Technically they're thirsty

A lot of my movie watching is of films that were made before I was born, but now that I'm getting up there in years, there are a lot of movies made after I was born that getting to the "old movies" era. As an example, one of the movies I recorded last year off of TCM had just turned 40 years old: The Hunger.

The movie starts off in one of those early-80s nightclubs that played new wave music and had lots of neon and other wacky lighting effects. One couple invites another home with them, which would normally be a cue for some sort of kinky sex. Well, that sort of happens, but the sex concludes with the two members of the first couple taking the ankh necklaces they wear, and using them to stab the other couple to death! The living couple then drinks the victims' blood before putting the dead bodies into the incinerator.

This couple is Miriam (Catherine Deneuve) and John (David Bowie). Miriam is a vampire, and drinks the blood to keep herself looking so young, something that she's been doing for millennia. Intercut with this are scenes from a research center somewhere in midtown Manhattan. There are a bunch of monkeys kept in cages, and as Miriam and John are cutting up their victims, one of the monkeys is killing another. The next day, Dr. Roberts (Susan Sarandon) wonders what the heck happened. This isn't the sort of research she had been expecting to do on her monkeys.

While Dr. Roberts pays the bills doing that research, Miriam and John have to pay the bills do keep their eternal life, which they do by giving classical music lessons, especially to budding violinist Alice (Beth Ehlers). She comes to her music lesson one day, and, taking a Polaroid of John, tells him that he looks awful. He certainly feels it, too. And when he looks at himself in the mirror, he starts seeing... wrinkles, and other signs of aging! As it turns out, John isn't a vampire by birth, but brought into the vampire business by Miriam. So he doesn't quite get the same eternal youth that Miriam does. And he's about to start aging extremely rapidly.

This is where the two stories are about to come together. Dr. Roberts is a gerontologist, doing research on aging. She can't promise eternal life, but she is working on longevity, trying to slow down the aging process. Not that there's been much success there, although there has been the opposite: speeding up the aging process. John, having read the book, decides to visit Dr. Roberts, who thinks John is a crank, leaving him to cool in the waiting room. It's only when she returns a few hours later that she realizes just how wrong she was.

Things get much more complicated when John wants out of this existence, resulting in his going missing, at least to the people in the outside world. Dr. Roberts goes to John and Miriam's place to look for John, and then the police come looking too....

The Hunger is one of those movies that's stylish and certainly has a relatively uncommon atmosphere about it. That certainly makes it interesting, and in some ways compelling. But at the same time, large portions of the movie feel like they have more atmosphere than substance, with the plot a bit hard to follow at times and the ending being a bit bizarre. So I think The Hunger is going to be the sort of movie that isn't going to appeal to everybody.