what the film does
miriam blaylock (deneuve) is an ancient vampire who promises her lovers eternal life. the promise is a lie: they get eternal youth for a time, then age rapidly and irreversibly, and miriam keeps them in coffins in her attic. john (bowie) begins aging over the course of a few days. desperate, he seeks out sarah roberts (sarandon), a researcher studying premature aging. miriam, watching sarah, decides she has found her next companion.
the film is an erotic horror with the production design of a perfume commercial. stephen goldblatt shot it. dick smith, the godfather of prosthetic makeup, handled the aging effects that transform bowie from a young man into a skeleton in a single sitting.
why this one
every tony scott film after this one owes it something. the smoke, the backlit curtains, the classical music colliding with post-punk, the editorial rhythm that treats every scene like a music video: all of it starts here. scott came from commercials, and the hunger is what happens when a commercials director gets a feature budget and actors who can hold the frame.
the deneuve-bowie-sarandon triangle is the engine. deneuve plays miriam with the stillness of someone who has outlived every emotion except desire. bowie, in his limited screen time, sells the horror of rapid aging with a vulnerability he rarely showed on film. sarandon’s conversion scene, set to delibes’s “the flower duet” from lakme, is one of the most imitated sequences of the 1980s.
the film was a box office disappointment ($12.3 million) and received mixed reviews. its reputation grew through home video and through the influence it had on a generation of filmmakers and music video directors.
what stays with me
the opening. peter murphy of bauhaus singing “bela lugosi’s dead” in a cage while deneuve and bowie pick up a couple in a club. the sequence runs nearly six minutes and tells you everything about the film’s priorities: style, atmosphere, music, and the specific kind of beauty that decays.
on hand
the dvd is the mgm release in the canon.
image: tmdb backdrop; cross-checked against letterboxd. baked through scripts/bake_dark_photo.py at factor 0.45, 1200x675