The Hunger (1983)
Directed by Tony Scott
Five-thousand-year-old vampire Miriam promises her lovers the gift of eternal life. When John, her cellist companion for centuries, discovers that he has suddenly begun growing old, he attempts to seek out the help of Dr. Sarah Roberts, a researcher on the mechanisms of aging.
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What critics compared The Hunger to
If “Drive,” his 2011 crime-thriller with Ryan Gosling, paid homage to the wet-asphalt action-films of Michael Mann, then “The Neon Demon” is his tribute to Ridley Scott’s Euro-trash vampire flick, “The Hunger” (1983).
If you want to see Tony Scott’s porny vampire drama “The Hunger” again — to cite another obvious influence — hey, I just checked and it costs $2 on Amazon.
At turns seductive and repulsive about its world of dangerous sex and violence, The Neon Demon combines horror movie tropes with arresting images and clever references to a body of genre entries, including Hammer Films' Dracula pictures, Cat People, and The Hunger.
Neon Demon reads like a vampire movie, with the sexy chill of The Hunger and the stark, hypnotic imagery of Under The Skin.
The movie is an original take on the vampire genre (although there’s a nightclub scene that nods in the direction of Tony Scott’s vamp-camp classic The Hunger).
The first movie to plow this turf — vampirism as a playground for attractive bohemians — was “The Hunger,” the 1983 Tony Scott film in which David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve, and Susan Sarandon went elegantly at each others’ throats.
Style, color, throwaway incidents and music are essential, as in unaccountably maligned The Hunger, in oddball Cronos, in now-coming-into-its-own Ganja and Hess and its aka?s, even non-physical-bloodsuckers Performance .
Julianne Moore and Amanda Seyfried steam up the screen in the hottest lesbian coupling since Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve got busy in Tony Scott's 1983 vampire film "The Hunger."
And watching dad David Bowie working with director Tony Scott in both the film and ensuing television series of The Hunger, a story about vampire lust, well, it seems that Jones got bit.
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Arthur's chambers look like the gauzy bedrooms of Tony Scott's The Hunger --gorgeous, of course, but anchored by an underpinning of death, sickly-sweet.
Guadagnino's vision had me thinking about Tony Scott's "The Hunger" more than once, Swinton, often regarded as the female equivalent of David Bowie, taking on the character of an old man, psychotherapist Dr. Josef Klemperer, just as Bowie aged in Scott's film (she also plays a third role, hidden under piles of hideous prosthetics as Helena Markos).
Their erotic chemistry is, thankfully, both funny and real, so potent that they may well wipe out Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon in The Hunger for cinematic glamorous lipstick lesbianism.
Why Pitt chooses to play Benjamin--already a child trapped in Hume Cronyn's body--as slow and wistful is beyond me, yet between the elaborate fright makeup aging him for the first half of the film (and turning Cate Blanchett into David Bowie's dying vampire from The Hunger in the second) and a performance swaddled beneath a syrupy Loooziana accent, find a simpering characterization of a precious naïf gifted with an air of beatific benevolence.
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Tony Scott’s Top Gun was the director’s sophomore film, a hard swerve away from the failure of his first (and best film), the exceptional arthouse vampire horror film, The Hunger (1983).
With a wall-to-wall high-gloss aesthetic courtesy Tony Scott—previously best known for his advertising work and the cult softcore lesbian vampire flick The Hunger —the film dazzled audiences with sunsets worthy of a yacht-rock album cover, uber-cool neo-noir lighting piercing blue-toned foggy interiors, and a Germano-American soundtrack inflected by jock-jam guitars and serpentine synths, their adrenaline-pumping sounds inextricably melded to the thunderous whine of jet engines and the pattering banter of the pilots’ hyperactive one-upmanship.
And their crimes aren’t sexy and stylish, like Bonnie and Clyde’s bank robberies or the vampiric murders in The Hunger — Guadagnino makes the consumption rituals bloody, grotesque, and animalistic, an unpleasant matter of survival.