Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob.
Speaker 3: Lamb and this is Joe McCormick.
Speaker 2: Happy Valentine's Day, everybody here in today's episode. You know,
Speaker 2: I really wanted to cover a paranormal love story of
Speaker 2: some sort for the holiday, and I gave myself this
Speaker 2: task and probably spend a little bit too much time
Speaker 2: looking at different films. I'm trying to figure out what
Speaker 2: would be what felt like the right fit. I looked
Speaker 2: at a few different, very well regarded films that seemed
Speaker 2: to fit the mold, but ended up being drawn into
Speaker 2: today's selection. The highly stylish nineteen eighty three erotic horror
Speaker 2: film The Hunger, a movie that was really only on
Speaker 2: my radar for being a film in which David Bowie
Speaker 2: plays a vampire. But it's actually so much more than
Speaker 2: just that. It's become a cult favorite with many do
Speaker 2: it's heavy goth vibes, it's LGBTQ themes, and it's absolutely
Speaker 2: bursting at the scenes with visual and sonic pizazz. And
Speaker 2: I tell you, I hope you like Venetian Blinds, because
Speaker 2: there are a lot of them in this movie.
Speaker 3: Yes, and doves, JJ was reminded. JJ also watched the
Speaker 3: movie this week and we were talking about it off
Speaker 3: Mike before we started this. JJ reminded me that there
Speaker 3: are just doves in their house all the Time's full
Speaker 3: of birds. They have like an open air attics, just
Speaker 3: birds coming and going all the time. Yes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I watched this one with my wife, and in fact,
Speaker 2: it was partially her suggestion. I was brainstorming all these
Speaker 2: ideas and she pulled up some lists online of paranormal
Speaker 2: horror films and she was like, how about The Hunger
Speaker 2: And I was like, oh, well, you know, The Hunger
Speaker 2: has been on my radar a little bit. We've it's
Speaker 2: come up in passing on the show before when we've
Speaker 2: discussed David Billie films, And so she watched it with me.
Speaker 3: She really enjoyed it.
Speaker 2: She loved all the like the gothy eighty eighties vibe
Speaker 2: to it. But also she pointed out, like, this feels
Speaker 2: like a feature length music video, and in many ways
Speaker 2: that is absolutely accurate and one of its strengths.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, turn around Bright Eyes for ninety minutes or
Speaker 3: a hundred or so. It's but don't let don't get
Speaker 3: the wrong idea from that. I do think this is
Speaker 3: actually a very strong film. I liked it a lot,
Speaker 3: despite the fact that critics apparently largely did not appreciate
Speaker 3: it when it came out. But I get the feeling
Speaker 3: this one has has gotten a critical reappraisal, like a
Speaker 3: lot more people like it now than did when it
Speaker 3: first released.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I believe that the cult following for it
Speaker 2: was really building up, you know, within the decade following
Speaker 2: its release, so you know, kind of a slow build there,
Speaker 2: but I think it achieved cult status by at least
Speaker 2: the nineties, as we'll discuss now.
Speaker 3: One thing I want to say close to the top
Speaker 3: of this episode is despite the fact that The Hunger
Speaker 3: is not especially plot driven, I'd say it's more of
Speaker 3: a mood driven or character driven, it does have some
Speaker 3: major surprises in store, and we're gonna have to talk
Speaker 3: about those surprises in the episode, So please be forewarned
Speaker 3: if you want to see The Hunger without having anything spoiled,
Speaker 3: and I would recommend that a good time to pause
Speaker 3: and go watch the movie would be Now.
Speaker 2: That being said, this movie is so committed to style.
Speaker 2: I feel like It's one of those where if you're
Speaker 2: spoiled on it, you can still really enjoy it.
Speaker 3: So rob like you. I had never seen The Hunger before,
Speaker 3: but I found it very, as I said, surprising, but
Speaker 3: also delightful, interesting, different. It felt fresh at its core.
Speaker 3: I think you could call this kind of a tainted
Speaker 3: love tale. It's a story primarily about romantic relationships, but
Speaker 3: one in which it is not all you know, steamy
Speaker 3: arrows and desire and lust like a lot of vampire
Speaker 3: love movies are. It's also not rom com energy. It's
Speaker 3: all cute, falling for you kind of moments. And it's
Speaker 3: certainly not the case that this is full of feel
Speaker 3: good morals about the eternal and all conquering power of love.
Speaker 3: This movie, like other tainted love tales, is about the
Speaker 3: ambiguities and contradictions of romantic love, the sort of vast
Speaker 3: gray space that defines a lot of what love is,
Speaker 3: where people might feel one way but act another, where
Speaker 3: it's impossible to put your emotions into words, you don't
Speaker 3: know how to talk about what you're feeling or what
Speaker 3: your frustrations with your love. Are situations in which people
Speaker 3: genuinely love one another, but also cause each other pain,
Speaker 3: where love just gets smashed into a million pieces against
Speaker 3: the surface of problems that cannot be fixed. And strangely,
Speaker 3: once I realized that was the kind of movie this was,
Speaker 3: it helped resolve something curious I noticed while watching The Hunger.
Speaker 3: Despite the fact that this movie has a different writer,
Speaker 3: a different director, totally different plot, and for much of
Speaker 3: its runtime a different star, I really kept being reminded
Speaker 3: of the other big David Bowie movie we have watched
Speaker 3: on the show, which was The Man Who Fell to
Speaker 3: Earth from nineteen seventy six, directed by Nicholas Rogue. That
Speaker 3: movie stars David Bowie as a tragic alien agent on
Speaker 3: a mission to Earth to secure water resources which could
Speaker 3: save his home planet. But of course, that ultimately is
Speaker 3: a story about failure, you know, about distraction and the
Speaker 3: inability to sort of stay on task and getting led
Speaker 3: astray by television and alcohol and love and all.
Speaker 2: That and table tennis right.
Speaker 3: Exactly, Yes, So I was thinking while I was watching it,
Speaker 3: why did these movies feel so similar despite all the
Speaker 3: totally different creative inputs. Could it just be that the
Speaker 3: power of David Bowie is so strong that it paves
Speaker 3: over everything that might be a little part of it,
Speaker 3: but I really think there are some other truly strong
Speaker 3: similarities in that both stories involve these tainted love themes.
Speaker 3: They're both love stories that have genuine feeling and passion
Speaker 3: in them. They're not just about people using each other
Speaker 3: for sex or for power or whatever. They are love stories,
Speaker 3: but they're also tragic love stories that cannot possibly have
Speaker 3: happy endings, in part because of the sci fi or
Speaker 3: supernatural mechanics that are operating in each story, and in
Speaker 3: part because of the kinds of human failings and contradictions
Speaker 3: that are present in all relationships of mortal humans, not
Speaker 3: just aliens and vampires. And I guess, since it's been
Speaker 3: a while, just a refresher. The love story central in
Speaker 3: The Man Who Fell to Earth is the one between
Speaker 3: David Bowie's alien character and an earthling played by Candy Clark.
Speaker 3: That story is at once both genuine and doomed, doomed
Speaker 3: by Bowie's alien mission and then by the pressures of
Speaker 3: money and betrayal and alcoholism. In The Hunger, I think
Speaker 3: one of the central thematic tainted love questions is what
Speaker 3: if you could only be with the person you love
Speaker 3: by dooming them to a fate worse than death if
Speaker 3: you choose to do it anyway, if you choose to
Speaker 3: be with them knowing that your love is an unspeakable curse,
Speaker 3: could it really be love? But at the same time,
Speaker 3: could it really be love if you could stand not
Speaker 3: to be with them in the first place. I guess
Speaker 3: we'll have to answer those questions as we go on
Speaker 3: throughout the episode. But another similarity I would say between
Speaker 3: The Men Who Fell to Earth and The Hunger is
Speaker 3: certain the presence of certain cinematography choices. Both of them
Speaker 3: are very mood driven, and they both have a kind
Speaker 3: of dreamy, elegic editing style with a lot of slow
Speaker 3: motion and lingering on wistful and melancholy scenes featuring two
Speaker 3: subjects who are suffering but who are unable to fix
Speaker 3: one what's wrong between them?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's worth noting. In the commentary track which I
Speaker 2: listened to, part of the director Tony Scott does mention
Speaker 2: Nicholas Rogue, the director of The Man Who Fell to Earth,
Speaker 2: being one of his inspirations, though he singles out the
Speaker 2: film performance more than anything. But of course the Man
Speaker 2: Who Felt to Earth is still in the mix. There somewhere,
Speaker 2: I imagine.
Speaker 3: On the other hand, I would say The Hunger does
Speaker 3: not have like the comic elements that we got in
Speaker 3: The Manufeld to Earth when he's watching all the TVs
Speaker 3: and screaming, get out of my mind.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's not really much in the way of humor
Speaker 2: in this picture, and I think that's one of the
Speaker 2: things that the critics kind of picked up on. They
Speaker 2: thought it was like too self serious, which I don't know.
Speaker 2: I feel like, if you're dealing with a story like
Speaker 2: this and you're dealing with, you know, these all these
Speaker 2: gothic vibes on top of it, like, I don't know,
Speaker 2: I don't think I really was wanting any comic relief
Speaker 2: in this picture.
Speaker 3: I certainly was not hurting for want of comic relief.
Speaker 3: And no, this movie doesn't need that. It's just not
Speaker 3: its style. It's not what it's about. Another surprising element
Speaker 3: I found about The Hunger, at least a violation of
Speaker 3: my expectations going in, was the relatively grounded science fiction subplot.
Speaker 3: Did not think it would have that kind of thing happening.
Speaker 3: So this will require some discussion of the plot, but
Speaker 3: I guess it's good to lay out a bit of
Speaker 3: the premise here at the top, because we can refer
Speaker 3: back to that as we talk about the cast and
Speaker 3: so forth. So two of the main characters of this
Speaker 3: movie begin the story as vampires, as vampire lovers, and
Speaker 3: they are faced with a unique consequence of their condition.
Speaker 3: In the lore of this movie, the vampires spawn enjoys
Speaker 3: a long life of suspended youth and vitality for perhaps
Speaker 3: hundreds of years, but at some point it all comes
Speaker 3: crashing down as a kind of rapid degenerative aging disease,
Speaker 3: where the vampire spawn suddenly grows old and withers into
Speaker 3: a powerless but still conscious, crumbling husk over the course
Speaker 3: of a few days or weeks. So in the movie,
Speaker 3: Catherine Denov plays a sort of vampire queen of ancient
Speaker 3: but otherwise uncertain origins named Miriam, who is in a
Speaker 3: centuries long love affair with her vampire spawn, John played
Speaker 3: by David Bowie. Originally a man, she turned into a
Speaker 3: vampire sometime in Europe in the seventeen hundreds. There's like
Speaker 3: a scene of them kissing in a barn in powdered wigs,
Speaker 3: and so the situation is while they seem to have
Speaker 3: been happy and ageless, hunting for blood together for hundreds
Speaker 3: of years. Suddenly, in the modern day setting of the
Speaker 3: film in New York in the nineteen eighties, John finds
Speaker 3: himself rapidly aging, and he seems to know this was
Speaker 3: something that could happen to him one day, but obviously
Speaker 3: it leaves him greatly demoralized and distressed. So this brings
Speaker 3: him into contact with another one of our major characters,
Speaker 3: Sarah Roberts played by Susan Sarandon, who is a research scientist.
Speaker 3: She's a gerontologist studying diseases that cause accelerated aging, and
Speaker 3: her work provides some hope of a way to stop
Speaker 3: the advance of the cellular clock and arrest the rapid
Speaker 3: advance of age and decay, and so as John desperately
Speaker 3: seeks her help, she becomes entangled in the lives of
Speaker 3: these vampires. She doesn't initially know their vampires, of course,
Speaker 3: and it becomes more than just the kind of mechanical
Speaker 3: science fiction connection to the story, like she becomes romantically
Speaker 3: involved as well. But it was so strange to me
Speaker 3: that the movie ended up having so much having as
Speaker 3: much science fiction as it did, and also the form
Speaker 3: the science fiction, because it was not the kind of
Speaker 3: you know, the kind of loose fantasy science fiction that
Speaker 3: you get in The Man Who Fell to Earth. It's
Speaker 3: instead a story about like research scientists in their lab
Speaker 3: doing experiments on monkeys. And we can come back to
Speaker 3: that later. But like some of the goorioesst and grossest
Speaker 3: stuff in the movie is not from the horror premise.
Speaker 3: It's from the sci fi premise.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's so as we'll get to in more
Speaker 2: detail in a bet. This is based on a novel,
Speaker 2: a nineteen eighty one novel by Whitley Streiber, And it's
Speaker 2: my understanding that the original novel is essentially one of
Speaker 2: these kind of like how would this work treatments of
Speaker 2: vamporism with sci fi elements bag backing it up, And
Speaker 2: I'm to understand that the script for the picture ended
Speaker 2: up drifting somewhat away from that vision, and then Tony
Speaker 2: Scott's direction and the work of all the other talented
Speaker 2: folks involved in like the visual and sonic flare of
Speaker 2: the picture are able to bring it into more of
Speaker 2: a territory. So, you know, it's kind of an interesting
Speaker 2: trajectory to like maybe start in something that's a little
Speaker 2: more grounded in the sci fi and ending up via
Speaker 2: a curve, ending up with something more surreal and ambiguous,
Speaker 2: but the sci fi roots are still present.
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. But it creates such an an unusual and
Speaker 3: interesting millage of themes. It's just it doesn't really feel
Speaker 3: like any other movie I can think of.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it really does stand apart. And I think that's
Speaker 2: one of the reasons that it just so instantly captivated me.
Speaker 2: Because some of the other pictures I was checking out,
Speaker 2: they they felt more like a definite artifact of their time,
Speaker 2: and or they fit more clearly into genres that we're already,
Speaker 2: you know, more familiar with on the show. And this one, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it really stood out. It seemed to have a different
Speaker 2: vision and exist in its own sonic and visual universe.
Speaker 3: Now, another big surprise that this movie had for me
Speaker 3: is that I really expect there to be more David
Speaker 3: Bowie in this David Bowie movie. He almost gets the
Speaker 3: treatment of Steven Sagall an executive decision. Maybe that's a
Speaker 3: horrible comparison, Maybe more like Drew Barrymore in Scream or
Speaker 3: Samuel L. Jackson in Deep Blue Sea. Though of course
Speaker 3: all of those characters, what happens is they die. The
Speaker 3: fate of David Bowie's character in this movie is even
Speaker 3: more tragic and horrifying than death. But I think it's
Speaker 3: interesting that I don't know if there's a formal showbiz
Speaker 3: term for this, but I would call it like a
Speaker 3: meta shock. You know, it is a violation of your expectations,
Speaker 3: which are established. Those expectations are established not through the
Speaker 3: narrative of the movie itself, but through your real world
Speaker 3: and knowledge of the movie's marketing context. So, for example,
Speaker 3: it is a surprising move to kill off the character
Speaker 3: played by the big star, the presence of whom ostensibly
Speaker 3: brought people into the movie theaters in the first place.
Speaker 3: That's always a surprising move. It's a bold and gutsy
Speaker 3: move usually, though I think it's a lot less gimmicky
Speaker 3: in The Hunger than it is in most of these
Speaker 3: metashock deaths you get in the film industry. In this movie,
Speaker 3: it it feels less like a gimmicky attempt at surprise,
Speaker 3: and instead it emphasizes the movie's kind of shadow themes
Speaker 3: of unfairness and the injustice of love and of real life.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, and I do want to stress for anyone
Speaker 2: out there who happens to be interested in The Hunger
Speaker 2: primarily because of David Bowie, still valid reason to be
Speaker 2: interested in this film. David Bowie will not disappoint you.
Speaker 2: The role. May have less screen time than you expected,
Speaker 2: but he still makes the most of that screen time.
Speaker 2: So definitely worth checking out for Bowie fans.
Speaker 3: Though also for some of the screen time he does have,
Speaker 3: he looks like Richard Lynch or he looks like he Oh,
Speaker 3: this is an unkind comparison, but he looks like a
Speaker 3: better version of Guy Pearce and the old man makeup
Speaker 3: in Prometheus.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great observation. But you know, Prometheus didn't
Speaker 2: have Dick Smith. As we'll be discussing special effects makeup master.
Speaker 2: Dick Smith is largely responsible for the aging of David
Speaker 2: Bowie in this picture. And I think it was Tony
Speaker 2: Scott on the commentary track pointing out how or maybe
Speaker 2: it was a maybe with Susan's frand and somebody's pointing
Speaker 2: out how he's under so much makeup for parts of this.
Speaker 2: But Bowie would just go to sleep in the chair
Speaker 2: like he was like super easy going while they were
Speaker 2: applying you know, hours upon hours of makeup and yeah,
Speaker 2: and nobody did it better than Dick Smith.
Speaker 3: It is really great old man makeup, way better than
Speaker 3: all the other examples I can think of.
Speaker 2: All right, well, more on that in a bit, but
Speaker 2: first let's go ahead and roll out the elevator pitch.
Speaker 2: As the song will play a huge role in the
Speaker 2: opening sequence of a picture. I'm just going to quote
Speaker 2: a few lines from the nineteen eighty two goth rock
Speaker 2: hit Bela Lugosi's Dead by Bowhouse with one pronoun change
Speaker 2: to make it fit better. The virginal brides file past
Speaker 2: her tomb strewn with times, dead flowers, bereft in deathly Bloom,
Speaker 2: alone in a darkened room, the.
Speaker 3: Count bereft in deathly Bloom. Yes, exactly. Oh what a delivery.
Speaker 3: Who's the singer of bow House.
Speaker 2: That's Peter Murphy and we'll sleep. We'll see Peter Murphy
Speaker 2: in the opening sequence.
Speaker 3: Here, tremendous flat delivery there, very good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it's a class it's it's probably one of,
Speaker 2: if not the best known, you know, goth tracks out there.
Speaker 2: Like if you're going to do a goth dance night
Speaker 2: at a club or something, they need to play Bella
Speaker 2: Lugosi's dead at least for a little bit. Maybe not
Speaker 2: the whole with like nine and a half minute runtime,
Speaker 2: but even still, like, yeah, go ahead and do the
Speaker 2: nine and a half minute runtime, because the whole song's tremendous.
Speaker 2: All right, we'll come back to bow House in a bit,
Speaker 2: but first let's go ahead and listen to a little
Speaker 2: bit of trailer audio from The Hunger.
Speaker 4: Sarah Roberts is in jeopardy.
Speaker 3: Hey lady, how about it?
Speaker 4: Stay with her? Help her, for she has begun to feel.
Speaker 3: The awful horror of the Hunger.
Speaker 4: John Blaylock, the Hunger has given him everlasting life until now.
Speaker 4: Pray for him. Miriam Blaylock. She feeds one day in
Speaker 4: seven on the unsuspecting, and soon she will turn into
Speaker 4: something that you will never be able to forget, no
Speaker 4: matter how hard and how long you try fear her?
Speaker 4: What have you done to me.
Speaker 3: For her life? Signs terminate right here?
Speaker 4: Haunting, mysterious, sensual, strange, perverse, riveting The Hunger?
Speaker 2: All right, Well, if you would like to watch The Hunger, well,
Speaker 2: luckily for you, it's widely available on digital formats as
Speaker 2: well as home video formats. There's a Blu ray, and
Speaker 2: I was gonna rent the Blu ray, but it was
Speaker 2: checked out when I dropped by Video Drum, so I
Speaker 2: ended up having to make do with the DVD version,
Speaker 2: which was also solid. I believe both the Blue and
Speaker 2: the DVD feature the same commentary track, which is a
Speaker 2: bit dry but still informative, featuring both Tony Scott and
Speaker 2: Susan Sarandon, though it sounds like maybe they weren't in
Speaker 2: the same room, like they recorded them separately and kind
Speaker 2: of like splice them in. So if you like a
Speaker 2: nice boisterous commentary track, that maybe this one isn't the one,
Speaker 2: but it's still a lot of great info in it.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, let's run through the people involved here,
Speaker 2: or at least some of them. We can't touch on
Speaker 2: everybody as usual. But the director is, of course Tony Scott.
Speaker 2: As previously mentioned, he lived nineteen forty four through twenty twelve,
Speaker 2: the late younger brother of Ridley Scott, who like his brother,
Speaker 2: came up through British TV commercial production before branching out
Speaker 2: into films, and this was his first feature theatrical film,
Speaker 2: and it really throws everything at you from a stylistic standpoint,
Speaker 2: it's flashy, it's sexy, it's daring, it's somber, it's serious.
Speaker 2: It delivers all the flare of a music video or
Speaker 2: a high end commercial, and as we alluded to at
Speaker 2: the time of its release, it was not a success.
Speaker 2: Critics panned it, including Roger Ebert, who called it quote
Speaker 2: an agonizingly bad vampire movie, circling around an exquisitely effective
Speaker 2: sex scene.
Speaker 3: Which sex scene.
Speaker 2: I assume it has to be the big love scene
Speaker 2: between Sarah and Miriam, which I mean, it's almost I
Speaker 2: think a disservice to call it a quote unquote sex
Speaker 2: scene because it's so stylish. It is like like the
Speaker 2: like the bed is glowing. I think one point, you know,
Speaker 2: it's like it's it's very surreal. It's not it's not
Speaker 2: raw or explicit, but it is still you know, highly
Speaker 2: erotic and just. And to Ebert's point, it is effective.
Speaker 2: But I also don't feel like it comes off as
Speaker 2: an oasis in a desert in this film or anything
Speaker 2: to that extent.
Speaker 3: No, I just would not agree with Ebert on this one.
Speaker 3: I think the film overall has a lot more to offer. Sorry,
Speaker 3: just now that we're on the subject, of Tony Scott.
Speaker 3: I was repeatedly thinking to myself while watching, I can't
Speaker 3: believe this is made by the same director as Top Gun.
Speaker 2: I mean, it is crazy to think about this, right
Speaker 2: because Top Gun, which was his follow up, what four
Speaker 2: years later, that was the next time that the studios
Speaker 2: gave him a shot at.
Speaker 3: A film, like three years later.
Speaker 2: We always say, well, what this one's eighty would have
Speaker 2: been made in what an eighty two and either yeah,
Speaker 2: three or four years, so he didn't have to wait
Speaker 2: that long. But still he was kind of shut out
Speaker 2: for a little bit there. But then he comes out
Speaker 2: of the gate with again with Top Gun, which of
Speaker 2: course is a massive hit. It was the highest grossing
Speaker 2: film domestic or otherwise for nineteen eighty six. That's a
Speaker 2: film that cemented Cruise's ascension into long lasting fame and
Speaker 2: established Scott as not a director of erotic horror, but
Speaker 2: as an action and thriller director. You know, because when
Speaker 2: you think about Tony Scott, those tend to be the
Speaker 2: films you think about. You think about things like eighty
Speaker 2: seven's Beverly Hills Cop two, nineteen nineties Days of Thunder,
Speaker 2: ninety three's True Romance, Crimson Tied ninety eight, Enemy of
Speaker 2: the State, two thousand and four's Man on Fire, or
Speaker 2: his final film twenty ten's Unstoppable. But yeah, compare this
Speaker 2: film to top Gun and I'm yeah, like, what connective
Speaker 2: tissue is there? Really? I mean, I'm sure you could
Speaker 2: probably get down and point to some of the stylistic
Speaker 2: touches that are distinctly Tony Scott, But it does kind
Speaker 2: of feel like a complete at least in my eyes,
Speaker 2: it feels like a complete restart of his cinematic trajectory. Now.
Speaker 2: Tony Scott would return to horror twice in the late
Speaker 2: nineties for two episodes of an erotic horror anthology series
Speaker 2: titled The Hunger, very much spinning off of this film.
Speaker 2: Like I said, this is one of the reasons I
Speaker 2: think we can assume that by the late nineties there
Speaker 2: was a cult following for this picture, because they decided
Speaker 2: to produce forty four episodes of a spinoff series on it.
Speaker 2: The first season was hosted by Terrence stamp Oh general, Yeah,
Speaker 2: he was your sexy cryptkeeper for the first season, and
Speaker 2: then you're a sexy crypt keeper for the second season.
Speaker 2: Was none other than David Bowie.
Speaker 3: Got to see this now. Well.
Speaker 2: The two episodes directed by Tony Scott were The Swords
Speaker 2: from season one and that starred Balthazar Getty, Amanda Ryan,
Speaker 2: and Timothy Spall. And then there was a season two
Speaker 2: episode titled Sanctuary starring Giovanni Ribisi and Lisa Repo Martel.
Speaker 2: I've never watched it again. They made forty four episodes.
Speaker 2: Russell McKay directed like six episodes of it, and the
Speaker 2: cast is pretty extensive as well. Gen Carlo Esposito plays
Speaker 2: a vampire in one of them. I don't know if
Speaker 2: it's a major vampire role or a small one, but
Speaker 2: he's in there. Daniel Craig shows up, Margo Kidder, Lori Petty,
Speaker 2: David Warner, Jason Fleming, among many others. I don't know
Speaker 2: where off the top of my head, I don't know
Speaker 2: where this aired. I'm guessing it maybe showed up on
Speaker 2: USA Network at some point, but I I have no
Speaker 2: memory of this at all.
Speaker 3: Sounds tremendous.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so yeah, by the late nineties, I feel like
Speaker 2: people were coming back around to this film. It's become
Speaker 2: a cult classic for a variety of reasons. It's style,
Speaker 2: it's cast, it's goth vibes. It's LGBTQ elements. Now Tony
Speaker 2: Scott sadly passed away in twenty twelve, but fourth noting
Speaker 2: that this film and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner from the
Speaker 2: previous year were both dedicated to their older brother Frank,
Speaker 2: who had passed away in nineteen eighty all Right, I
Speaker 2: already mentioned that Whitley Streiber is the author of the
Speaker 2: original novel upon which this is based, came out in
Speaker 2: eighty one, the first of a trilogy of vampire novels,
Speaker 2: and these were a follow up to his nineteen seventy
Speaker 2: eight where Wolf novel The Wolfin, which was also adapted
Speaker 2: into a film nineteen eighty one's Wolfen starring Albert Finnie.
Speaker 3: Which I always confused with the movie Wolf starring Is
Speaker 3: it Wolf starring Jack Nicholson.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Wolf is the one with Jack Nicholson. Wolfin is
Speaker 2: the one with Albert Finnie. And then there's the howling,
Speaker 2: you know, the Ocasionally there's a big werewolf bump in
Speaker 2: the horror industry and you get several different horror horror
Speaker 2: films about werewolves more or less at once.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we go through monster waves, don't we.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there have been several werewolf films recently. We're kind
Speaker 2: of experiencing a werewolf bump right now.
Speaker 3: That would make sense. Yeah, but I feel, you know,
Speaker 3: we had like zombies in the two thousands, and then
Speaker 3: you had a vampire craze after that, and I don't
Speaker 3: know what we're in right now. I think we had
Speaker 3: a witch craze for a bit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's got to come out mummies again, but I'm
Speaker 2: waiting on it anyway. This author has written numerous books,
Speaker 2: including The Coming Global Superstorm, which was written with Art
Speaker 2: Bell of all People, and adapted into the two thousand
Speaker 2: and four film The Day After Tomorrow.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: He's also well known for his nineteen eighty seven ufology
Speaker 2: book Communion, which was adapted into a nineteen eighty nine
Speaker 2: film in which Christopher Walken plays Whitley Stripe.
Speaker 3: I've never read that or seen the movie, but I've
Speaker 3: had general cultural awareness of them. For some reason. For years,
Speaker 3: I had in my mind Whitley Streiber categorized as somebody
Speaker 3: who is like a promoter of UFO encounter is more
Speaker 3: than like a novelist.
Speaker 2: Well, I think he's apparently both like he definitely he
Speaker 2: claimed very much claims to believe in UFOs and communion
Speaker 2: is presented as a work of nonfiction, but then he
Speaker 2: also has written a lot of fiction as well. I don't,
Speaker 2: as far as I know, he doesn't actually believe in
Speaker 2: the reality of vampires and werewolves, So that's separate from
Speaker 2: the aliens. Okay now, and as far as the screenplay
Speaker 2: goes here, James Costagan, writing as Ian Davis, is one
Speaker 2: of the credited writers. He lived nineteen twenty six through
Speaker 2: two thousand and seven. Emmy Award winning screenwriter for fifty
Speaker 2: nine's Little Moon of alban seventy six is Eleanor and
Speaker 2: Franklin and seventy five's Love among the Ruins. Who was
Speaker 2: also a writer on nineteen eighty five's King David, in
Speaker 2: which Richard Gear battles George Eastman. And then we also
Speaker 2: have Michael Thomas credited on the screenplay, screenwriter, perhaps best
Speaker 2: known for his work on nineteen eighty five's Lady Hawk
Speaker 2: as well as twenty eleven's The Devil's Double. All right, now,
Speaker 2: getting into the cast, starting at the top, this film
Speaker 2: stars Catherine Daneuve, who mentioned her already. She plays Miriam Blaylock.
Speaker 2: This is Our Vampire Queen and Yeah, Daneuve very very
Speaker 2: talented actress here obviously born nineteen forty three. I'm not
Speaker 2: sure I had seen her in anything before. French actress
Speaker 2: who has only appeared in a handful of genre pictures
Speaker 2: during the course of her long career. They include nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty five's Repulsion, seventy seven's Lost Soul, seventy nine See
Speaker 2: Here My Love, in eighty eight Frequent Death. She's probably
Speaker 2: best known for such films as sixty four As The
Speaker 2: Umbrellas of Herborg, sixty seven's The Young Girls of Rockfort,
Speaker 2: and nineteen seventies Donkey Skin. This is based on the
Speaker 2: Donkey Skin fairy tale, which I think has come up
Speaker 2: on stuff to blow your mind episodes before the fairy tale,
Speaker 2: not the movie.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, well, I think we might have talked about
Speaker 3: covering the movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, I.
Speaker 3: Think it's supposed to be pretty weird.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I'm all for it. You know, if it
Speaker 2: has been move in it, I'm certainly worth another book.
Speaker 2: She also appears in two thousand Dancer in the Dark
Speaker 2: and lends her voice to two thousand and sevens animated
Speaker 2: film Persepolis, based on the graphic novel She was nominated
Speaker 2: for an Academy Award for her leading role in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety three's End of Chime. So yeah, I think she's
Speaker 2: terrific in this, as we'll discuss. While her character certainly
Speaker 2: has plenty of like fim fatale elements, she's never presented
Speaker 2: as like a cold, unfeeling vamp, and certainly Miriam could
Speaker 2: have been presented in that way. Like her passion is real,
Speaker 2: her love is real. I believe these things when when
Speaker 2: when I experience her character on the screen, all this
Speaker 2: despite the tragic, supernatural ramifications of that passion and that love.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she's a very ambiguous character, is I mean, is
Speaker 3: she the protagonist of the film or is she the
Speaker 3: villain of the film? Should we think of should we
Speaker 3: think of John and Sarah as the kind of trading
Speaker 3: off protagonists of the film and in a way to
Speaker 3: move as the villain or in a way it's more
Speaker 3: her story than it is anybody else's.
Speaker 2: Though, Yeah, it does make me wonder who might be
Speaker 2: the the central protagonist of the novel, because there does
Speaker 2: seem to feel it feels like there's maybe a certain
Speaker 2: amount of confusion with this with this story as it's
Speaker 2: as it's presented in the film, like, yeah, whose story
Speaker 2: is it? And you know, some would argue, you know,
Speaker 2: rather strongly, that a film does need one key protagonist.
Speaker 2: There may essentially be two, but there needs to be
Speaker 2: in the writing of the thing, there needs to be
Speaker 2: like one central protagonist. The writer needs to know who
Speaker 2: that is.
Speaker 3: I guess you could argue then it might be Sarah,
Speaker 3: but Sarah also is never She's never really made fully
Speaker 3: aware of the whole emotional arc of the story. The
Speaker 3: only character who really knows everything is Miriam, and so anyway,
Speaker 3: I guess we can talk more about that in the
Speaker 3: plot if necessary, But either way, I agree with you.
Speaker 3: Danov is wonderful in the movie. I mean, there is
Speaker 3: I think a kind of coldness to her, but it
Speaker 3: doesn't come off as cruelty necessarily.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's the key coldness, but not cruelty.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she is somebody who's projecting. I mean, I guess
Speaker 3: this is a problem in a lot of vampire movies
Speaker 3: because you have these characters who are supposed to have
Speaker 3: lived many, many lives. You know, they've been around for
Speaker 3: hundreds or thousands of years in her case, and it
Speaker 3: always raises the question that the normal kinds of performances,
Speaker 3: of human feelings and thoughts and intelligence and memory and
Speaker 3: everything that we get in the film in films is
Speaker 3: based on the arc of a normal human lifetime. Like
Speaker 3: you know, part of playing a character is what it
Speaker 3: means to play a character in their youth or in
Speaker 3: middle age or something like that. Vampires achieve a kind
Speaker 3: of age that no human ever does, and so that
Speaker 3: raises questions of like, how does that age manifest in
Speaker 3: their character? How should it manifest in their emotions and
Speaker 3: how they react to things and what their philosophical outlook is.
Speaker 3: And I feel like Danuve contains a lot of that
Speaker 3: mystery in her performance. There is something that feels unreal
Speaker 3: and a little beyond human about her, and a lot
Speaker 3: of times it's because she is difficult to read in
Speaker 3: situations where otherwise an actor might be more inclined to
Speaker 3: portray something very clear and overt.
Speaker 2: Does that make sense, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. You know,
Speaker 2: there are these scenes I think, in particular about some
Speaker 2: of the scenes where David Bowie's character John is like
Speaker 2: trying to discuss not only his his aging, his illness,
Speaker 2: if you will, with her, but also like the ramifications
Speaker 2: of it, and you don't get the sense that she's
Speaker 2: you know, unfeeling to it. But also she doesn't fully
Speaker 2: engage with him on it either. She's in walking this
Speaker 2: line where it doesn't it doesn't come off entirely like
Speaker 2: she's completely blowing him off or like, well, that's your problem, John,
Speaker 2: you solve it. But she's she's also not fully embracing him.
Speaker 2: She is to some degree distancing herself from his suffering,
Speaker 2: but in a way that also feels more real and
Speaker 2: more mortal, and is not like just this vamp queen
Speaker 2: who's like, I am done with you. You know, you
Speaker 2: have served your purpose or something like that.
Speaker 3: I agree, Again, it's a different take on the vampire
Speaker 3: character than I'm used to seeing.
Speaker 2: We'll have more to say about this character as we
Speaker 2: get into the plot a bit later. Now moving on
Speaker 2: to David Bowie, who lived nineteen forty seven through twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: again playing John Blairlocke. So far in Weird House, we've
Speaker 2: considered films where Bowie plays a space alien and the
Speaker 2: changeland king of a Goblin realm, so it's only natural
Speaker 2: that we now consider him as a vampire instead of
Speaker 2: covering all the main notes of his career will couch
Speaker 2: this instead in terms of where he was with his
Speaker 2: music and acting career at the time. So we're only
Speaker 2: six years out from The Man Who Fell to Earth,
Speaker 2: and I believe the only other feature film he'd appeared
Speaker 2: in in addition to The Man Who Fell to Earth
Speaker 2: at this point was seventy eight, just a Jigglo. So
Speaker 2: he really only had one what we would consider now
Speaker 2: iconic film role in his filmography at this point, and
Speaker 2: I think was far from established as the cult film
Speaker 2: icon that he would later become and certainly would be
Speaker 2: cemented in following his passing in twenty sixteen. Musically, this
Speaker 2: film falls between Scary Monsters and super Creeps from nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty and Let's Dance from eighty three, both massive critical
Speaker 2: and commercial hits, and by the way, Let's Dance includes
Speaker 2: a track he did with Giorgio Moroder for the nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty two it Route a car of film Cat People,
Speaker 2: which of course is a remake of the nineteen forties
Speaker 2: Cat People, except with Malcolm McDowell turning into a cat.
Speaker 3: I've seen the original Cat People years ago, and I
Speaker 3: remember I quite liked it, So we may want to
Speaker 3: come back to that on the show one day. But
Speaker 3: the remake I have not seen, I'm to understand it
Speaker 3: goes a little bit harder.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I don't know. I don't know if I
Speaker 2: want to watch Malcolm McDowell turn into a cat every
Speaker 2: time he orgasms, But I don't know. It's a product
Speaker 2: of the time, I guess. As for Bowie in this film, though,
Speaker 2: I think he's terrific. As well. As always, Bowie excels
Speaker 2: at playing the outsider, and here he's kind of a
Speaker 2: double outsider. He's a vampire, thus set apart from the
Speaker 2: mortal world and a stranger to many aspects of but
Speaker 2: he is also, as we come to realize, something of
Speaker 2: a thrall uninitiated into all the intricacies of vampiric existence.
Speaker 2: Much of John Blaylock's journey is one of struggling with
Speaker 2: aging immortality, which Bowie handles with a kind of kind
Speaker 2: of like a quiet anxiety that feels very palpable on
Speaker 2: the screen.
Speaker 3: Even though at some points I think we referred to
Speaker 3: his performance in The Man Who Fell to Earth as
Speaker 3: kind of quailudic he he also did have outbursts in
Speaker 3: The Man Who Filled to earth. Like there were moments
Speaker 3: where his performance got quite big, kind of like the
Speaker 3: pressure came up and blew the top off and he screams,
Speaker 3: get out of my mind, or when he like smacks
Speaker 3: the tray of cookies in the air. I recall less
Speaker 3: of anything like that in here. This is a much tighter,
Speaker 3: more subdued, controlled performance throughout, despite the fact that we
Speaker 3: can see his character is suffering immensely. John Blaylock is
Speaker 3: a character who, you know, he weathers his suffering with
Speaker 3: a kind of with a kind of quiet, melancholy and
Speaker 3: indignant resentment. Like there there are parts where you can
Speaker 3: see his ego is wounded, but it but it never
Speaker 3: turns into a big reaction. Instead, he just kind of
Speaker 3: he subsumes it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like there's a scene in the picture where he's
Speaker 2: he's significantly aged and this this this youth that's been
Speaker 2: coming to the apartment for you know, like music lessons
Speaker 2: and and and so forth thinks that he is the
Speaker 2: father of John, and she's like, oh, you know, I
Speaker 2: thought that because you have the same eyes. And yeah.
Speaker 2: His response is so haunting. He's like he's like he's
Speaker 2: says something the effective well that's that's that's interesting. I've
Speaker 2: known him for so long and I never realized that,
Speaker 2: you know, I don't know. The little moments like that
Speaker 2: are just so well executed, all right. And then we
Speaker 2: also have Susan Sarandon playing Sarah Roberts, as we mentioned earlier.
Speaker 2: Born nineteen forty six, she's the first of three Rocky
Speaker 2: Horror Picture Show connections in this film. Susan Sarandon's career
Speaker 2: entails a great deal of mainstream dramatic success, obviously, but
Speaker 2: for many of us, I think she's always going to
Speaker 2: be a legend for her performances. Janet Weiss a heroin
Speaker 2: in the nineteen seventy five film Rocky hor Picture Show.
Speaker 2: Her screen and TV credits go back to nineteen seventy
Speaker 2: and include such titles as seventy four as The Satan Murders,
Speaker 2: eighty seven's The Witches of Eastwick, ninety one's Film and Louise,
Speaker 2: ninety five's dead Man Walking, and twenty twelve's Cloud Atlas.
Speaker 2: One time Oscar winner for dead Man Walking and five
Speaker 2: time nominee, including a nomination for Film and Louise. And
Speaker 2: you know, I also have nothing but great things to
Speaker 2: say about Sarandon. In this picture, she's sporting a great
Speaker 2: androgynous look with short red hair. She is essentially most
Speaker 2: of the film our protagonists. I guess you could argue
Speaker 2: a gerontologist whose obsession for her works and transforms into
Speaker 2: an obsession for the mysterious Miriam Blaylock. And while our
Speaker 2: bisexual vampire duo here more stated with Miriam and implied
Speaker 2: with John, are maybe a bit more cliche in their
Speaker 2: depiction of bisexuality, you know, their indiscriminate supernatural beings the
Speaker 2: vampires here, I do feel like Sarah is presented in
Speaker 2: a especially for the time like refreshingly believable light. So
Speaker 2: her attraction to Miriam, despite her character having a boyfriend,
Speaker 2: is not presented as something that is in and of
Speaker 2: itself alarming or something that would otherwise be inconceivable for
Speaker 2: this character, you know, without the supernatural intrigue. So I
Speaker 2: applaud that in this film for sure.
Speaker 3: Oh, that seems to me to be just kind of
Speaker 3: an understood part of her character, Like they don't really
Speaker 3: discuss it explicitly, but like, for example, her her kind
Speaker 3: of jerk boyfriend is suspicious of her when he learns
Speaker 3: that she spent the whole afternoon with this mysterious, beautiful woman.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah. And the fact that it is understood without
Speaker 2: being like really called out in a way where like
Speaker 2: there's no scene where she explains it to him or anything.
Speaker 2: You know. Again, I think that's quite refreshing.
Speaker 3: I think Susan Sarandon's performance here is great, especially in
Speaker 3: the way that in the way that it changes over
Speaker 3: the course of the film, because when we first get
Speaker 3: to know her, she is in work mode. She is
Speaker 3: fully a professional, and all we're seeing is her interaction
Speaker 3: with the research that she does, like her engaging with
Speaker 3: the topics of her work as a professional, and even
Speaker 3: when she first meets John Blaylock played by Bowie, it's
Speaker 3: in that context. It's like a work thing. And then
Speaker 3: there is the strangest and most surprising shift, as like
Speaker 3: she is brought into the vampire characters' lives, that her
Speaker 3: role turns into an emotional and erotic one, and that
Speaker 3: she instead we instead learn about what she wants and
Speaker 3: what she feels, and her desires and her suffering, which
Speaker 3: was not really part of the character at all when
Speaker 3: we first met her, except insofar as like her desires
Speaker 3: and suffering related to her struggles with her research. That's
Speaker 3: a weird kind of arc to pull off within a story,
Speaker 3: and I think a surendum handles it so well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lesser film and a lesser performance, it would
Speaker 2: have been the character taking her glasses off, you know
Speaker 2: that sort of thing. Yeah, where it's just a complete
Speaker 2: shift and you just kind of roll with it because
Speaker 2: that's just how movies do it. But her performance brings
Speaker 2: those two sides together and make them both believable parts
Speaker 2: of the sane human character. Now we mentioned the jerk boyfriend.
Speaker 2: The jerk boyfriend is Tom have Her played by Cliff
Speaker 2: DeYoung born nineteen forty five, a sixties rock star. The
Speaker 2: group was Clear Light. I'm not familiar with him Turn
Speaker 2: Broadway actor. He was in Hair Turn film and TV actor,
Speaker 2: and he absolutely played Brad Major's and Farley flavors in
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty one Shock Treatment, Richard O'Brien's follow up to
Speaker 2: Rocky Horr. So in this de Young would be was
Speaker 2: taking over the role from Barry Bostwick, who played Brad
Speaker 2: in the original Rocky r Picture Show. Clifty Young's other
Speaker 2: credits include nineteen eighty nine's Glory, nineteen ninety two's Doctor
Speaker 2: Giggles and nineteen ninety six is The Craft.
Speaker 3: Don't forget also that he was in the nineteen eighties
Speaker 3: or maybe early nineties film called Pulse, which is an
Speaker 3: all appliances attack film. Like an evil I don't know,
Speaker 3: alien virus or something gets into the power lines and
Speaker 3: it makes the toasters go crazy and try to kill people.
Speaker 2: Oh Man, maximum overdrive. Yeah, all right, we mentioned the youth.
Speaker 2: This is the character Alice Alice Cavender played by Beth
Speaker 2: Ellers nineteen sixty eight, a child slash youth actor at
Speaker 2: the time, but she'd go on to a long and
Speaker 2: award winning career on the soap Opera's Guiding Light and
Speaker 2: All My Children.
Speaker 3: Very tragic, innocent character. When you first meet her, you're
Speaker 3: just like, oh no, I think she's gonna get her
Speaker 3: blood drank.
Speaker 2: And yeah, now when vampires start drinking folks blood, you know,
Speaker 2: occasionally the law starts sniffing around. In this film. That
Speaker 2: character is Lieutenant Ali Greza played by Dan Hidea for
Speaker 2: nineteen forty. We reference him all the time. I feel like,
Speaker 2: but this is actually our first Dan Hidea film.
Speaker 3: I was shocked how cute Dan Hidea is in this movie.
Speaker 3: I think of him as, oh, you know, a perennially crusty, mean, gristly,
Speaker 3: cantankerous old dude, or like the villain in Commando. But
Speaker 3: either way, a kind of perpetually older seeming character actor
Speaker 3: who just has a different energy than the Dan Todaea
Speaker 3: we get in this film. I think the major difference
Speaker 3: being this is one of the only times I've ever
Speaker 3: seen him with his hair grown out this long, and
Speaker 3: he looks positively scruffy as a police detective, which is
Speaker 3: against type anyway. So I don't know what's going on,
Speaker 3: but strange different turn for Dan. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: If you're not familiar with Danaday, a memorable character actor
Speaker 2: with a real talent for playing often sleazy characters, villains
Speaker 2: and so forth. Be it the vengeful husband in nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty four's Blood Simple from the Cohen Brothers, or Richard
Speaker 2: Nixon in nineteen ninety nine's Dick. He's been active on
Speaker 2: screen and TV since the mid seventies, and let's see,
Speaker 2: at this point in his career, he had just appeared
Speaker 2: in Alan Rudolph's cattle mutilation thriller in Dangered Species.
Speaker 3: Now this just came up recently. That's different than the
Speaker 3: cattle mutilation movie that we did with Martin Landau.
Speaker 2: Correct, Yeah, different film. This one is more of a
Speaker 2: conspiracy thriller and it's quite good. So I recommend it
Speaker 2: if if you need to have a viewing party back
Speaker 2: to back cattle mutilation films, you know, watch those two.
Speaker 3: Also, though dan Headea's character, correct me if I'm wrong,
Speaker 3: But I don't think the police make any progress one, no.
Speaker 2: Progress at all. He's completely ineffective. He doesn't even get killed.
Speaker 2: Like when he showed up, I was like, oh, he's
Speaker 2: getting the psycho treatment. This guy's going down the stairs.
Speaker 2: But no, there's just like nothing comes to the investigation.
Speaker 2: And then he comes up, comes back at the end
Speaker 2: of the picture and just kind of pokes around a
Speaker 2: little bit and figures out nothing.
Speaker 3: Why would they make him cute like this if Catherine
Speaker 3: Danube's not gonna drink his blood.
Speaker 2: I have no idea. Maybe they had to drop a subplot.
Speaker 2: I don't know, all right, I said there were three
Speaker 2: rocky horror reference points in this picture. Well, the third
Speaker 2: is the actor Rufus Collins, who lived nineteen thirty five
Speaker 2: through nineteen ninety six. He plays the character Charlie humphreyes.
Speaker 2: He's one of the other research scientists that Sarah is
Speaker 2: working with.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so with Susan Sarandon, Clifty Young and Rufus Collins
Speaker 3: together are the three gerontologists who were working in this
Speaker 3: lab brutally rotting monkeys alive in order to discover the
Speaker 3: secret of aging.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a stop motion effect. By the way, when
Speaker 2: we see that monkey rot it's pretty pretty nice. But yeah,
Speaker 2: Rufus Collins New York actor who started out in a
Speaker 2: living theater, which is an experimental acting troop of the day.
Speaker 2: He worked in the UK as well, which maybe why
Speaker 2: he's in this film because most of it was filmed
Speaker 2: in London. But he has some wild credits, including Andy
Speaker 2: Warhol's Batman Dracula from sixty four. I'm not sure what
Speaker 2: that entailed. I've seen it referenced almost as like a
Speaker 2: lost film, so some sort of experimental Warhol project. But
Speaker 2: he's in both The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Shock Treatment,
Speaker 2: playing an uncredited, uncredited Transylvanian. In the former, if you
Speaker 2: look in the background, there's like at least one black
Speaker 2: Transylvanian with like really cool hair and sunglasses. That's Rufus Collins. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and then he plays a member of the camera crew
Speaker 2: in the latter picture.
Speaker 3: He wears like neon sunglasses indoors in this movie. Lots
Speaker 3: of characters wear sunglasses indoors in the Hunger, but he
Speaker 3: is one of them, and his sunglasses are cooler looking
Speaker 3: than most.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're a whole sit in. My wife and I
Speaker 2: were coming on this. There's a scene later on where
Speaker 2: I believe a Jigglow is brought back by Miriam purely
Speaker 2: for the purpose or mostly for the purposes of blood.
Speaker 2: And he's wearing sunglasses, as is she. She's a vampire,
Speaker 2: so we're like, okay, she can wear sunglasses at night,
Speaker 2: but this dude's wearing sunglasses at night anyway. And the
Speaker 2: apartment is so dark. Is anyone seeing anything? But yeah,
Speaker 2: everybody's wearing sunglasses. Everyone's smoking like a chimney, all right.
Speaker 2: And finally, it's worth noting that we have little more
Speaker 2: than a cameo here, very bit part. But Willem Dafoe
Speaker 2: pops up playing second phone booth youth and he was
Speaker 2: like he was twenty seven or twenty eight at the time,
Speaker 2: and it is this is the youngest I've seen Defoe
Speaker 2: in a motion picture. This was only like his fourth
Speaker 2: screen or TV appearance. Dude, he is smooth, Yeah, like
Speaker 2: he you know, you think of Dafoe or you know,
Speaker 2: or I think of William Dafoe. I think of like
Speaker 2: that rugged face, you know, you know, a very very
Speaker 2: handsome face, but very rugged. The lines are important to
Speaker 2: the overall work, and it's almost a little jarring to
Speaker 2: see him this young. He doesn't have much to do here.
Speaker 2: He doesn't drink blood nor get his blood drink, but
Speaker 2: this would This still qualifies as the first of five
Speaker 2: Willem Dafoe vampire films that I know of, alongside two
Speaker 2: thousand and one Shadow of a Vampire, twenty ten, Daybreakers,
Speaker 2: two thousand and nine circ To Freak the Vampire's Assistant,
Speaker 2: and of course twenty twenty four is Nosferatu.
Speaker 3: He doesn't play a vampire in this, but he looks
Speaker 3: like a vampire in his regular human makeup. In Streets
Speaker 3: of Fire.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, that would be that. And I guess
Speaker 2: like eighty five's Roadhouse sixty six and To Live and
Speaker 2: Die in La were really those are more of the
Speaker 2: launching points of his career, so he was really under
Speaker 2: the radar at this point.
Speaker 3: Have you never seen Streets of Fire and you want
Speaker 3: to have a good time, Just look up Willem Defoe
Speaker 3: screaming streets of Fire. That's that's a good face.
Speaker 2: All right, Really, I'll try and speak this along. I
Speaker 2: realized we're taking a while on the connections here, but
Speaker 2: we mentioned Dick Smith. Make up illusions is what he's
Speaker 2: credited with here. Lived twenty two through twenty fourteen. You know,
Speaker 2: a host of talented makeup artists were involved in bringing
Speaker 2: these characters to life, but Dick Smith played a key
Speaker 2: role in David Bowie's on screen aging effects. We previously
Speaker 2: discussed Smith in our episode on Scanners, which features a
Speaker 2: number of amazing body horror effects, but he was also
Speaker 2: legendary for his aging makeup effects, most famously that of
Speaker 2: f Murray Abraham's Saliari in eighty four Zama Dais, which
Speaker 2: earned him an Academy Award. His other credits include seventy
Speaker 2: three's The Exorcist in nineteen eighties Altered States.
Speaker 3: Oh does he do the just the de I wonder
Speaker 3: if The Exorcist was just demon makeup or if he
Speaker 3: also was making Father Maren look older.
Speaker 2: And yeah, I'm not entirely sure, but you know he was,
Speaker 2: you know, clearly he was skilled beyond mere aging effects,
Speaker 2: but he became well known for it. And to your
Speaker 2: point earlier about Prometheus, yeah, I feel like there are
Speaker 2: plenty of examples of movies that probably had more money
Speaker 2: in behind them than films that utilized Dick Smith that
Speaker 2: ended up being less convincing in their aging makeup. He
Speaker 2: had a true gift for this sort of thing. Tony
Speaker 2: Scott mentions in the commentary track that that Smith was
Speaker 2: disappointed that the lighting wasn't more intense in some of
Speaker 2: these scenes where David Bowie is aged and you know,
Speaker 2: and you know, Tony's you know, basically saying, well, you know,
Speaker 2: that's part of it. You also, it's not just the makeup.
Speaker 2: You got to have the lighting, and you know, it
Speaker 2: makes it more effective if things are not maybe completely
Speaker 2: in focus or completely lit. But it's kind of telling
Speaker 2: like that's how strongly Dick Smith believed in his makeup effects.
Speaker 4: Here.
Speaker 2: It's like, shine the lights on him. They can go
Speaker 2: out in the sun.
Speaker 3: Oh, he's good. I understand why you had the confidence.
Speaker 2: Yeah, costume, we don't always mention costuming, but Molina Canna
Speaker 2: Narrow was the costume and key to the costuming here.
Speaker 2: Born nineteen forty six, another legendary behind the scenes figure
Speaker 2: and thirty three time Oscar winner. Where do you even
Speaker 2: keep all those trophies? I'm not sure? But there's this
Speaker 2: one story, and this is one that that Tony shares
Speaker 2: on the commentary track. She's famously fled the set of
Speaker 2: the film one day and they were like, where is she?
Speaker 2: Where'd she go? Nobody knew. Turns out she flew from
Speaker 2: London to Rome just to get the right cloth for
Speaker 2: like a pocket square on David Bowie's costume. She was like,
Speaker 2: there's nothing here in London, I have to go to
Speaker 2: Rome to get it. So she just just flew in
Speaker 2: her own dime and came back with it.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: She's worked with such directors as Stanley Kubrick, really Scott Francis,
Speaker 2: Ford Coppola and Wes Anderson, some of them you know
Speaker 2: multiple times. We're talking such costume rich films as seventy
Speaker 2: one's o' clockwork, Orange, nineteen nineties Dick Tracy and nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety nine's Titus.
Speaker 3: Those are all eye popping films. Yeah.
Speaker 2: The director of photography was Stephen Goldblatt born nineteen forty five,
Speaker 2: South African born cinematographer who worked on such films as
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty one's Outland, eighty five's Young Sherlock Holmes, and
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety seven's Batman Forever, for which he was nominated
Speaker 2: for an Oscar.
Speaker 3: That was the one. Yeah, it's boy Ling acid.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna mention the editor. We don't always mention the editor,
Speaker 2: but the editing in this film, I feel like, is
Speaker 2: something else. There's some very alarming editing choices at times.
Speaker 2: Pamela Power born nineteen forty two. She worked with Ridley
Speaker 2: Scott multiple times on seventy seven's The Duellist, his Apple
Speaker 2: Mac commercial from eighty four, eighty five's Legend, and ninety
Speaker 2: seven's gij Okay. Now we get to the music, and
Speaker 2: there are several people to mention on the musical note here,
Speaker 2: so much like the editing, the music is pretty wild.
Speaker 2: We have a mixture of needle drop classical tracks, experimental
Speaker 2: electronic sounds, and then a riveting opening performance by Boohause.
Speaker 2: Howard Blake born in nineteen thirty eight was the musical
Speaker 2: director on the film. He also served in this role
Speaker 2: on nineteen eighty's Flash Gordon, which we previously talked about.
Speaker 2: Let's see that multiple classical tracks are used here. There's
Speaker 2: also a score by Guiney Jaguera, who also did the
Speaker 2: theme song for TVs. The Powers of Matthew Starr, and
Speaker 2: Michael Rubini, who also worked on Matthew Starr but also
Speaker 2: went on to score the likes of nineteen eighty four
Speaker 2: is What Waits Below, nineteen eighty six is man Hunter,
Speaker 2: and ninety two's Nemesis.
Speaker 3: Oh, it's been a while since I've seen it, but
Speaker 3: I remember Man Hunter having intriguing music.
Speaker 2: That's the stylish picture. Yeah, all right. And then finally,
Speaker 2: David Lawson or Dave Lawson is credited with performer, Additional
Speaker 2: Electronic Music and Effects, Composer, Additional Electronic music and Effects
Speaker 2: uncredited on that latter pump point. But this guy's pretty
Speaker 2: interesting as well. There are a number of weird supernatural
Speaker 2: synth flourishes in the film, and when I heard them,
Speaker 2: I was like, this sounds like Jim Henson's Labyrinth. You
Speaker 2: know these sort of there's sort of like cascading synth
Speaker 2: waterfalls of supernatural intrigue, and they happen a lot in
Speaker 2: this picture, and they happen periodically in Labyrinth, and sure enough,
Speaker 2: I mean the same guy was involved in both of
Speaker 2: these pictures.
Speaker 3: Oh wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So let's see he did supply. He supplied synthesized
Speaker 2: electronic sounds for The Dark Crystal in eighty two and
Speaker 2: also contributed to the Labyrinth score. Otherwise, he has a
Speaker 2: handful of film credits on the major databases, though sometimes
Speaker 2: he's not credited on the film, but if you look
Speaker 2: up the score album elsewhere, you can find that he's credited.
Speaker 2: Let's see, he worked on ninety four as Frankenstein. He
Speaker 2: worked with Trevor Jones on such films as Angel Heart
Speaker 2: in eighty seven Mississippi Burning in eighty eight. So he's
Speaker 2: a British keyboardist who was a member of the UK
Speaker 2: progressive rock band green Slade. I was unfamiliar with Greenslade,
Speaker 2: but I pulled them up as I was working on
Speaker 2: notes here and I like what they're laying down. It's
Speaker 2: kind of a neat prog rock sound with some synth
Speaker 2: in there. You know, maybe feels a little old fashioned,
Speaker 2: but in a good way, you know. Okay, so he's
Speaker 2: something of a synth legend. He played on the soundtrack
Speaker 2: for seventy six. Is the man who fell to Earth
Speaker 2: and worked with the likes of Jimmy Page and Kate Bush.
Speaker 2: Said to own one of the largest synth systems in Europe.
Speaker 3: The largest synth systems. What does that mean, like the
Speaker 3: physically largest.
Speaker 2: I guess it's kind of like, I think, maybe a
Speaker 2: collection of synths, but they're active and all like hooked together.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I found some There's a Psychedelic Baby
Speaker 2: magazine has an interview with him from twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2: It includes a number of photographs of him back in
Speaker 2: the day and in present times. And yeah, the ones
Speaker 2: from the seventies are pretty great because here's this like
Speaker 2: long hair dude, you know, of course, surrounded by synths
Speaker 2: and keyboards and all looks like he was quite the
Speaker 2: synth wizard of the day.
Speaker 3: I was trying to see if I could recognize any
Speaker 3: brands to know what his style was. But I do
Speaker 3: not know what these are.
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, even when I hear guys like this
Speaker 2: talk about their gear, I'm just not a gearhead for
Speaker 2: this sort of thing. So all the names of these
Speaker 2: various devices and innovations just go completely over my head.
Speaker 2: But I love the results. So you definitely hear his
Speaker 2: influence on the sounds of the Hunger. But again it's
Speaker 2: kind of all over the place. You have electronic, you
Speaker 2: have classical, and also some I guess more traditional score
Speaker 2: hidden in there as well, in addition to contemporary tracks
Speaker 2: like the Bauhause track that opens up the picture.
Speaker 3: Okay, well, is it time to talk a bit about
Speaker 3: the plot?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I let's jump in.
Speaker 3: So this is not one of those movies where we're
Speaker 3: going to do a kind of chronological scene by scene
Speaker 3: talk through the plot like we often do. Sometimes it
Speaker 3: just doesn't feel right with what the movie is. I
Speaker 3: think this is one of those cases. I've already described
Speaker 3: some of the plot, but here I think maybe we
Speaker 3: can do a kind of general overview and then talk
Speaker 3: about some specific scenes and elements and themes. So at
Speaker 3: the beginning of the story, John and Miriam Blaylock. That's
Speaker 3: David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve. They live in a house
Speaker 3: in New York City, and they have seemingly been together
Speaker 3: for hundreds of years. Miriam is some kind of ancient
Speaker 3: being we see brief flashbacks of her in what appeared
Speaker 3: to be palaces and maybe ancient Greece and certainly ancient Egypt.
Speaker 3: There are these different kind of costumes. I think we
Speaker 3: see some kind of Egyptian priesthood paraphernalia. I don't know
Speaker 3: if you had any particular observations about the ancient flashbacks,
Speaker 3: but I couldn't detect a lot of plot from them.
Speaker 3: They were not full of information. They were more full
Speaker 3: of vibe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these are not flashbacks in the Highlander sense where
Speaker 2: it's like, all right, we're going back now, and here's
Speaker 2: a definite time stamp of where we're going and when
Speaker 2: we're going to. It's presented very surrealistically and jarringly. There
Speaker 2: are multiple times like this in the picture where you're like,
Speaker 2: what's happening? Is this is the past? Yes, it must
Speaker 2: be the past, and then you kind of piece it
Speaker 2: together later. But yeah, Greco Egyptian is about the most
Speaker 2: I could make out of it.
Speaker 3: Though you could be forgiven for being confused when we
Speaker 3: cut to these palaces of the past, because in the opening,
Speaker 3: John and Miriam live together in this beautiful house in
Speaker 3: New York City that is very old world like they
Speaker 3: are apparently fabulously wealthy, and their home is full of
Speaker 3: magnificent art. It's full of marble statues that they say
Speaker 3: are thousands of years old, and it's got these big,
Speaker 3: spacious Baroque rooms and musical instruments and stuff. So it
Speaker 3: seems like the kind of place you might suddenly go
Speaker 3: around a corner and be in a room that looks
Speaker 3: like it is a palace in ancient Egypt.
Speaker 2: When I am in New York and I get to
Speaker 2: walk around New York and I see a home where
Speaker 2: people live, I just assume these are sorts of people
Speaker 2: that live there, and this must be ancient vampires with
Speaker 2: you know, generational wealth and supernatural blood.
Speaker 3: So the flashbacks they showed that, but they also show
Speaker 3: us Miriam and John falling in love when John was immortal,
Speaker 3: And I believe this is supposed to be somewhere in
Speaker 3: Europe in the seventeenth century. I think I read somewhere
Speaker 3: it said France, but I don't recall the movie saying France.
Speaker 2: It feels very French.
Speaker 3: So they are falling in love in powdered Wigland, and
Speaker 3: she promises him eternal life and eternal love, and they
Speaker 3: drink one another's blood to turn John into her youthful
Speaker 3: vampire lover for ages to come. And there's something about
Speaker 3: this scene where you know they promise, the promise is forever,
Speaker 3: and this promise of forever is repeated later in the story,
Speaker 3: like I think I'm remembering this right. There are scenes
Speaker 3: of them early the film, in their nineteen eighties New
Speaker 3: York phase where they're still trading these reassurances, Like there's
Speaker 3: one part where I think they're in the shower and
Speaker 3: John just asks forever and she says forever. Now, maybe
Speaker 3: here we should do an aside on the opening sequence,
Speaker 3: because that gives us a flavor of part of what
Speaker 3: they do in their nineteen eighties New York life. Before
Speaker 3: seeing this movie, I really did not know what it
Speaker 3: was going to be like, but I guess I assumed
Speaker 3: that the whole thing was going to be a lot
Speaker 3: more like the first ten minutes. This was not the case,
Speaker 3: But the opening sequence rocks strictly in terms of what happens.
Speaker 3: It's just our two original vampires, Miriam and John. They
Speaker 3: go to a goth club, they pick up a couple
Speaker 3: of dates. They bring them back home, and they drink
Speaker 3: their blood. But the sequence is so fun everybody. So
Speaker 3: there's the goth clothing, all this dark leather, people wearing
Speaker 3: sunglasses inside in the dark, and Bauhaus performing apparently inside
Speaker 3: some kind of animal cage.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you will observe many things in this film through slits, slats, blinds, cages,
Speaker 2: and of course translucent black capes and drapes and veils.
Speaker 2: And again, I also, I hope you're not trying to
Speaker 2: quit smoking while watching this film, because there's a lot
Speaker 2: of cigarette smoking. Yes, But yeah, that's Bowhouse lead singer
Speaker 2: Peter Murphy performing in the goth club himself looking like
Speaker 2: some sort of an undead creature, and they're performing their
Speaker 2: biggest tip, Bela Lugosi's Dead. I do wish they'd included
Speaker 2: all nine minutes and thirty four seconds of the track,
Speaker 2: because it's a tremendous track. I got to see Bowhouse
Speaker 2: perform at Coachella back in two thousand and five, and
Speaker 2: they opened with Peter Murphy performing Bela Lagosi's Dead whilst
Speaker 2: suspended upside down on stage. It was pretty great. So here, yeah,
Speaker 2: we get these scenes of the club, Peter Murphy, our
Speaker 2: vampire couple strolling in, but then we get also we
Speaker 2: can also get some like crazy cuts. This is where
Speaker 2: we first st start getting hit with like crazy cuts
Speaker 2: to them like driving and stuff later on, and then
Speaker 2: we keep cutting back to Peter Murphy's performance during the
Speaker 2: vampire blood drinking scene that shortly follows.
Speaker 3: That's right, So Miriam and John they both pick up someone,
Speaker 3: they bring them back together to their home, and they
Speaker 3: start like they're going to have sex, but instead they
Speaker 3: end up, of course, cutting them and drinking their blood.
Speaker 3: We'll talk more about the mechanics of the blood drinking
Speaker 3: in a moment, but we do see here something that
Speaker 3: is I think. While a lot of this movie is
Speaker 3: different than other vampire movies and very fresh and unusual,
Speaker 3: a common convention you see in vampire films that's also
Speaker 3: present here is that some of the most erotically charged
Speaker 3: imagery is used in the lead up to blood drinking
Speaker 3: rather than to sex. This does imply a kind of
Speaker 3: blurring of the lines between like the vampire's carnal desires
Speaker 3: and appetite. It's like, to them, is the blood sexier
Speaker 3: than sex? And if so, how does this affect the
Speaker 3: way we should think about the vampire's love stories.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is a great point. Yeah, multiple points in
Speaker 2: the film, including some very subtle moments, it's clear that
Speaker 2: the desire to feed is also the desire for sex. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and one, I don't know, I got the impression that
Speaker 2: maybe the one is not merely a stepping stone for
Speaker 2: the other, like it, Like, I didn't get as much
Speaker 2: the idea that it's like, oh, well, only they only
Speaker 2: do sex because they just want to do blood. Like
Speaker 2: the two seem inseparable.
Speaker 3: I guess you're right, Yeah, they are kind of the same.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a great scene later on where John is
Speaker 2: aging rather rapidly and he's in I guess it's so
Speaker 2: just a restroom, but it feels like a locker room,
Speaker 2: and there's like a shirtless man like splashing his face
Speaker 2: with water next to him, and he's like eyeing the
Speaker 2: guy's throat. And that too, is also a very like
Speaker 2: less overt, more subtle moment where there's a feeling of
Speaker 2: the desire both for flesh in the sexual sense and
Speaker 2: also blood in the vampiric sense.
Speaker 3: Now a note on the vampire mechanics here. The vampires
Speaker 3: in this movie do not, I believe, have fangs, or
Speaker 3: at least I don't recall ever seeing them. I don't
Speaker 3: know what the novel describes, but I don't think we
Speaker 3: see fangs in the movie, and that would make sense
Speaker 3: because instead they slice. The way they get the blood
Speaker 3: from their victims is they attack with a particular dedicated tool.
Speaker 3: They slice their victims' arteries with this little ank blade
Speaker 3: and then like they wear it around their neck like
Speaker 3: a crucifix, except it's an Egyptian style onc and then
Speaker 3: they cut the neck and then they drink the blood
Speaker 3: like you would from a water fountain.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I believe you're right. No fangs. I never
Speaker 2: saw any things. And their tool users and they're feeding.
Speaker 2: There's a really fun Key and Peel sketch from years
Speaker 2: back about or where they discuss how vampires make too
Speaker 2: much of a man when they feed like they bite
Speaker 2: and then there's just blood everywhere and they're not getting
Speaker 2: enough of the blood into their mouths. Well, this vision
Speaker 2: of vampiorism at least excuses all the gushing and mess
Speaker 2: making because they don't have like dedicated like feeding mouth
Speaker 2: parts so much. They have to they have to stab,
Speaker 2: They have to allow for there to be a gush
Speaker 2: and then feed on it as best they can.
Speaker 3: I feel like the movie also takes seriously the mess. Yeah,
Speaker 3: like you see them cleaning up afterwards.
Speaker 2: Yeah, cleanup seems to be a big deal. And there's
Speaker 2: some hauntingly beautiful and very powerful scenes. I'm thinking, particularly
Speaker 2: after the first killing, we get the scene of the
Speaker 2: two bloody aunks landing in the sink during the wash up,
Speaker 2: and then of course we see the incineration of the
Speaker 2: corpses of the drained victims and they're like wrapped in
Speaker 2: black garbage bags, and then they're placing the incinerator in
Speaker 2: the plastic is like, you know, melting around. The bodies,
Speaker 2: all very well executed.
Speaker 3: The police do not seem concerned by the fact that
Speaker 3: John and Miriam have an incinerator in their basement.
Speaker 2: I guess it's like only murders in the building, Like
Speaker 2: all these buildings in New York have powerful incinerators that
Speaker 2: just completely adamized bodies. So I guess they're just used
Speaker 2: to it.
Speaker 3: So I wanted to pause for a moment here and
Speaker 3: explore the question of what other powers or limitations do
Speaker 3: the vampires have within the lore of the film. So
Speaker 3: we've established that they have arrested, aging or unnaturally prolonged youth,
Speaker 3: perhaps eternal youth in Miriam's case. Unclear. I was wondering,
Speaker 3: are they supposed to be invulnerable or resistant to regular injuries?
Speaker 3: I really don't think so. In fact, several things happen
Speaker 3: in the movie that made it seem like the vampires
Speaker 3: can be harmed by standard physical forces. I get the
Speaker 3: impression that in this world, like you could really wound
Speaker 3: a vampire. A human, regular mortal could really wound a
Speaker 3: vampire as easily as they could wound another human. But
Speaker 3: maybe I'm forgetting something to the contrary.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I think that's right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the vampires do need to drink blood. In fact,
Speaker 3: they have this insatiable craving, and that is really framed
Speaker 3: more I guess this is actually quite common, but it's
Speaker 3: framed more as a weakness than a power. You know.
Speaker 3: It's like they need, they need to say this hunger,
Speaker 3: and it causes them to do things that are in
Speaker 3: some cases destructive to their own well being.
Speaker 2: Right, right.
Speaker 3: Vampires in the movies often have a kind of super strength.
Speaker 3: I think Miriam does have super strength because at one
Speaker 3: point we see her throw Sarah clear across the room.
Speaker 3: Does John have in human strength. I don't recall ever
Speaker 3: seeing in any evidence of that.
Speaker 2: If he does, he never employs it. So it's if
Speaker 2: he has that supernatural strength, using it is not really
Speaker 2: a part of his character. But I guess I'm inclined
Speaker 2: to think that maybe he doesn't have it, like maybe
Speaker 2: that's one of the limitations of him being the vampire spawned,
Speaker 2: the vampire thrawl, or a half vampiric being, however you
Speaker 2: want to describe it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Now, there's no problem with them going out in sunlight.
Speaker 3: They venture out in the daytime throughout the film, and
Speaker 3: they don't have to sleep in coffins or in their
Speaker 3: native soil. They sleep in a big kind of you know,
Speaker 3: a wind blown music video bed.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, I mean I get the impression they sleep
Speaker 2: in a lot, but it's not like they can't go
Speaker 2: out in the sun.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I don't recall any apparent influence of religious imagery
Speaker 3: or material.
Speaker 2: I think there's one. I think one of the phone
Speaker 2: booth guys, not Willem Dafoe, but the other guy maybe
Speaker 2: has a cross on, But it's ambiguous if it actually
Speaker 2: has any effect on the vampirically affected character who views it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so maybe Miriam has super strength, and unclear if
Speaker 3: John does. But apart from that, really, the only great
Speaker 3: kind of power we see of the vampire, I think
Speaker 3: is just the fact that they live eternally or so
Speaker 3: called eternally, that they do not age, they can maintain
Speaker 3: youth for a long time. Would you say that there's
Speaker 3: any other apparent power on display?
Speaker 2: I think that's mostly it now. Miriam in particular is
Speaker 2: quite seductive and charismatic. People are drawn to her, but
Speaker 2: I never thought that this was presented in a like
Speaker 2: definite Dracula's gaze sort of way, like she to Yeah,
Speaker 2: to an extent, you could say she casts a spell
Speaker 2: on Sarah, but I don't think in the literal sense,
Speaker 2: not in a way that overrides Sarah's agency in the seduction.
Speaker 3: You know, Yeah, Sarah doesn't seem like hypnotized. She seems more,
Speaker 3: I don't know, encouraged to give in to something that
Speaker 3: she does want.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it'd be more like being starstruck, except you know,
Speaker 2: it's like the vampiric version of that, I guess.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So anyway, worth noting that the vision of va
Speaker 3: emperorsm in this film is quite mechanically limited, Compared to
Speaker 3: most vampire lore, many of the standard horror tropes do
Speaker 3: not apply.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no garlic in this picture, No steaks, nothing like that.
Speaker 3: There is steak in the picture.
Speaker 2: There's a steak. Yeah, there's rare steak.
Speaker 3: Of course, a quite significant steak scene where after Susan
Speaker 3: Sarandon has been turned, she's like at a restaurant trying
Speaker 3: to eat some steak and just like yuck, only want blood.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, And he's like, I can't believe you spent
Speaker 2: three and a half hours with that woman. You need
Speaker 2: to go to a doctor.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think you have bisexual ititis or something. I don't know.
Speaker 3: Anyway, So to come back to our sort of zoomed
Speaker 3: out overview of the plot. In the opening again, John
Speaker 3: and Miriam they're living this apparently fabulous life. They live
Speaker 3: this big, beautiful house in New York. When they're not
Speaker 3: hunting for victims at goth clubs, they appear to spend
Speaker 3: a lot of their time on artistic leisure. They are
Speaker 3: both musicians. I think Miriam plays the piano and John
Speaker 3: play the cello, and they like to play music with
Speaker 3: a talented young teenage violinist from the house across the
Speaker 3: street named Alice. Does she take music lessons from them?
Speaker 2: I was unclear on that if if she just jams
Speaker 2: with them or she takes lessons at any rate, it's
Speaker 2: you know, it's probably fine. This is probably totally okay
Speaker 2: that she's coming over here and hanging out with these
Speaker 2: two ancient vampires.
Speaker 3: Yeah, not going anywhere good. Anything else to say about
Speaker 3: their apparently somewhat happy life in the beginning, I.
Speaker 2: Mean, not much other than it does seem like they
Speaker 2: are happy content. It doesn't seem like they particularly have
Speaker 2: any vampire hunters breathing down their necks or anything. And
Speaker 2: I guess they've been going at it for a long time,
Speaker 2: and they're staying on top of the fashions. Like sometimes,
Speaker 2: I mean, there's so many ways to treat longevity and
Speaker 2: vampires in fiction, and sometimes vampires are depicted as like
Speaker 2: totally out of keeping with modern fads and so forth,
Speaker 2: and certainly technology, and also maybe being rather bored, like
Speaker 2: they just run out of passion. These two seem to
Speaker 2: still have a lot of passion for what's popular in
Speaker 2: the world, changing musical genres and so forth, And you know,
Speaker 2: they're staying active. They're still killing people and drinking their
Speaker 2: blood and then burning them in the.
Speaker 3: Basement, and the way in which their hip seems to
Speaker 3: be I don't know, basically just keeping pace with culture.
Speaker 3: You don't get like that Saltation view where or it's
Speaker 3: like in Francis Ford Coppolas Dracula, where Gary oldman. You know,
Speaker 3: he's got the big bun head and he's decrepit and
Speaker 3: old world and then suddenly all at once he's rejuvenated
Speaker 3: and hip and stylish. Anyway, the trouble of the plot
Speaker 3: starts when John notices that he is losing his hair
Speaker 3: and he can't seem to sleep, and he notices several
Speaker 3: things and realizes he is aging rapidly. Apparently years are
Speaker 3: falling off of his life every day. Now. One question
Speaker 3: here I was trying to remember is what is the
Speaker 3: level of openness between John and Miriam about this. I
Speaker 3: seem to remember they do talk about it as if
Speaker 3: he knew this might happen at some point, Like I
Speaker 3: remember he asks Miriam how long it took for another
Speaker 3: person to decay in this way? Presumably this was a
Speaker 3: previous lover of Miriam's, But I also don't get the
Speaker 3: impression that he knew this would happen before he was
Speaker 3: turned Did you take that all the same way?
Speaker 2: I mean, it's this is one of the more thought
Speaker 2: provoking mysteries of the film, I think, because like logically,
Speaker 2: in the film, yeah, he seems to be aware that
Speaker 2: there were other lovers in the past, that they they
Speaker 2: went away, that they faded away one way or another,
Speaker 2: and that something like that could happen to him. On
Speaker 2: the other hand, there is the whole reassurances of things
Speaker 2: being forever. And then of course this also ties into
Speaker 2: how I think, you know, we all, to varying degrees,
Speaker 2: deal with or don't deal with aging and mortality. Like
Speaker 2: we all know that we will grow old and that
Speaker 2: we will die. That that is like the biological trajectory,
Speaker 2: and that you know, very little can can occur to
Speaker 2: change that path. And yet I think we often carry
Speaker 2: on like John, not thinking about it, finding ways to
Speaker 2: avoid the reality of it. And then when it does
Speaker 2: begin to occur, it, you know, it comes as a shock,
Speaker 2: but it's not a shock because we knew it all along,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, though, I mean for John, there's this interesting dynamic
Speaker 3: because it's like he short sold his life. Essentially, he
Speaker 3: had all these many many years, unnaturally extended life and youth.
Speaker 3: He's been young and vigorous for so long, and now
Speaker 3: it's all coming home. It's all coming home at once.
Speaker 3: It's happening so fast. Yeah. So anyway, John is in
Speaker 3: this state and on TV he sees a report about
Speaker 3: the work of a gerontologist named doctor Sarah Roberts. This
Speaker 3: is the character played by Susan Sarandon. She's written a
Speaker 3: book about her work and she's performing experiments along with
Speaker 3: a couple of colleagues, Charlie Humphreys and Tom have her
Speaker 3: Tom again is Sarah's boyfriend. Together they are trying to
Speaker 3: understand the process of aging at the cellular level and
Speaker 3: possibly halt or reverse it, particularly to help children who
Speaker 3: have diseases that cause accelerated aging and deterioration. And these characters,
Speaker 3: the scientist characters, are interesting because on one hand, we
Speaker 3: see what seems to me to be obvious care or
Speaker 3: a real desire to help people, especially children, like their
Speaker 3: motivations are represented as not impure, and yet they're also
Speaker 3: not lionized. The scientists are not treated as saints. They
Speaker 3: in some ways come off as quite brutal, like we
Speaker 3: see them performing these gory, horrifying experiments on monkeys where
Speaker 3: one of these experiments in a really great special effects
Speaker 3: shop by the way, causes like a monkey to rapidly
Speaker 3: age and then turbo decompose in minutes, like when you
Speaker 3: drink from the Fall scale in the Last Crusade. Yeah,
Speaker 3: we also see them. We see just sort of human
Speaker 3: failings of these scientists, like when Sarah and John first meet,
Speaker 3: Sarah is rude and dismissive to him, and she lies
Speaker 3: to him. John comes asking for help, and then also
Speaker 3: Tom have her boyfriend, the other scientist. He comes off
Speaker 3: as a total jerk, though at the same time there
Speaker 3: are also indications that he genuinely cares for Sarah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean he's put in a tough spot, I
Speaker 2: guess to some degree, and we're not maybe as privy
Speaker 2: as much to his side of things. But yeah, that
Speaker 2: scene where John is sort of cast aside by Sarah
Speaker 2: and she's like, just wait wait for me in the
Speaker 2: waiting room and I'll get back you later, and she's
Speaker 2: then she tells the security guy it's like there's another
Speaker 2: weirdo here. Just leave him alone. He'll probably get bored
Speaker 2: and leave on his own. And then we the viewer
Speaker 2: watch as John literally grows like decades older in the
Speaker 2: waiting room, a scene that I think could otherwise come
Speaker 2: off as comedic, like because when you're explaining it's like,
Speaker 2: you literally watch him grow old in the waiting room.
Speaker 2: It sounds like a comedic bit, but it's it's executed
Speaker 2: in a way that that does not feel funny. And
Speaker 2: in the effect, the makeup effects are, of course, so convincing.
Speaker 2: We don't see any kind of like transition effect. It's
Speaker 2: all you know, checking back in with him and seeing
Speaker 2: that he's visibly aged, and yeah, like he ends up
Speaker 2: leaving the waiting room a much older man.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And then as he's leaving, Sarah sees him again
Speaker 3: and he and he recognizes her, knowing that like she
Speaker 3: totally blew him off and lied to him earlier, but
Speaker 3: she sees now that he has visibly rapidly aged since
Speaker 3: earlier that day. And at this point she tries to
Speaker 3: apologize and she's like, oh, no, come with me. You know,
Speaker 3: we'll bring you in for tests, we'll see what's going on.
Speaker 3: But now John's pride is hurt and he refuses her help.
Speaker 3: And I think we kind of talked about that earlier.
Speaker 3: The way that John's personality is represented as kind of
Speaker 3: when he faces the you know, these extreme troubles, just
Speaker 3: kind of like taking it inside and pushing it underneath. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like this was his last, his only attempt to
Speaker 2: like reach out for help, and it didn't turn out
Speaker 2: the way he hoped it would, and there's not going
Speaker 2: to be a second chance for him.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And then there's a section here where John is
Speaker 3: you can tell he's hungry, so he's trying to feed.
Speaker 3: We see him have encountered. He's very he's very rapidly aging,
Speaker 3: turning old in the course of this single day. And
Speaker 3: he like goes into a bathroom the scene you talked
Speaker 3: about where he sees the man I don't know, shaving
Speaker 3: or whatever in the sink and he's staring at him.
Speaker 3: I think he tries to attack a skater in a park.
Speaker 2: Oh it's a roller skater. Yeah, and like they set
Speaker 2: up this really cool scene where it's like, what's happening
Speaker 2: where are we now? Another music video has started. This
Speaker 2: guy starts doing some cool skating and then here comes
Speaker 2: John attempts to stab him and drink his blood, but
Speaker 2: then it doesn't fully pull it off. For some reason.
Speaker 3: So he comes home and then oh no, because he's
Speaker 3: so old. Now, when the neighbor girl Alice comes over
Speaker 3: to play music, John has to pretend to be someone
Speaker 3: else because she won't recognize him. He looks so much older.
Speaker 3: And then even worse when she's in there, he talks
Speaker 3: her into playing some music for him, and we don't
Speaker 3: see it. It happens off screen, but we know what.
Speaker 3: He kills her and drinks her blood.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and he gets more heartbreaking from there with John,
Speaker 2: because he just gets progressively older. Miriam is walking this
Speaker 2: line between comforting him and keeping him at arm's length,
Speaker 2: and she's having to burn Alice's body in the basement.
Speaker 2: And then John comes down and he's he's so old.
Speaker 2: At this point he asks for one more kiss and
Speaker 2: then he asks if she will kill him, and you know,
Speaker 2: and in this and like heartbreakingly, she tells him, like
Speaker 2: you know, it doesn't work like that. You like, you
Speaker 2: don't die, you don't get to die, and uh and
Speaker 2: and again it's maybe a little unclear to what extent
Speaker 2: he knew this was the case or remembered it was
Speaker 2: the case. I'm not sure, but yeah, it's quickly made
Speaker 2: obvious that that, yeah, he's not going to grow old
Speaker 2: and die, He's just going to grow perpetually older, but
Speaker 2: have eternal life in a very non glamorous way.
Speaker 3: That's right. There is no death for a vampire. That's
Speaker 3: the twist. There is just aging and pain and decay,
Speaker 3: but actually no end. And then in a oh a
Speaker 3: hair raising scene where she takes him up to the
Speaker 3: attic and she deposits his aging body inside a coffin
Speaker 3: next to this huge stack of other coffins that are
Speaker 3: filled with Miriam's previous lovers, all of whom are reduced
Speaker 3: to husks inside the coffins, but are not gone. They
Speaker 3: are all still conscious inside. And she bids her other
Speaker 3: previous lovers to keep him company and to treat him
Speaker 3: with kindness.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, very haunting. Yeah, thousands of years worth of
Speaker 2: lovers here, stored away in neat little stacks.
Speaker 3: So here the story switches. Miriam is left alone, and
Speaker 3: who should come to the house now but Sarah, Sarah,
Speaker 3: the researcher, the gerontologist. Her initial line of inquiry is
Speaker 3: where is John? She somehow got his address and she
Speaker 3: is trying to find him because obviously somebody who's aging
Speaker 3: as rapidly as him would be of interest to her research.
Speaker 3: Miriam initially tells tell Sarah that he went to Switzerland.
Speaker 3: I think so she thinks he's at a clinic there.
Speaker 3: But she comes in and she begins to get to
Speaker 3: know Miriam. And this is where the story takes a
Speaker 3: really different kind of turn, because I think the way again,
Speaker 3: Miriam is often presented in a kind of ambiguous way.
Speaker 3: We don't always know exactly what she's feeling. She's more
Speaker 3: hard to scrutinize than many of the human characters. But
Speaker 3: I suspect that the implication is that Miriam is now
Speaker 3: lonely because there was the idea, of course, she had John,
Speaker 3: and she loved John, And there was also the implication
Speaker 3: that she and John discussed that maybe one day, when
Speaker 3: Alice was older, she would turn Alice into a vampire
Speaker 3: as well, and she would become her new companion, and
Speaker 3: she'd been thinking about this. But of course John killed
Speaker 3: Alice and drank her blood. So now Miriam really doesn't
Speaker 3: seem to have a friend in the world.
Speaker 2: But then, oh, here's Sarah, and Sarah has a lot
Speaker 2: of things going for and there is there is an
Speaker 2: opening in the significant other market here in Miriam's house, that's.
Speaker 3: Right now, somewhere in here, I think. Actually Sarah comes
Speaker 3: twice to visit. In between their two visits, I think,
Speaker 3: or when the cops come to investigate, and this goes
Speaker 3: absolutely nowhere, absolutely nowhere. But Sarah does eventually come back
Speaker 3: to visit Miriam again. And here is where things really
Speaker 3: take a turn. Upon the second visit, it's it becomes
Speaker 3: increasingly clear that Miriam and Sarah are interested in each other.
Speaker 3: They are, you know, Miriam is playing the piano and
Speaker 3: they're talking about the what the music is. Miriam is
Speaker 3: explaining the piece of music, and Sarah keeps commenting that
Speaker 3: it sounds like a love song. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And on this second visit, Sarah also you know, shows
Speaker 2: up wearing a sexy outfit and it's not long before
Speaker 2: that outfit gets what some Sherry spilled on it, and
Speaker 2: you know, things things progress as you might expect. Much
Speaker 2: is said about the fact that she doesn't even like Sherry.
Speaker 2: Of course that's the other part. But somehow it's different
Speaker 2: with Miriam and and so they imbibe.
Speaker 3: Now, I guess this leads to the scene that Roger
Speaker 3: Ebert liked. This is the love scene between Sarah and Miriam, which,
Speaker 3: as we talked about earlier, there is a kind of
Speaker 3: mingling of the of the romantic desire and the desire
Speaker 3: for blood. And it's pretty clear what Miriam's aims are
Speaker 3: at this point. Miriam wants not only to drink Sarah's blood,
Speaker 3: but to give of her blood to Sarah as well,
Speaker 3: to turn her into a vampire. She wants companionship. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and so it's this weird dreamlike scene where ultimately I
Speaker 3: think in this scene they do drink of each other's blood.
Speaker 3: So there's like a wound in Sarah's arm where she's
Speaker 3: been pierced by the ONC, but she has also taken
Speaker 3: of Miriam's blood.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and again this is a very artful, stylish sequence.
Speaker 2: It's certainly by by today's standards. There's nothing, you know,
Speaker 2: very explicit about it, though it is it is very
Speaker 2: erotically charged. And yeah, and Susan's Randon in her comments
Speaker 2: on you know, says that she thinks it was probably
Speaker 2: ahead of its time, you know, for eighty three. But
Speaker 2: but yeah, I mean, and to Ebert's point, it is
Speaker 2: a highly effective sequence.
Speaker 3: Now we do see Sarah kind of trying to go
Speaker 3: back to her own, her old life after this, but
Speaker 3: it's just it's not going to work out at this point.
Speaker 3: So there are several different scenes there. There are scenes
Speaker 3: of her increasingly tense and failing relationship with Tom, her boyfriend,
Speaker 3: Like they go out to dinner and they discuss things.
Speaker 3: Tom airs his suspicions and they you know, they are
Speaker 3: fighting about that. She doesn't seem to want food for
Speaker 3: some reason. It's like, she orders a steak, but she's like,
Speaker 3: I can't eat this, and I think it makes her
Speaker 3: throw up.
Speaker 2: Later, she said them oysters back. There's oysters are muscles
Speaker 2: every sage, but she sent them back and he's like,
Speaker 2: I can't believe you did that.
Speaker 3: Also, she starts doing some tests on herself in the laboratory,
Speaker 3: and their colleague, Charlie, he explains what's going on. He's like, whoops, well,
Speaker 3: looking at your blood, we see that you actually have
Speaker 3: some kind of alien blood in you. There's you, there's
Speaker 3: you blood, and then there's some other non human kind
Speaker 3: of blood and they're fighting for dominance within your veins
Speaker 3: and the other blood is winning.
Speaker 2: And so in this Sarah is feeling the titular hunger
Speaker 2: she is craving the blood. She is herself becoming a vampire,
Speaker 2: and like Miriam needs to feed, but she doesn't know
Speaker 2: how to do any of these things. She needs Miriam's
Speaker 2: guidance in order to fully transition into this life as
Speaker 2: a creature of the night.
Speaker 3: That's right, So there's more negotiation on these fronts. We
Speaker 3: see that Sarah is not immediately into the idea of
Speaker 3: drinking blood to survive, but she kind of ends up
Speaker 3: without a choice and it doesn't she so she's like
Speaker 3: extremely weakened and she ends up staying at Miriam's house
Speaker 3: and she's like in a bed there and at one
Speaker 3: point they have more interactions, but eventually Miriam's like, look,
Speaker 3: I'm going to do the work. I'm going to show
Speaker 3: you what to do. I'll go get a guy, and
Speaker 3: so she goes and there's like a great scene where
Speaker 3: she goes out and gets a guy wearing sunglasses at
Speaker 3: night and brings him back to the house for Susan
Speaker 3: Sarandon to eat.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is the Jiggolow character, and boy, they really
Speaker 2: went out of their ways to make sure you were
Speaker 2: okay with this dude getting fanged or not actually fank anked.
Speaker 2: And drained because he's like, he's rude, he's looking in
Speaker 2: the liquor crut and he like spits his chewing gum
Speaker 2: out in Miriam's apartment. So we're like, we're totally okay
Speaker 2: with this guy getting it, and it doesn't take long
Speaker 2: before he does get it.
Speaker 3: So at this point you might be assuming, okay, well,
Speaker 3: is Sarah just going to embrace the new lifestyle? Is
Speaker 3: Sarah this is what I am now. I am Miriam's
Speaker 3: vampire lover. I am her vampire spawn. I can have
Speaker 3: eternal youth, and I just need to pick up people
Speaker 3: at the goth club, bring him back here and drink
Speaker 3: their blood. And that's what we're going to do for
Speaker 3: I don't know however long it takes. I don't recall.
Speaker 3: Does she get any indication of that what happened to
Speaker 3: John will also happen to her eventually. Do they talk
Speaker 3: about that.
Speaker 2: I don't know that they talk about it at all. No,
Speaker 2: But I mean, obviously we the viewer knows that that
Speaker 2: would be the end result, you know, some centuries down
Speaker 2: the line.
Speaker 3: But instead of the full embrace of what happens, there
Speaker 3: is a twist. Sarah proves a more recalcitrant of a
Speaker 3: new Vampa. There's something more of her original humanity left
Speaker 3: than it seems like happened with any of Miriam's previous lovers.
Speaker 3: So instead of fully embracing the new lifestyle, there's a
Speaker 3: confrontation and a big, terrible climax. Now I forget exactly
Speaker 3: how it is triggered. What is it that Sarah does
Speaker 3: that ends up with Miriam like carrying her upstairs to
Speaker 3: like rapidly put her away with the other old lovers.
Speaker 3: Is it that she tries to make Miriam drink her blood.
Speaker 2: I'm a little unsure about how what exactly happens in
Speaker 2: this moment, but she ends up stabbing herself with the
Speaker 2: Anka during a very close embrace, one of these embraces
Speaker 2: where you're not sure at first who is stabbed by
Speaker 2: and who does the stabbing, But yeah, she stabs herself,
Speaker 2: and then Miriam is like, well this is you know,
Speaker 2: she's clearly heartbroken by this. You know, she clearly had
Speaker 2: very strong feelings for Sarah and saw a future with Sarah.
Speaker 2: But now she's going to have to take Sarah up
Speaker 2: to the attic and file her away with the others.
Speaker 3: Right, But then it is revenge of the zombies. The
Speaker 3: ex lovers emerge in their withered, dusty husk forms, and
Speaker 3: they all come out and they take their vengeance, or
Speaker 3: should it be thought of as vengeance? I don't know
Speaker 3: exactly what you how you frame it, but they surround
Speaker 3: and attack Miriam and destroy her.
Speaker 2: There are so many places in this film where I
Speaker 2: feel like a lesser film would would have gone in
Speaker 2: a different direction. I think there's certain pitfalls that a
Speaker 2: movie like this might have naturally veered into, and I
Speaker 2: think this is a key example. I think in a
Speaker 2: lesser picture it would have been a pure vengeance of
Speaker 2: the zombies, like they would have attacked her, torn her
Speaker 2: apart or something. Because the yeah, the undying husks of
Speaker 2: her former lovers do come out of their boxes. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And I think a lesser film might have had them
Speaker 2: be a direct physical cause of Miriam's demise. You know,
Speaker 2: she would have been torn apart by her demons in
Speaker 2: a literal fashion. But if we wouldn't have fit here,
Speaker 2: because you know, set lovingly aside, they still love her,
Speaker 2: they still pine for her. I don't think they would
Speaker 2: intentionally hurt her still, even in their reduced state. Plus
Speaker 2: though their longing is strong, they're physically quite weak and powerless,
Speaker 2: like they're almost dust at this point. What could they do?
Speaker 2: And she clearly has a heightened strength, So instead it
Speaker 2: feels more like it's like it's not as much it's
Speaker 2: their presence, certainly, but it's also the cumulative guilt of
Speaker 2: it all that overcomes Miriam and leads to what appears
Speaker 2: to be her physical death or physical demise, and this
Speaker 2: ends up ending the cursed existence of her thralls, like
Speaker 2: they finally crumble to dust.
Speaker 3: It is not exactly clear what the mechanism, what all
Speaker 3: is going on here, but it feels like it works,
Speaker 3: I will say. After this, I mean it's curious too,
Speaker 3: because this is not quite the end of the film.
Speaker 3: We also see something else with Sarah, don't we.
Speaker 2: That's right, because I really at this point in the
Speaker 2: picture I thought Sarah was dead. I thought she killed
Speaker 2: herself via the aunk, that's why she was being filed away.
Speaker 2: But you know, at the end we get this really
Speaker 2: excellent sequence where we see Sarah standing out in the
Speaker 2: balcony of this like modern high rise in what I
Speaker 2: believe is London, And it's quite quite fetching because you
Speaker 2: have the varied and at times quite old bits of
Speaker 2: architecture visible in the city, you know, so it kind of,
Speaker 2: you know, it kind of meshes nicely with this idea
Speaker 2: of empiric life. But Mike, I had several questions, like, Okay,
Speaker 2: is Sarah a vampire now? Or is she free of
Speaker 2: the curse completely in his mortal again? Did she? Or
Speaker 2: you know, did she dodge the fate and the curse?
Speaker 2: Has the experience unlocked some key into her own research?
Speaker 2: I assume she's keeping going with her work, but is
Speaker 2: it going to take a new turn now that she
Speaker 2: has has either been a vampire or partially been a vampire?
Speaker 2: Where is still a vampire? We don't know. We're left
Speaker 2: to ponder it. And what happened to Miriam? Like is
Speaker 2: Miriam completely destroyed? Or is she in one of the
Speaker 2: boxes now?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, good question. Yeah, so a lot of questions
Speaker 3: left open at the ending, and I don't know exactly
Speaker 3: how to interpret it. But but yeah, despite I don't
Speaker 3: know exactly what to say about the ending, But I
Speaker 3: love the film overall.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was. I was quite impressed with it, you know,
Speaker 2: I like you, I kind of thought the first ten minutes,
Speaker 2: we're going to set the tone for the entire picture,
Speaker 2: and it ended up being a much more poignant and
Speaker 2: thought provoking motion picture overall.
Speaker 3: One last thing I wanted to mention before we wrap
Speaker 3: up here, and it was the thought about the interaction
Speaker 3: between the vampire themes of the story and the h
Speaker 3: and a common thing that's true about well. I was
Speaker 3: gonna say love stories and movies, but actually just love
Speaker 3: in real life, and that is the way that the
Speaker 3: vampire setting really helps the us against the world feeling
Speaker 3: of being in love. I'm not the first person to
Speaker 3: point this out, of course, you know this is a
Speaker 3: commonly observed thing, but there is a way in which
Speaker 3: true love really kind of it does encourage a kind
Speaker 3: of contempt for like the rest of reality. You know
Speaker 3: that when people are in love they like to talk,
Speaker 3: you know, like to you know, to say mean things
Speaker 3: about other people to each other, and to kind of
Speaker 3: be in a conspiracy. When people are in love, they
Speaker 3: like to do kind of selfish or irresponsible things against
Speaker 3: other people outside of that two person conspiracy. It's just
Speaker 3: kind of it happens naturally. I don't know exactly why
Speaker 3: that is, but it just seems to be a thing
Speaker 3: that flows naturally from this two person bond, and that
Speaker 3: works so well when your two characters are vampires, because
Speaker 3: that's exactly the mechanic of the story. It's like, we
Speaker 3: together are in on this great secret. We're working this
Speaker 3: little this little blood conspiracy. We can go out to
Speaker 3: the club and only you and I are in on
Speaker 3: the joke that the people that we bring home or
Speaker 3: that we're just going to kill them, and you know,
Speaker 3: their bodies end up in the incinerator. And you know,
Speaker 3: so we've talked about that us against the world quality
Speaker 3: in other great love movies we've done before. It's kind
Speaker 3: of there totally different themes, but they're in a danger
Speaker 3: diabolic you know, the way that the two lovers are
Speaker 3: in on crimes together and the same thing as present here,
Speaker 3: and that is such a fun and mysterious and interesting dynamic.
Speaker 3: Like it's funny to see it play out, and it
Speaker 3: feels good, but it also just raises these questions, like
Speaker 3: why is that so common that people feel and act
Speaker 3: that way when they're in love? Like what is it
Speaker 3: about being in love that does that to us? It
Speaker 3: kind of kind of makes us bad to the rest
Speaker 3: of the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess that's one of the appeals of paranormal
Speaker 2: romances and paranormal love stories, because the experience of being
Speaker 2: in love, the experience of being in a romance does
Speaker 2: feel supernatural. It does have that kind of energy to it.
Speaker 2: You know, you're not It feels like you have fallen
Speaker 2: in love with a vampire or a were wolf, or
Speaker 2: a sasquatch or a centaur, you know whatever. You know,
Speaker 2: your interest happens to be on the page or on
Speaker 2: the screen.
Speaker 3: All right, Well, Happy Valentine's Day everybody.
Speaker 2: All right, just a reminder to everybody that's stuff to
Speaker 2: blow your mind. Is primarily a science and culture podcast
Speaker 2: with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays
Speaker 2: we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
Speaker 2: a weird film here on Weird House Cinema. If you
Speaker 2: want to check out a list of all the movies
Speaker 2: we've covered over the years, and sometimes a peek ahead
Speaker 2: of what comes next, you can go to letterbox dot com.
Speaker 2: Our user name there is weird House, and you'll find
Speaker 2: a nice list of everything. And of course you can
Speaker 2: write into us as well, let us know what vampire
Speaker 2: film we should do next, you know, sometimes weeks ahead.
Speaker 2: We're going to do some other non vampire films for sure,
Speaker 2: but we'll keep coming back to vampires and were wolves
Speaker 2: and Mommy. It's inevitable.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks, as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
Speaker 3: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 3: topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
Speaker 3: can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Speaker 3: Mind dot com.
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