Film

The Hunger

Name: The Hunger
Genre: Horror, Drama
Released: 1983
Cast: Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie, Susan Sarandon, Cliff DeYoung, Beth Ehlers

Fantasy
Horror
Very dark

The Hunger is less a vampire movie than a mood board: Deneuve gliding through Manhattan in couture, Bowie ageing in real time, synth-pop and slow-motion doves. Tony Scott directs it like a perfume ad crossed with a nightmare — gorgeous, glacial, more interested in texture than terror. For lovers of style, dread, and eternal-youth anxiety, not jump scares.

TMDb rating

3.3

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you like your vampires cool, elegant and sensual, more interested in mood, music and glossy 1980s style than in gore or jump scares.

Skip it if you need brisk plotting and steady scares, because this drifts through long, quiet stretches of lingering shots and stylised silence that can feel like posing.

What it asks of you: A patient, unhurried watch at 97 minutes where mood does most of the work and the horror arrives in glances, pauses and cool, deliberate looks.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Interview with the Vampire1994

Same lush, doomed-romance vampirism but with more plot and more blood — centuries-old lovers wrestling with guilt, beauty, and the horror of never dying, told with real narrative sweep.

But Neil Jordan's take is warmer and more melodramatic than Scott's icy chic — less arthouse dread, more gothic soap opera.

Only Lovers Left Alive2013

Jarmusch's vampires are exhausted intellectuals drifting through Detroit and Tangier, capturing the same weary, sensual immortality The Hunger trades in, just funnier and far gentler.

But Almost nothing happens for long stretches — if you wanted The Hunger's dread, this swaps it for dry wit and record collections.

Bram Stoker's Dracula1992

Coppola goes even further into operatic excess — velvet, blood, and increasingly outrageous costumes, all in service of a love that outlasts death itself.

But It's melodrama turned up to eleven; subtlety is not on the menu, and neither is restraint.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from The Hunger

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Vampyr1932

The Hunger's real innovation — treating vampirism as texture and dread rather than plot — is exactly what Dreyer pioneered fifty years earlier in near-silence.

Dreyer's early sound film invented vampire-as-atmosphere decades before The Hunger — dreamlike, nearly wordless, built from shadows and dread rather than fangs and gore.

But It's from 1932, slow by any modern measure, and its scares are conceptual rather than visceral — patience required.

Let the Right One In2008

A Swedish vampire story that trades Manhattan glamour for a snowbound housing estate, but keeps The Hunger's interest in what eternal youth actually costs the person you love.

But It's tender where The Hunger is cold, and its horror comes from childhood loneliness rather than seduction.

Byzantium2013

Neil Jordan returns to vampires with a mother and daughter hiding out in a faded seaside town — moody, feminine, fixated on the loneliness of living forever.

But Slower and more melancholic than gory; some will find it drags where The Hunger at least keeps its images sharp.

Cronos1993

Del Toro's debut turns immortality into a body-horror fable about a small golden device that grants eternal life at a terrible price — strange, tender, unforgettable.

But It's scrappier and stranger than The Hunger's polish, with a fairy-tale logic that won't suit anyone wanting glossy horror.

The Addiction1995

Abel Ferrara shoots vampirism in grainy black-and-white as a metaphor for addiction and moral rot on the streets of New York — bleak, philosophical, genuinely unsettling.

But There's no seduction here, only despair; it's punishing rather than sensual, and the philosophy talk can feel heavy-handed.

Thirst2009

Park Chan-wook's Korean vampire film is horny, violent, and morally chaotic in ways The Hunger only hints at — a priest turned vampire spiraling into desire and guilt.

But It's much more graphic and unpredictable tonally; the shifts from tragedy to pitch-black comedy won't work for everyone.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night2014

An Iranian vampire western shot in gorgeous black-and-white, all skateboards and chadors and loneliness — proof the genre's mood can travel anywhere and still feel this cool.

But Very little happens by design; if you need forward momentum, this atmospheric slow-burn will test your patience.

Death Becomes Her1992

It takes The Hunger's central horror — the body betraying you the instant immortality is withdrawn — and plays it for screams of laughter instead of dread.

Same obsession — eternal youth, vanity, the horror of an ageing body — but played as vicious slapstick comedy with Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn literally falling apart.

But If you want dread, this is the opposite: broad, cartoonish, and gleefully silly rather than unsettling.

Amour2012

Strip away the vampirism and John's terror at ageing overnight is Amour's subject played straight: love tested by a body that won't hold together anymore.

Haneke's devastating drama about an elderly couple facing decline has no vampires, no genre trappings — just the raw version of the question The Hunger dresses in eyeliner: what do you owe someone whose body is failing?

But It's unflinching and quietly devastating, with none of the style or distance horror usually provides — this one just hurts.