The phrase “directed by Tony Scott” likely brings to mind images of slickly constructed action movies populated by A-list talent. Before his death in 2012, Scott directed a murderer’s row of stand-out blockbusters that include Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), Enemy of the State (1998), and my personal favorite, Unstoppable (2010). Therefore, discovering The Hunger (1983), Scott’s second feature-length directorial effort, was a tantalizing surprise. The Hunger is an erotic arthouse vampire thriller starring David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve, and Susan Sarandon, components resulting in a film that is equal parts baroque surrealism and morality play. It also features the first prominent feature example of a filmmaking technique that would go on to define Scott’s action filmmaking in subsequent decades: parallel editing.
Parallel editing, the term for cutting together two or more scenes happening at the same time, is responsible for any number of memorable sequences. It is the backbone of The Godfather’s (1972) “Baptism Sequence” just as it is the foundation of the adrenaline-pumping fake-out that is the FBI arriving at the wrong house and leaving Clarice Starling on her own near the end of The Silence of the Lambs (1991). When deployed well, parallel editing can do anything from heightening suspense to drawing thematic parallels between characters all through editing. In The Hunger, Scott, and editor Pamela Power utilize parallel editing at various points to comment on the character’s vampirism and underscore the moral and philosophical aspects of what it means to be a near-immortal figure who violently feasts on human blood.
Just as the film’s opening sequence introduces us to Miriam (Deneuve), John (Bowie), and the urban 1980s setting, it also jumps right into parallel editing. We join the vampires while they are on the prowl at a rave. With both characters putting out peak seductive energy, it is only a short while before they net a young couple whom the bloodsuckers accompany home for a night of swapped sex, or so the film would first have you believe. Back at the couple’s home, Scott shoots the scene with a combination of shadows and beams of light reminiscent of the sexiest of noirs before incorporating a feast of shots and angles centered on the erotic. Cycling through close-ups of leather giving way to bare skin it seems we are about to witness swinger sex up close.
Yet, when Miriam and John begin undressing their hopeful partners, Scott and Power cut to a quick shot of two monkeys in a cage. The result is complete disorientation: the viewer has been given no information on where these monkeys are or why they are in the movie. The shot is followed by a quick cut to the musicians who performed at the rave, whose stage was surrounded by caging similar to that of the monkeys. Together, the cuts build a first connection between the visuals of the rave and the monkeys. Once we return to Miriam and John they move closer to sex. Scott moves between their encounters, spotlighting kissing mouths and hands on thighs. In concert, more cuts back to the monkeys reveal agitation. One jumps around in the cage growling, while the other starts to cower. Emotionally, the editing disrupts any visual pleasure viewers might glean from voyeuristically observing the sexual encounters; instead, the are jolted by the comparison between human sexuality and some version of animalistic chaos.
Scott and Power linger in this stage of the scene before unleashing the horror that has lurked just beneath the discomfort. Miriam and John both attack their partners, pulling out golden knives to slit their throats and drink their blood. As they do so, their violence is intercut with the monkey goring the other monkey. Scott spares none of the slaughter, going in close on torn flesh and entrails so that even though the human killings are less graphic, the association the editing has already built between the monkeys and the vampires foregrounds their shared brutality. The sum total of the sequence, therefore, is a tone-setter. The Hunger is an erotic film, one in a long line of vampire movies all the way back to Dracula (1931) that fixate on the seductive tricks used by vampires, but it also refuses to sanitize the darkness and violence inherent in vampires. The parallel editing at hand here makes it possible to communicate all of that to viewers and set expectations in the opening six minutes or so of the film.
From there, The Hunger returns to the approach repeatedly to expand on the themes introduced at the top as well as push the narrative further along into the depths of Miriam and John’s growing fascination with Dr. Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon), a researcher who is responsible for the monkeys we witnessed earlier. Sarah works in a lab looking at ways to stop the aging process, and the monkey that went haywire and killed its lover was a test subject for her team’s latest innovations. In a shocking reveal, we learn that John is dying as a result of his centuries of aging rapidly catching up to him, and so he visits Sarah’s lab to try and glean any information that may help him survive. Sarah turns him away, but not directly; she tells him to sit in the waiting room and she will get to him after a meeting. She has no intention of doing so, blowing him off and returning to the monkey. John nonetheless deposits himself in a waiting room chair to try and outlast her indifference.
As he waits, his aging leaps into overdrive, and we enter another sequence driven by parallel editing that this time juxtaposes John and the murderous monkey, who is also dying of rapid aging as a result of the experiments. As the film cuts back and forth, both John and the Monkey degrade; hair falls out, skin sags, and joints crack during the most minimal of movements. All the while John remains stagnant while Sarah watches with morbid fascination as the monkey literally disintegrates in front of her. When John finally leaves, he has changed from a beautiful middle-aged man to a decrepit old one. Topically, the context is clearly meant to evoke the savagery of aging and foreground it as the greatest threat to our vampiric leads. Sub-textually, the continued conflation of the monkeys and the vampires continues the thematic thread from the opening sequence, this time incorporating the idea that no amount of unnaturally-compelled bloodlust can save you. Both John and the monkey end up as piles of dust.
From the first sequence to the last, Scott and Power display an intimate comprehension of how effective parallel editing can be in developing character, theme, and tone. Both examples this piece foregrounds take place in the opening half-hour of the film, leaving two-thirds of the runtime still to unfold. Parallel editing appears again and again as Sarah connects with Miriam, as the former seduces the latter, and as Sarah herself becomes the next vampiric lover in a string that Miriam has created to keep her company. Each sequence, like the two spot-lit above, further the concepts of mortality and morality–and brings a focus on the romance that interrogates the baseline conceptions the genre has of vampires. These themes and concepts would exist in the plot regardless of filmmaking style, but Scott and Power’s editing execution allows them to sing and emerge as a key component of a compulsively watchable film that doubles as a quiet dissertation on the limits of vampires in the genre.
The Hunger is now streaming on HBO Max.
Devin McGrath-Conwell is a graduate of Middlebury College currently working on a Screenwriting MFA at Emerson College. His work has also appeared on portlandfilmreview.com where he is a staff writer, cbsnews.com, and in The Middlebury Campus. He has been lucky enough to have his screenwriting produced in the short film Locally Sourced, which he also directed, and the web series Lambert Hall. He has written for Horror Homeroom on white masculinity in Scream, the use of dread in Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass, and Flanagan’s devotion to negative space. If you enjoy his work, follow him on Twitter @devintwonames where he regularly tweets into the abyss about film, television, and, of course, horror.
