in the beginning, I.

Speaker 2 (01:11:31):
Mean, not much other than it does seem like they
are happy content. It doesn't seem like they particularly have
any vampire hunters breathing down their necks or anything. And
I guess they've been going at it for a long time,
and they're staying on top of the fashions. Like sometimes,
I mean, there's so many ways to treat longevity and
vampires in fiction, and sometimes vampires are depicted as like

(01:11:53):
totally out of keeping with modern fads and so forth,
and certainly technology, and also maybe being rather bored, like
they just run out of passion. These two seem to
still have a lot of passion for what's popular in
the world, changing musical genres and so forth, And you know,

(01:12:14):
they're staying active. They're still killing people and drinking their
blood and then burning them in the.

Speaker 3 (01:12:19):
Basement, and the way in which their hip seems to
be I don't know, basically just keeping pace with culture.
You don't get like that Saltation view where or it's
like in Francis Ford Coppolas Dracula, where Gary oldman. You know,
he's got the big bun head and he's decrepit and
old world and then suddenly all at once he's rejuvenated

(01:12:40):
and hip and stylish. Anyway, the trouble of the plot
starts when John notices that he is losing his hair
and he can't seem to sleep, and he notices several
things and realizes he is aging rapidly. Apparently years are
falling off of his life every day. Now. One question

(01:13:02):
here I was trying to remember is what is the
level of openness between John and Miriam about this. I
seem to remember they do talk about it as if
he knew this might happen at some point, Like I
remember he asks Miriam how long it took for another
person to decay in this way? Presumably this was a

(01:13:24):
previous lover of Miriam's, But I also don't get the
impression that he knew this would happen before he was
turned Did you take that all the same way?

Speaker 2 (01:13:36):
I mean, it's this is one of the more thought
provoking mysteries of the film, I think, because like logically,
in the film, yeah, he seems to be aware that
there were other lovers in the past, that they they
went away, that they faded away one way or another,
and that something like that could happen to him. On
the other hand, there is the whole reassurances of things

(01:13:58):
being forever. And then of course this also ties into
how I think, you know, we all, to varying degrees,
deal with or don't deal with aging and mortality. Like
we all know that we will grow old and that
we will die. That that is like the biological trajectory,
and that you know, very little can can occur to

(01:14:21):
change that path. And yet I think we often carry
on like John, not thinking about it, finding ways to
avoid the reality of it. And then when it does
begin to occur, it, you know, it comes as a shock,
but it's not a shock because we knew it all along,
you know.

Speaker 3 (01:14:40):
Yeah, though, I mean for John, there's this interesting dynamic
because it's like he short sold his life. Essentially, he
had all these many many years, unnaturally extended life and youth.
He's been young and vigorous for so long, and now
it's all coming home. It's all coming home at once.
It's happening so fast. Yeah. So anyway, John is in

(01:15:01):
this state and on TV he sees a report about
the work of a gerontologist named doctor Sarah Roberts. This
is the character played by Susan Sarandon. She's written a
book about her work and she's performing experiments along with
a couple of colleagues, Charlie Humphreys and Tom have her
Tom again is Sarah's boyfriend. Together they are trying to

(01:15:22):
understand the process of aging at the cellular level and
possibly halt or reverse it, particularly to help children who
have diseases that cause accelerated aging and deterioration. And these characters,
the scientist characters, are interesting because on one hand, we
see what seems to me to be obvious care or

(01:15:43):
a real desire to help people, especially children, like their
motivations are represented as not impure, and yet they're also
not lionized. The scientists are not treated as saints. They
in some ways come off as quite brutal, like we
see them performing these gory, horrifying experiments on monkeys where

(01:16:06):
one of these experiments in a really great special effects
shop by the way, causes like a monkey to rapidly
age and then turbo decompose in minutes, like when you
drink from the Fall scale in the Last Crusade. Yeah,
we also see them. We see just sort of human
failings of these scientists, like when Sarah and John first meet,

(01:16:27):
Sarah is rude and dismissive to him, and she lies
to him. John comes asking for help, and then also
Tom have her boyfriend, the other scientist. He comes off
as a total jerk, though at the same time there
are also indications that he genuinely cares for Sarah.

Speaker 2 (01:16:46):
Yeah, I mean he's put in a tough spot, I
guess to some degree, and we're not maybe as privy
as much to his side of things. But yeah, that
scene where John is sort of cast aside by Sarah
and she's like, just wait wait for me in the
waiting room and I'll get back you later, and she's
then she tells the security guy it's like there's another
weirdo here. Just leave him alone. He'll probably get bored

(01:17:08):
and leave on his own. And then we the viewer
watch as John literally grows like decades older in the
waiting room, a scene that I think could otherwise come
off as comedic, like because when you're explaining it's like,
you literally watch him grow old in the waiting room.
It sounds like a comedic bit, but it's it's executed

(01:17:29):
in a way that that does not feel funny. And
in the effect, the makeup effects are, of course, so convincing.
We don't see any kind of like transition effect. It's
all you know, checking back in with him and seeing
that he's visibly aged, and yeah, like he ends up
leaving the waiting room a much older man.

Speaker 3 (01:17:46):
Yeah. And then as he's leaving, Sarah sees him again
and he and he recognizes her, knowing that like she
totally blew him off and lied to him earlier, but
she sees now that he has visibly rapidly aged since
earlier that day. And at this point she tries to
apologize and she's like, oh, no, come with me. You know,
we'll bring you in for tests, we'll see what's going on.

(01:18:09):
But now John's pride is hurt and he refuses her help.
And I think we kind of talked about that earlier.
The way that John's personality is represented as kind of
when he faces the you know, these extreme troubles, just
kind of like taking it inside and pushing it underneath. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:18:27):
Yeah, Like this was his last, his only attempt to
like reach out for help, and it didn't turn out
the way he hoped it would, and there's not going
to be a second chance for him.

Speaker 3 (01:18:37):
Yeah. And then there's a section here where John is
you can tell he's hungry, so he's trying to feed.
We see him have encountered. He's very he's very rapidly aging,
turning old in the course of this single day. And
he like goes into a bathroom the scene you talked
about where he sees the man I don't know, shaving
or whatever in the sink and he's staring at him.

(01:18:59):
I think he tries to attack a skater in a park.

Speaker 2 (01:19:02):
Oh it's a roller skater. Yeah, and like they set
up this really cool scene where it's like, what's happening
where are we now? Another music video has started. This
guy starts doing some cool skating and then here comes
John attempts to stab him and drink his blood, but
then it doesn't fully pull it off. For some reason.

Speaker 3 (01:19:21):
So he comes home and then oh no, because he's
so old. Now, when the neighbor girl Alice comes over
to play music, John has to pretend to be someone
else because she won't recognize him. He looks so much older.
And then even worse when she's in there, he talks
her into playing some music for him, and we don't

(01:19:42):
see it. It happens off screen, but we know what.
He kills her and drinks her blood.

Speaker 2 (01:19:47):
Yeah, and he gets more heartbreaking from there with John,
because he just gets progressively older. Miriam is walking this
line between comforting him and keeping him at arm's length,
and she's having to burn Alice's body in the basement.
And then John comes down and he's he's so old.

(01:20:09):
At this point he asks for one more kiss and
then he asks if she will kill him, and you know,
and in this and like heartbreakingly, she tells him, like
you know, it doesn't work like that. You like, you
don't die, you don't get to die, and uh and
and again it's maybe a little unclear to what extent

(01:20:31):
he knew this was the case or remembered it was
the case. I'm not sure, but yeah, it's quickly made
obvious that that, yeah, he's not going to grow old
and die, He's just going to grow perpetually older, but
have eternal life in a very non glamorous way.

Speaker 3 (01:20:48):
That's right. There is no death for a vampire. That's
the twist. There is just aging and pain and decay,
but actually no end. And then in a oh a
hair raising scene where she takes him up to the
attic and she deposits his aging body inside a coffin

(01:21:10):
next to this huge stack of other coffins that are
filled with Miriam's previous lovers, all of whom are reduced
to husks inside the coffins, but are not gone. They
are all still conscious inside. And she bids her other
previous lovers to keep him company and to treat him

(01:21:30):
with kindness.

Speaker 2 (01:21:32):
Yeah, yeah, very haunting. Yeah, thousands of years worth of
lovers here, stored away in neat little stacks.

Speaker 3 (01:21:48):
So here the story switches. Miriam is left alone, and
who should come to the house now but Sarah, Sarah,
the researcher, the gerontologist. Her initial line of inquiry is
where is John? She somehow got his address and she
is trying to find him because obviously somebody who's aging
as rapidly as him would be of interest to her research.

(01:22:12):
Miriam initially tells tell Sarah that he went to Switzerland.
I think so she thinks he's at a clinic there.
But she comes in and she begins to get to
know Miriam. And this is where the story takes a
really different kind of turn, because I think the way again,

(01:22:32):
Miriam is often presented in a kind of ambiguous way.
We don't always know exactly what she's feeling. She's more
hard to scrutinize than many of the human characters. But
I suspect that the implication is that Miriam is now
lonely because there was the idea, of course, she had John,
and she loved John, And there was also the implication

(01:22:56):
that she and John discussed that maybe one day, when
Alice was older, she would turn Alice into a vampire
as well, and she would become her new companion, and
she'd been thinking about this. But of course John killed
Alice and drank her blood. So now Miriam really doesn't
seem to have a friend in the world.

Speaker 2 (01:23:17):
But then, oh, here's Sarah, and Sarah has a lot
of things going for and there is there is an
opening in the significant other market here in Miriam's house, that's.

Speaker 3 (01:23:27):
Right now, somewhere in here, I think. Actually Sarah comes
twice to visit. In between their two visits, I think,
or when the cops come to investigate, and this goes
absolutely nowhere, absolutely nowhere. But Sarah does eventually come back
to visit Miriam again. And here is where things really
take a turn. Upon the second visit, it's it becomes

(01:23:48):
increasingly clear that Miriam and Sarah are interested in each other.
They are, you know, Miriam is playing the piano and
they're talking about the what the music is. Miriam is
explaining the piece of music, and Sarah keeps commenting that
it sounds like a love song. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:24:07):
And on this second visit, Sarah also you know, shows
up wearing a sexy outfit and it's not long before
that outfit gets what some Sherry spilled on it, and
you know, things things progress as you might expect. Much
is said about the fact that she doesn't even like Sherry.
Of course that's the other part. But somehow it's different
with Miriam and and so they imbibe.

Speaker 3 (01:24:31):
Now, I guess this leads to the scene that Roger
Ebert liked. This is the love scene between Sarah and Miriam, which,
as we talked about earlier, there is a kind of
mingling of the of the romantic desire and the desire
for blood. And it's pretty clear what Miriam's aims are

(01:24:52):
at this point. Miriam wants not only to drink Sarah's blood,
but to give of her blood to Sarah as well,
to turn her into a vampire. She wants companionship. Yeah,
and so it's this weird dreamlike scene where ultimately I
think in this scene they do drink of each other's blood.
So there's like a wound in Sarah's arm where she's

(01:25:13):
been pierced by the ONC, but she has also taken
of Miriam's blood.

Speaker 2 (01:25:18):
Yeah, and again this is a very artful, stylish sequence.
It's certainly by by today's standards. There's nothing, you know,
very explicit about it, though it is it is very
erotically charged. And yeah, and Susan's Randon in her comments
on you know, says that she thinks it was probably
ahead of its time, you know, for eighty three. But

(01:25:39):
but yeah, I mean, and to Ebert's point, it is
a highly effective sequence.

Speaker 3 (01:25:44):
Now we do see Sarah kind of trying to go
back to her own, her old life after this, but
it's just it's not going to work out at this point.
So there are several different scenes there. There are scenes
of her increasingly tense and failing relationship with Tom, her boyfriend,
Like they go out to dinner and they discuss things.
Tom airs his suspicions and they you know, they are

(01:26:04):
fighting about that. She doesn't seem to want food for
some reason. It's like, she orders a steak, but she's like,
I can't eat this, and I think it makes her
throw up.

Speaker 2 (01:26:13):
Later, she said them oysters back. There's oysters are muscles
every sage, but she sent them back and he's like,
I can't believe you did that.

Speaker 3 (01:26:21):
Also, she starts doing some tests on herself in the laboratory,
and their colleague, Charlie, he explains what's going on. He's like, whoops, well,
looking at your blood, we see that you actually have
some kind of alien blood in you. There's you, there's
you blood, and then there's some other non human kind
of blood and they're fighting for dominance within your veins

(01:26:44):
and the other blood is winning.

Speaker 2 (01:26:46):
And so in this Sarah is feeling the titular hunger
she is craving the blood. She is herself becoming a vampire,
and like Miriam needs to feed, but she doesn't know
how to do any of these things. She needs Miriam's
guidance in order to fully transition into this life as

(01:27:08):
a creature of the night.

Speaker 3 (01:27:10):
That's right, So there's more negotiation on these fronts. We
see that Sarah is not immediately into the idea of
drinking blood to survive, but she kind of ends up
without a choice and it doesn't she so she's like
extremely weakened and she ends up staying at Miriam's house
and she's like in a bed there and at one
point they have more interactions, but eventually Miriam's like, look,

(01:27:32):
I'm going to do the work. I'm going to show
you what to do. I'll go get a guy, and
so she goes and there's like a great scene where
she goes out and gets a guy wearing sunglasses at
night and brings him back to the house for Susan
Sarandon to eat.

Speaker 2 (01:27:48):
Yeah, this is the Jiggolow character, and boy, they really
went out of their ways to make sure you were
okay with this dude getting fanged or not actually fank anked.
And drained because he's like, he's rude, he's looking in
the liquor crut and he like spits his chewing gum
out in Miriam's apartment. So we're like, we're totally okay
with this guy getting it, and it doesn't take long
before he does get it.

Speaker 3 (01:28:10):
So at this point you might be assuming, okay, well,
is Sarah just going to embrace the new lifestyle? Is
Sarah this is what I am now. I am Miriam's
vampire lover. I am her vampire spawn. I can have
eternal youth, and I just need to pick up people
at the goth club, bring him back here and drink
their blood. And that's what we're going to do for
I don't know however long it takes. I don't recall.

(01:28:32):
Does she get any indication of that what happened to
John will also happen to her eventually. Do they talk
about that.

Speaker 2 (01:28:39):
I don't know that they talk about it at all. No,
But I mean, obviously we the viewer knows that that
would be the end result, you know, some centuries down
the line.

Speaker 3 (01:28:50):
But instead of the full embrace of what happens, there
is a twist. Sarah proves a more recalcitrant of a
new Vampa. There's something more of her original humanity left
than it seems like happened with any of Miriam's previous lovers.

(01:29:10):
So instead of fully embracing the new lifestyle, there's a
confrontation and a big, terrible climax. Now I forget exactly
how it is triggered. What is it that Sarah does
that ends up with Miriam like carrying her upstairs to
like rapidly put her away with the other old lovers.
Is it that she tries to make Miriam drink her blood.

Speaker 2 (01:29:34):
I'm a little unsure about how what exactly happens in
this moment, but she ends up stabbing herself with the
Anka during a very close embrace, one of these embraces
where you're not sure at first who is stabbed by
and who does the stabbing, But yeah, she stabs herself,
and then Miriam is like, well this is you know,
she's clearly heartbroken by this. You know, she clearly had

(01:29:56):
very strong feelings for Sarah and saw a future with Sarah.
But now she's going to have to take Sarah up
to the attic and file her away with the others.

Speaker 3 (01:30:05):
Right, But then it is revenge of the zombies. The
ex lovers emerge in their withered, dusty husk forms, and
they all come out and they take their vengeance, or
should it be thought of as vengeance? I don't know
exactly what you how you frame it, but they surround
and attack Miriam and destroy her.

Speaker 2 (01:30:28):
There are so many places in this film where I
feel like a lesser film would would have gone in
a different direction. I think there's certain pitfalls that a
movie like this might have naturally veered into, and I
think this is a key example. I think in a
lesser picture it would have been a pure vengeance of
the zombies, like they would have attacked her, torn her
apart or something. Because the yeah, the undying husks of

(01:30:51):
her former lovers do come out of their boxes. Yeah,
And I think a lesser film might have had them
be a direct physical cause of Miriam's demise. You know,
she would have been torn apart by her demons in
a literal fashion. But if we wouldn't have fit here,
because you know, set lovingly aside, they still love her,
they still pine for her. I don't think they would

(01:31:11):
intentionally hurt her still, even in their reduced state. Plus
though their longing is strong, they're physically quite weak and powerless,
like they're almost dust at this point. What could they do?
And she clearly has a heightened strength, So instead it
feels more like it's like it's not as much it's
their presence, certainly, but it's also the cumulative guilt of

(01:31:34):
it all that overcomes Miriam and leads to what appears
to be her physical death or physical demise, and this
ends up ending the cursed existence of her thralls, like
they finally crumble to dust.

Speaker 3 (01:31:46):
It is not exactly clear what the mechanism, what all
is going on here, but it feels like it works,
I will say. After this, I mean it's curious too,
because this is not quite the end of the film.
We also see something else with Sarah, don't we.

Speaker 2 (01:32:02):
That's right, because I really at this point in the
picture I thought Sarah was dead. I thought she killed
herself via the aunk, that's why she was being filed away.
But you know, at the end we get this really
excellent sequence where we see Sarah standing out in the
balcony of this like modern high rise in what I

(01:32:22):
believe is London, And it's quite quite fetching because you
have the varied and at times quite old bits of
architecture visible in the city, you know, so it kind of,
you know, it kind of meshes nicely with this idea
of empiric life. But Mike, I had several questions, like, Okay,
is Sarah a vampire now? Or is she free of
the curse completely in his mortal again? Did she? Or

(01:32:45):
you know, did she dodge the fate and the curse?
Has the experience unlocked some key into her own research?
I assume she's keeping going with her work, but is
it going to take a new turn now that she
has has either been a vampire or partially been a vampire?
Where is still a vampire? We don't know. We're left
to ponder it. And what happened to Miriam? Like is

(01:33:05):
Miriam completely destroyed? Or is she in one of the
boxes now?

Speaker 3 (01:33:11):
Yeah? Yeah, good question. Yeah, so a lot of questions
left open at the ending, and I don't know exactly
how to interpret it. But but yeah, despite I don't
know exactly what to say about the ending, But I
love the film overall.

Speaker 2 (01:33:25):
Yeah, I was. I was quite impressed with it, you know,
I like you, I kind of thought the first ten minutes,
we're going to set the tone for the entire picture,
and it ended up being a much more poignant and
thought provoking motion picture overall.

Speaker 3 (01:33:38):
One last thing I wanted to mention before we wrap
up here, and it was the thought about the interaction
between the vampire themes of the story and the h
and a common thing that's true about well. I was
gonna say love stories and movies, but actually just love
in real life, and that is the way that the
vampire setting really helps the us against the world feeling

(01:34:00):
of being in love. I'm not the first person to
point this out, of course, you know this is a
commonly observed thing, but there is a way in which
true love really kind of it does encourage a kind
of contempt for like the rest of reality. You know
that when people are in love they like to talk,

(01:34:22):
you know, like to you know, to say mean things
about other people to each other, and to kind of
be in a conspiracy. When people are in love, they
like to do kind of selfish or irresponsible things against
other people outside of that two person conspiracy. It's just
kind of it happens naturally. I don't know exactly why

(01:34:43):
that is, but it just seems to be a thing
that flows naturally from this two person bond, and that
works so well when your two characters are vampires, because
that's exactly the mechanic of the story. It's like, we
together are in on this great secret. We're working this
little this little blood conspiracy. We can go out to
the club and only you and I are in on

(01:35:03):
the joke that the people that we bring home or
that we're just going to kill them, and you know,
their bodies end up in the incinerator. And you know,
so we've talked about that us against the world quality
in other great love movies we've done before. It's kind
of there totally different themes, but they're in a danger
diabolic you know, the way that the two lovers are
in on crimes together and the same thing as present here,

(01:35:27):
and that is such a fun and mysterious and interesting dynamic.
Like it's funny to see it play out, and it
feels good, but it also just raises these questions, like
why is that so common that people feel and act
that way when they're in love? Like what is it
about being in love that does that to us? It
kind of kind of makes us bad to the rest

(01:35:49):
of the world.

Speaker 2 (01:35:50):
Yeah, I guess that's one of the appeals of paranormal
romances and paranormal love stories, because the experience of being
in love, the experience of being in a romance does
feel supernatural. It does have that kind of energy to it.
You know, you're not It feels like you have fallen
in love with a vampire or a were wolf, or

(01:36:11):
a sasquatch or a centaur, you know whatever. You know,
your interest happens to be on the page or on
the screen.

Speaker 3 (01:36:19):
All right, Well, Happy Valentine's Day everybody.

Speaker 2 (01:36:23):
All right, just a reminder to everybody that's stuff to
blow your mind. Is primarily a science and culture podcast
with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays
we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
a weird film here on Weird House Cinema. If you
want to check out a list of all the movies
we've covered over the years, and sometimes a peek ahead
of what comes next, you can go to letterbox dot com.

(01:36:43):
Our user name there is weird House, and you'll find
a nice list of everything. And of course you can
write into us as well, let us know what vampire
film we should do next, you know, sometimes weeks ahead.
We're going to do some other non vampire films for sure,
but we'll keep coming back to vampires and were wolves
and Mommy. It's inevitable.

Speaker 3 (01:37:01):
Huge thanks, as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:37:22):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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