Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: The Hunger

This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Hi, it's Joe Interstein, host of the Spirit Daughter Podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life. And today, I'm talking with my dear friend, Krista Williams. It can change you in the best way possible. Dance with the change, dance with the breakdowns. The embodiment of Pisces intuition with Capricorn power moves. So I'm like delusionally proud of my chart. Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast starting on February 24th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, we unpack the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in 2023. But what if we didn't get the whole story? Everything's been made to fit. The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapsed. What if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to believe? Oh, my God, I think she might be innocent. 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In this Black History Month adventure, asking questions, thinking creatively, can lead to amazing discoveries. Listen to Adventures of Curiosity Cove every Monday from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema Rewind. This is Rob Lamb, and today we are re-airing our Valentine's Day episode from last year. It is our discussion of the 1983 Tony Scott film, The Hunger. This one's a lot of fun. So, so stylish. So gothy. Let's dive right in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb. And this is Joe McCormick. Happy Valentine's Day, everybody. Here in today's episode, you know, I really wanted to cover a paranormal love story of some sort for the holiday. And I gave myself this task and probably spent a little bit too much time looking at different films and trying to figure out what felt like the right fit. I looked at a few different very well-regarded films that seemed to fit the mold but ended up being drawn into today's selection, the highly stylish 1983 erotic horror film The Hunger, a movie that was really only on my radar for being a film in which David Bowie plays a vampire. But it's actually so much more than just that. It's become a cult favorite with many due to its heavy goth vibes, its LGBTQ themes, and it's absolutely bursting at the seams with visual and sonic pizzazz. And I tell you, I hope you like Venetian blinds because there are a lot of them in this movie. Yes, and doves. JJ also watched the movie this week, and we were talking about it off mic before we started this. J.J. reminded me that there are just doves in their house all the time. It's full of birds. They have like an open air attic. It's just birds coming and going all the time. Yes. Yeah. I watched this one with my wife. And in fact, it was partially her suggestion. I was brainstorming all these ideas and she pulled up some lists, you know, online of paranormal horror films. And she was like, how about The Hunger? And I was like, oh, well, you know, The Hunger has been on my radar a little bit. It's come up in passing on the show before when we've discussed David Bowie films. And so she watched it with me. She really enjoyed it. She loved all the gothy 80s vibe to it. But also she pointed out, like, this feels like a feature length music video. And in many ways, that is absolutely accurate and one of its strengths. Yeah, yeah. Turn around bright eyes for 90 minutes or 100 or so. But don't get the wrong idea from that. I do think this is actually a very strong film. I liked it a lot, despite the fact that critics apparently largely did not appreciate it when it came out. But I get the feeling this one has gotten a critical reappraisal. Like a lot more people like it now than did when it first released. Yeah, and I believe that the cult following for it was really building up within the decade following its release. So, you know, kind of a slow build there. But I think it achieved cult status by at least the 90s, as we'll discuss. Now, one thing I want to say close to the top of this episode is, despite the fact that The Hunger is not especially plot-driven, I'd say it's more of a mood-driven or character-driven film, it does have some major surprises in store. And we're going to have to talk about those surprises in the episode. So please be forewarned, if you want to see The Hunger without having anything spoiled, and I would recommend that, a good time to pause and go watch the movie would be now. That being said, this movie is so committed to style. I feel like it's one of those where if you're spoiled on it, you can still really enjoy it. So, Rob, like you, I had never seen The Hunger before, but I found it very, as I said, surprising, but also delightful, interesting, different. It felt fresh. At its core, I think you could call this kind of a tainted love tale. It's a story primarily about romantic relationships, but one in which it is not all steamy eros and desire and lust like a lot of vampire love movies are. It's also not rom-com energy. It's not like all cute falling for you kind of moments. And it's certainly not the case that this is full of feel-good morals about the eternal and all-conquering power of love. This movie, like other tainted love tales, is about the ambiguities and contradictions of romantic love, the sort of vast gray space that defines a lot of what love is, where people might feel one way but act another, where it's impossible to put your emotions into words. You don't know how to talk about what you're feeling or what your frustrations with your love are. Situations in which people genuinely love one another but also cause each other pain, where love just gets smashed into a million pieces against the surface of problems that cannot be fixed. And strangely, once I realized that was the kind of movie this was, It helped resolve something curious I noticed while watching The Hunger. Despite the fact that this movie has a different writer, a different director, a totally different plot, and for much of its runtime, a different star, I really kept being reminded of the other big David Bowie movie we have watched on the show, which was The Man Who Fell to Earth from 1976, directed by Nicholas Roeg. That movie stars David Bowie as a tragic alien agent on a mission to Earth to secure water resources, which could save his home planet. But of course, that ultimately is a story about failure, you know, about distraction and the inability to sort of stay on task and getting led astray by television and alcohol and love and all that. And table tennis, right? Exactly. Yes. And so I was thinking while I was watching it, why did these movies feel so similar despite all the totally different creative inputs? Could it just be that the power of David Bowie is so strong that it paves over everything? That might be a little part of it. But I really think there are some other truly strong similarities in that both stories involve these tainted love themes. They're both love stories that have genuine feeling and passion in them. They're not just about people using each other for sex or for power or whatever. They are love stories, but they're also tragic love stories that cannot possibly have happy endings, in part because of the sci-fi or supernatural mechanics that are operating in each story, and in part because of the kinds of human failings and contradictions that are present in all relationships of mortal humans, not just aliens and vampires. And I guess since it's been a while, just a refresher, the love story central in The Man Who Fell to Earth is the one between David Bowie's alien character and an earthling played by Candy Clark. That story is at once both genuine and doomed, doomed by Bowie's alien mission and then by the pressures of money and betrayal and alcoholism. In The Hunger, I think one of the central thematic tainted love questions is, what if you could only be with the person you love by dooming them to a fate worse than death? If you choose to do it anyway, if you choose to be with them knowing that your love is an unspeakable curse, could it really be love? But at the same time, could it really be love if you could stand not to be with them in the first place? I guess we'll have to answer those questions as we go on throughout the episode. But another similarity, I would say, between The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Hunger is the presence of certain cinematography choices. Both of them are very mood driven and they both have a kind of dreamy, elegiac editing style with a lot of slow motion and lingering on wistful and melancholy scenes featuring two subjects who are who are suffering, but who are unable to fix what's wrong between them. Yeah, it's worth noting in the commentary track, which I listened to part of, the director, Tony Scott, does mention Nicholas Roeg, the director of The Man Who Fell to Earth, being one of his inspirations, though he singles out the film performance more than anything. But, of course, The Man Who Fell to Earth is still in the mix there somewhere, I imagine. on the other hand i would say the hunger does not have like the comic elements that we got in the man who fell to earth when he's watching all the tvs and screaming get out of my mind yeah there's not really much in the way of humor in this picture and i think that's one of the things that the critics kind of picked up on they thought it was like too self-serious um which i don't know i feel like if you're dealing with uh with a story like this and you're dealing with you You know, all these gothic vibes on top of it. Like, I don't know. I don't think I really was wanting any comic relief in this picture. I certainly was not hurting for want of comic relief. No, this movie doesn't need that. It's just not its style. It's not what it's about. Another surprising element I found about The Hunger, at least a violation of my expectations going in, was the relatively grounded science fiction subplot. did not think it would have that kind of thing happening. So this will require some discussion of the plot. But I guess it's good to lay out a bit of the premise here at the top, because we can refer back to that as we talk about the cast and so forth. So two of the main characters of this movie begin the story as vampires, as vampire lovers, and they are faced with a unique consequence of their condition. In the lore of this movie, the vampire's spawn enjoys a long life of suspended youth and vitality for perhaps hundreds of years, but at some point it all comes crashing down as a kind of rapid degenerative aging disease. where the vampire spawn suddenly grows old and withers into a powerless but still conscious crumbling husk over the course of a few days or weeks. So in the movie, Catherine Deneuve plays a sort of vampire queen of ancient but otherwise uncertain origins named Miriam, who is in a centuries-long love affair with her vampire spawn, John, played by David Bowie, originally a man she turned into a vampire sometime in Europe in the 1700s. There's like a scene of them kissing in a barn in powdered wigs. And so the situation is, while they seem to have been happy and ageless, hunting for blood together for hundreds of years, suddenly in the modern day setting of the film in New York in the 1980s, John finds himself rapidly aging. and he seems to know this was something that could happen to him one day, but obviously it leaves him greatly demoralized and distressed. So this brings him into contact with another one of our major characters, Sarah Roberts, played by Susan Sarandon, who is a research scientist. She's a gerontologist studying diseases that cause accelerated aging. and her work provides some hope of a way to stop the advance of the cellular clock and arrest the rapid advance of age and decay. And so as John desperately seeks her help, she becomes entangled in the lives of these vampires. She doesn't initially know they're vampires, of course. And it becomes more than just the kind of mechanical science fiction connection to the story. She becomes romantically involved as well. but it was so strange to me that the movie ended up having so much, having as much science fiction as it did. And also the form the science fiction took because it was not the kind of, you know, the kind of loose fantasy science fiction that you get in the man who fell to earth. It is instead a story about like research scientists in their lab doing experiments on monkeys. And we can come back to that later, but like some of the goriest and grossest stuff in the movie is not from the horror premise. It's from the sci-fi premise. Yeah, yeah. So we'll get to in more detail in a bit. This is based on a novel, a 1981 novel by Whitley Stryber. And it's my understanding that the original novel is essentially one of these kind of like, how would this work treatments of vampirism with sci-fi elements backing it up. And I'm to understand that the script for the picture ended up drifting somewhat away from that vision. And then Tony Scott's direction and the work of all the other talented folks involved in like the visual and sonic flair of the picture are able to bring it into more of a surreal territory. So, you know, it's kind of an interesting trajectory to like maybe start in something that's a little more grounded in the sci fi and ending up via a curve, ending up with something more surreal and ambiguous. But the sci fi roots are still present. Yeah, totally. But it creates such an unusual and interesting melange of themes. It doesn't really feel like any other movie I can think of. Yeah, it really does stand apart. And I think that's one of the reasons that it just so instantly captivated me, because some of the other pictures I was checking out, they felt more like a definite artifact of their time. And or they fit more clearly into genres that we're already, you know, more familiar with on the show. And this one, yeah, it really stood out. It seemed to have a different vision and exist in its own sonic and visual universe. Now, another big surprise that this movie had for me is that I really expected there to be more David Bowie in this David Bowie movie. He almost gets the treatment of Steven Seagal in Executive Decision. Maybe that's a horrible comparison. Maybe more like Drew Barrymore in Scream or Samuel L. Jackson in Deep Blue Sea. Though, of course, all of those characters, what happens is they die. the fate of David Bowie's character in this movie is even more tragic and horrifying than death. But I think it's interesting that I don't know if there's a formal like showbiz term for this, but I would call it like a meta shock. You know, it is a violation of your expectations, which are established. Those expectations are established not through the narrative of the movie itself, but through your real world knowledge of the movie's marketing context. So, for example, it is a surprising move to kill off the character played by the big star, the presence of whom ostensibly brought people into the movie theaters in the first place. So that's always a surprising move. It's a bold and gutsy move, usually, though I think it's a lot less gimmicky in The Hunger than it is in most of these MetaShock deaths you get in the film industry. in this movie it it feels less like a a gimmicky attempt at surprise and instead it emphasizes the movie's kind of shadow themes of unfairness and the injustice of love and of real life yeah absolutely uh and i and i do want to stress for anyone out there who who happens to be interested in the hunger primarily because of david bowie still valid reason to be interested in this film David Bowie will not disappoint you. The role may have less screen time than you expected, but he still makes the most of that screen time. So definitely worth checking out for Bowie fans. Though also for some of the screen time he does have, he looks like Richard Lynch or he looks like he, this is an unkind comparison, but he looks like a better version of Guy Pearce in the old man makeup in Prometheus. Yeah, that's a great observation. But you know, Prometheus didn't have Dick Smith. As we'll be discussing, special effects makeup master, Dick Smith, is largely responsible for the aging of David Bowie in this picture. And I think it was Tony Scott on the commentary track pointing out how, or maybe it was Susan Sarandon, somebody was pointing out how he's under so much makeup for parts of this, but Bowie would just go to sleep in the chair. Like he was like super easygoing while they were applying, you know, hours upon hours of makeup. And yeah, nobody did it better than Dick Smith. It is really great old man makeup, way better than all the other examples I can think of. All right, well, more on that in a bit. But first, let's go ahead and roll out the elevator pitch. As the song will play a huge role in the opening sequence of the picture, I'm just going to quote a few lines from the 1982 goth rock hit Bela Lugosi's Dead by Bauhaus with one pronoun change to make it fit better. The virginal brides file past her tomb, strewn with time's dead flowers, bereft in deathly bloom, alone in a darkened room, the Count. Bereft in deathly bloom. Yes, exactly. Oh, what a delivery. Who's the singer of Bauhaus? That's Peter Murphy. And we'll see Peter Murphy in the opening sequence here. Tremendous flat delivery there. Very good. Yeah, I mean, it's probably one of, if not the best known, you know, goth tracks out there. Like if you're going to do a goth dance night at a club or something, they need to play Bela Lugosi's Dead, at least for a little bit. Maybe not the whole, like, nine and a half minute runtime. But even still, like, yeah, go ahead and do the nine and a half minute runtime because the whole song's tremendous. All right, we'll come back to Bauhaus in a bit. But first, let's go ahead and listen to a little bit of trailer audio from The Hunger. Sarah Roberts is in jeopardy Hey lady, how about it? Stay with her Help her For she has begun to feel the awful horror of The Hunger John Blaylock The Hunger has given him everlasting life Until now Pray for him Miriam Blaylock She feeds one day in seven on the unsuspecting, and soon she will turn into something that you will never be able to forget. No matter how hard and how long you try, fear her. What have you done to me? Forever and ever. And life signs terminate right here. Haunting, mysterious, sensual, strange, perverse, riveting, The Hunger. All right. Well, if you would like to watch The Hunger, well, luckily for you, it's widely available on digital formats as well as home video formats. There's a Blu-ray, and I was going to rent the Blu-ray, but it was checked out when I dropped by Videodrome. So I ended up having to make do with the DVD version, which was also solid. But I believe both the blue and the DVD feature the same commentary track, which is a bit dry, but still informative. Featuring both Tony Scott and Susan Sarandon, though it sounds like maybe they weren't in the same room, like they recorded them separately and kind of like spliced them in. So if you like a nice, boisterous commentary track, then maybe this one isn't the one. But it's still a lot of great info. Hi, this is Joe Winterstein, host of the Spirit Daughter podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life. And I just sat down with a mini driver. The Irish traveler said when I was 16, you're going to have a terrible time with men. Actor, storyteller, and unapologetic Aquarian visionary. Aquarius is all about freedom loving and different perspectives. And I find a lot of people with strong placements in Aquarius like are misunderstood. A sun and Venus in Aquarius in her seventh house spark her unconventional approach to partnership. He really has taught me to embrace people sleeping in different rooms and different houses and different places, but just an embracing of the isness of it all. If you're navigating your own transformation or just want a chart side view into how a leading artist integrates astrology, creativity and real life, this episode is a must listen. Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast starting on February 24th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. its crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits he stood trial for murder and got acquitted the biggest mind game of all nlp might actually work this is wild listen to mind games on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts What do you do when the headlines don't explain what's happening inside of you? I'm Ben Higgins, and if you can hear me, it's where culture meets the soul, a place for real conversation. Each episode, I sit down with people from all walks of life, celebrities, thinkers, and everyday folks, and we go deeper than the polished story. We talk about what drives us, what shapes us, and what gives us hope. We get honest about the big stuff. Identity when you don't recognize yourself anymore. Loss that changes you. Purpose when success isn't enough. Peace when your mind won't slow down. Faith when it's complicated. Some guests have answers. Most are still figuring it out. If you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to If You Can Hear Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. This MSS officer has no idea the U.S. government is on to him. But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary. hear how they got it on the Sixth Bureau podcast I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer no doubt, no question of his life and that's the unicorn no one had ever seen anything like that it was unbelievable this is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets listen to the Sixth Bureau on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, well, let's run through the people involved here, or at least some of them. We can't touch on everybody, as usual. But the director is, of course, Tony Scott. As previously mentioned, he lived 1944 through 2012. The late younger brother of Ridley Scott, who, like his brother, came up through British TV commercial production before branching out into films. And this was his first feature theatrical film. And it really throws everything at you from a stylistic standpoint. It's flashy. It's sexy. It's daring. It's somber. It's serious. It delivers all the flair of a music video or a high-end commercial. And as we alluded to at the time of its release, it was not a success. Critics panned it, including Roger Ebert, who called it, quote, an agonizingly bad vampire movie circling around an exquisitely effective sex scene. which sex scene i assume it has to be the the big um love scene between uh sarah and miriam which i mean it's almost i think a disservice to call it a quote-unquote sex scene because it's so stylish it is like like the like the bed is glowing i think one point you know it's like it's it's very surreal it's not it's not raw or explicit but it is still you know highly erotic and just and and and to ebert's point it is effective but i also don't feel like it comes off as an oasis in a desert in this film or anything to that extent no i just would not agree with ebert on this one i think the film overall has a lot more to offer um sorry just now that we're on the subject of tony scott i was repeatedly thinking to myself while watching i can't believe this is made by the same director as top gun that i mean it is crazy to think about is right because top gun which was his follow-up uh what four years later um that was the next time that the studios gave him a shot at a film like three years later uh right yeah we all see well what this one's 80 would have been made what an 82 either yeah three or four years uh so he didn't have to wait that long but still he was kind of shut out for a little bit there but then he comes out of the gate with again with Top Gun, which is, of course, is a massive hit. It was the highest grossing film domestic or otherwise for 1986. That's a film that cemented Cruise's ascension into long lasting fame and established Scott as not a director of erotic horror, but as an action and thriller director, you know, because when you think about Tony Scott those tend to be the films you think about You think about things like 87 Beverly Hills Cop 2 1990 Days of Thunder 93 True Romance 95 Crimson Tide 98 Enemy of the State 2004's Man on Fire, or his final film, 2010's Unstoppable. But yeah, compare this film to Top Gun, and what connective tissue is there, really? I mean, I'm sure you could probably get down and point to some of the stylistic touches that are distinctly Tony Scott. But it does kind of feel like a complete, at least in my eyes, it feels like a complete restart of his cinematic trajectory. Now, Tony Scott would return to horror twice in the late 90s for two episodes of an erotic horror anthology series titled The Hunger, very much spinning off of this film. Like I said, this is one of the reasons I think we can assume that by the late 90s, There was a cult following for this picture because they decided to produce 44 episodes of a spinoff series on it. The first season was hosted by Terrence Stamp. Oh, General Zod. Yeah, he was your sexy cryptkeeper for the first season. And then your sexy cryptkeeper for the second season was none other than David Bowie. Got to see this now. Well, the two episodes directed by Tony Scott were The Swords from season one. and that starred Balthazar Getty, Amanda Ryan, and Timothy Spall. And then there was a season two episode titled Sanctuary, starring Giovanni Ribisi and Lisa Repo Martel. I've never watched it. Again, they made 44 episodes. Russell McKay directed like six episodes of it. And the cast is pretty extensive as well. Giancarlo Esposito plays a vampire in one of them. I don't know if it's a major vampire role or a small one, but he's in there. Daniel Craig shows up, Margot Kidder, Lori Petty, David Warner, Jason Fleming, among many others. I don't know where off the top of my head. I don't know where this this aired. I'm guessing it maybe showed up on USA Network at some point. But I had no I have no memory of this at all. Sounds tremendous. Yeah. So, yeah, by the late 90s, I feel like people were coming back around to this film. It's become a cult classic for a variety of reasons. It's style. It's cast. It's goth vibes. It's LGBTQ elements. Now, Tony Scott sadly passed away in 2012. But it's worth noting that this film and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner from the previous year were both dedicated to their older brother, Frank, who had passed away in 1980. All right. I already mentioned that Whitley Stryber is the author of the original novel upon which this is based. Came out in 81, the first of a trilogy of vampire novels. and these were a follow-up to his 1978 werewolf novel The Wolfen, which was also adapted into a film, 1981's Wolfen, starring Albert Finney. Which I always confuse with the movie Wolf starring, or is it Wolf starring Jack Nicholson? Yeah, Wolf is the one with Jack Nicholson. Wolfen is the one with Albert Finney. Okay. And then there's the howling. You know, occasionally there's a big werewolf bump in the horror industry and you get several different horror films about werewolves more or less at once. Yeah. We go through monster waves, don't we? Yeah. There have been several werewolf films recently. We're kind of experiencing a werewolf bump right now. That would make sense, yeah. But, you know, we had like zombies in the 2000s and then you had a vampire craze after that. I don't know what we're in right now. I think we had a witch craze for a bit. Yeah. It's got to come out mummies again. But I'm waiting on it. Anyway, this author has written numerous books, including The Coming Global Superstorm, which was written with Art Bell, of all people, and adapted into the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow. OK. He's also well known for his 1987 ufology book Communion, which was adapted into a 1989 film in which Christopher Walken plays Whitley Stryver. I've never read that or seen the movie, but I've had general cultural awareness of them. For some reason, for years, I had in my mind Whitley Stryber categorized as somebody who was like a promoter of UFO encounters more than like a novelist. Well, I think he's apparently both. He very much claims to believe in UFOs, and communion is presented as a work of nonfiction. But then he also has written a lot of fiction as well. I don't, as far as I know, he doesn't actually believe in the reality of vampires and werewolves. So that's separate from the aliens. Okay. Now, as far as the screenplay goes here, James Costigan, writing as Ian Davis, is one of the credited writers. He lived 1926 through 2007. Emmy Award winning screenwriter for 59's Little Moon of Albin. 76's Eleanor and Franklin, and 75's Love Among the Ruins. He was also a writer on 1985's King David, in which Richard Gere battles George Eastman. And then we also have Michael Thomas credited on the screenplay, a screenwriter perhaps best known for his work on 1985's Lady Hawk, as well as 2011's The Devil's Double. All right, now getting into the cast, starting at the top, this film stars Catherine Deneuve. We mentioned her already. She plays Miriam Blalock. This is our vampire queen. And yeah, the new very, very talented actress here, obviously born 1943. I'm not sure I had seen her in anything before. French actress who has only appeared in a handful of genre pictures during the course of her long career. They include 1965's Repulsion, 77's Lost Soul, 79's See Here My Love, and 88's Frequent Death. Uh, she's probably best known for such films as 64s, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 67s, The Young Girls of Rockford, and 1970s Donkey Skin. Uh, this is based on the Donkey Skin fairy tale, which I think has come up on Stuff to Blow Your Mind episodes before. The fairy tale, not the movie. Oh, yeah. Well, I think we might have talked about covering the movie. Yeah? Okay. I think it's supposed to be pretty weird. Yeah? Well, I'm, I'm all for it. You know, if it has Danube in it, certainly worth another look. She also appears in 2000's Dancer in the Dark and lends her voice to 2007's animated film Persepolis, based on the graphic novel. She was nominated for an Academy Award for her leading role in 1993's End of China. So, yeah, I think she's terrific in this. As we'll discuss, while her character certainly has plenty of like femme fatale elements, she's never presented as like a cold, unfeeling vamp. And certainly Miriam could have been presented in that way. Like her passion is real. Her love is real. I believe these things when I when I experienced her character on the screen. All of this, despite the tragic supernatural ramifications of that passion and that love. Yeah, she's a very ambiguous character. is i mean is she the protagonist of the film or is she the villain of the film uh should we think of should we think of john and sarah as the kind of trading off protagonists of the film and in a way denuve is the villain or in a way it's more her story than it is anybody else's though yeah it It does make me wonder who might be the central protagonist of the novel, because there does seem to feel, it feels like there's maybe a certain amount of confusion with this story as it's presented in the film. Yeah, whose story is it? And some would argue rather strongly that a film does need one key protagonist. There may essentially be two, but there needs to be, in the writing of the thing, there needs to be one central protagonist. The writer needs to know who that is. I guess you could argue then it might be Sarah, but Sarah also is never she's never really made fully aware of the of the whole emotional arc of the story. The only character who really knows everything is is Miriam. And so anyway, I don't know. I guess we can talk more about that in the plot if necessary. But either way, I agree with you. Deneuve is wonderful in the movie. I mean, there is, I think, a kind of coldness to her, but it doesn't come off as cruelty necessarily. Yeah, I think that's the key. Coldness, but not cruelty. Yeah. She is somebody who's projecting. I mean, I guess this is a problem in a lot of vampire movies because you have these characters who are supposed to have lived many, many lives. You know, they've been around for hundreds or thousands of years in her case. And it always raises the question that the normal kinds of performances of human feelings and thoughts and intelligence and memory and everything that we get in the film in films is based on the arc of a normal human lifetime. Like, you know, part of playing a character is what it means to play a character in their youth or in middle age or something like that. Vampires achieve a kind of age that no human ever does. And so that raises questions of like, how does that age manifest in their character? How should it manifest in their emotions and how they react to things and what their philosophical outlook is? And I feel like Deneuve contains a lot of that mystery in her performance. There is something that feels unreal and a little beyond human about her. And a lot of times it's because she is difficult to read in situations where otherwise an actor might be more inclined to portray something very clear and overt. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. There are these scenes, I think in particular, about some of the scenes where David Bowie's character, John, is trying to discuss not only his aging, his illness, if you will, with her, but also like the ramifications of it. And you don't get the sense that she's unfeeling to it, but also she doesn't fully engage with him on it either. yeah um she's walking this line where it doesn't it doesn't come off entirely like she's completely blowing him off or like well that's your problem john you solve it um but she's she's also not fully embracing him she is to some degree distancing herself from his suffering um but in a way that also feels more real and more mortal and is not like just this vamp queen who's like i am done with you you know you have served your purpose or something like that i agree again it's a different take on the vampire character than I'm used to seeing. We'll have more to say about this character as we get into the plot a bit later. Now, moving on to David Bowie, who lived 1947 through 2016, again playing John Blaylock. So far in Weird House, we've considered films where Bowie plays a space alien and the changeling king of a goblin realm, so it's only natural that we now consider him as a vampire. Instead of covering all the main notes of his career, We'll couch this instead in terms of where he was with his music and acting career at the time. So we're only six years out from The Man Who Fell to Earth. And I believe the only other feature film he'd appeared in, in addition to The Man Who Fell to Earth at this point, was 78's Just a Gigolo. So he really only had one, what we would consider now iconic film role in his filmography at this point. And I think was far from established as the cult film icon that he would later become and certainly would be cemented in following his passing in 2016. Musically, this film falls between Scary Monsters and Super Creeps from 1980 and Let's Dance from 83, both massive critical and commercial hits. And by the way, Let's Dance includes a track he did with Giorgio Moroder for the 1982 Erotic horror film Cat People, which, of course, is a remake of the 1940s Cat People, except with Malcolm McDowell turning into a cat. I've seen the original Cat People years ago, and I remember I quite liked it. So we may want to come back to that on the show one day. But the remake I have not seen. I understand it goes a little bit harder. Yeah, and I don't know. I don't know if I want to watch Malcolm McDowell turn into a cat every time he orgasms. But I don't know. It's a product of the time, I guess. As for Bowie in this film, though, I think he's terrific as well. As always, Bowie excels at playing the outsider. And here he's kind of a double outsider. He's a vampire, thus set apart from the mortal world and a stranger to many aspects of modernity. But he is also, as we come to realize, something of a thrall. uninitiated into all the intricacies of vampiric existence. Much of John Blalock's journey is one of struggling with aging, immortality, which Bowie handles with a kind of like a quiet anxiety that feels very palpable on the screen. Even though at some points I think we referred to his performance in The Man Who Fell to Earth as kind of quaaludic, he also did have outbursts in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Like there were moments where his performance got quite big, It kind of like the pressure came up and blew the top off and he screams, get out of my mind. Or when he like smacks the tray of cookies into the air. I recall less of anything like that in here. This is a much tighter, more subdued, controlled performance throughout. Despite the fact that we can see his character is suffering immensely. Um, John Blalock is a character who, um, you know, he weathers his suffering with a kind of, with a kind of, uh, quiet, melancholy and, and indignant resentment. Like there, there are parts where you can see his ego is wounded, but it, but it never turns into a big reaction. Instead, he just kind of, he subsumes it. yeah yeah like there's the scene um in the picture where he's he's significantly aged and um this um this this youth that's been coming to the apartment for uh you know like music lessons and and so forth thinks that he is the father of john and she's like oh you know i thought that because you have the same eyes and uh yeah his response is so haunting he's like he's like he says something to effective well that's that's that's interesting i've known him for so long and i i never realized that you know i don't know little moments like that are just so well executed hi this is joe winterstein host of the spirit daughter podcast where we talk about astrology natal charts and how to step into your most vibrant life and i just sat down with a mini driver the irish traveler said when i was 16 you're gonna have a terrible time with men actor storyteller and unapologetic aquarian visionary aquarius is all about freedom loving and different perspectives and i find a lot of people with strong placements in aquarius like are misunderstood a sun and venus in aquarius in her seventh house spark her unconventional approach to partnership he really has taught me to embrace people sleeping in different rooms and different houses and different places, but just an embracing of the isness of it all. If you're navigating your own transformation or just want a chart side view into how a leading artist integrates astrology, creativity, and real life, this episode is a must listen. Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast starting on February 24th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, a.k.a. Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What do you do when the headlines don't explain what's happening inside of you? I'm Ben Higgins, and if you can hear me, it's where culture meets the soul, a place for real conversation. Each episode, I sit down with people from all walks of life, celebrities, thinkers, and everyday folks, And we go deeper than the polished story. We talk about what drives us, what shapes us, and what gives us hope. We get honest about the big stuff. Identity when you don't recognize yourself anymore. Loss that changes you. Purpose when success isn't enough. Peace when your mind won't slow down. Faith when it's complicated. Some guests have answers. Most are still figuring it out. If you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to If You Can Hear Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief. The nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history. everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict, a villain, a nurse named Lucy Letby. Lucy Letby has been found guilty. But what if we didn't get the whole story? The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Letby was. no voicing of any skepticism or doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level that the British establishment of this is wrong. Listen to Doubt, The Case of Lucy Lettby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, and then we also have Susan Sarandon playing Sarah Roberts, as we mentioned earlier. Born 1946, she's the first of three Rocky Horror Picture Show connections in this film. Susan Sarandon's career entails a great deal of mainstream dramatic success, obviously. But for many of us, I think she's always going to be a legend for her performance as Janet Weiss, a heroine in the 1975 film Rocky Horror Picture Show. Her screen and TV credits go back to 1970 and include such titles as 74's The Satan Murders, 87's The Witches of Eastwick 91's Thilman Louise 95's Dead Man Walking and 2012's Cloud Atlas one time Oscar winner for Dead Man Walking and five time nominee including a nomination for Thilman Louise and you know I also have nothing but great things to say about Sarandon in this picture she's sporting a great androgynous look with short red hair she is essentially for most of the film our protagonist I guess you could argue a gerontologist whose obsession for her work soon transforms into an obsession for the mysterious Miriam Blalock. And while our bisexual vampire duo here, more stated with Miriam and implied with John, are maybe a bit more cliche in their depiction of bisexuality, you know, they're indiscriminate supernatural beings, the vampires here. I do feel like Sarah is presented in a, especially for the time, like refreshingly believable light. So her attraction to Miriam, despite her character having a boyfriend, is not presented as something that is in and of itself alarming or something that would otherwise be inconceivable for this character, you know, without the supernatural intrigue. So I applaud that in this film for sure. Oh, that seems to me to be just kind of an understood part of her character. Like they don't really discuss it explicitly. But like, for example, her her kind of jerk boyfriend is suspicious of her when he learns that she spent the whole afternoon with this mysterious, beautiful woman. Yeah. Yeah. And the fact that it is understood without being like really called out in a way where like there's no scene where she explains it to him or anything, you know. Again, I think that's that's quite refreshing. I think Susan Sarandon's performance here is great, especially in the way that in the way that it changes over the course of the film, because when we first get to know her, she is in work mode. She is fully a professional. And all we're seeing is her is her interaction with the research that she does, like her engaging with the topics of her work as a professional. And even when she first meets John Blaylock, played by Bowie, it's in that context. It's like a work thing. And then there is the strangest and most surprising shift as like she is brought into the vampire characters lives that her role turns into an emotional and erotic one. And that she instead we instead learn about like what she wants and what she feels and her her desires and her suffering, which was not really part of the character at all when we first met her, except insofar as like her desires and suffering related to her struggles with her research. That's a weird kind of arc to pull off within a story. And I think Sarandon handles it so well. Yeah, a lesser film and a lesser performance. it would have been the character taking her glasses off, that sort of thing, where it's just a complete shift and you just kind of roll with it because that's just how movies do it. But her performance brings those two sides together and make them both believable parts of the same human character. Now we mentioned the jerk boyfriend. The jerk boyfriend is Tom Haver, played by Cliff DeYoung, born 1945. A 60s rock star, the group was Clear Light, I'm not familiar with them, Turned Broadway actor, he was in Hair, turned film and TV actor, and he absolutely played Brad Majors and Farley Flavors in 1981's Shock Treatment, Richard O'Brien's follow-up to Rocky Horror. So in this, DeYoung was taking over the role from Barry Bostwick, who played Brad in the original Rocky Horror Picture Show. Cliff DeYoung's other credits include 1989's Glory, 1992's Dr. Giggles, and 1996's The Craft. Don't forget also that he was in a 1980s or maybe early 90s film called Pulse, which is an all appliances attack film. Like an evil, I don't know, alien virus or something gets into the power lines and it makes the toasters go crazy and try to kill people. Oh, man. Maximum overdrive. Yeah. All right. We mentioned the youth. This is the character Alice, Alice Cavender, played by Beth Ellers, born 1968, a child slash youth actor at the time. But she'd go on to a long and award winning career on the soap operas Guiding Light and All My Children. Very tragic, innocent character. When you first meet her, you're just like, oh, no, I think I think she's going to get her blood drank. And yeah. Now, when vampires start drinking folks blood, you know, occasionally the law starts sniffing around. In this film, that character is Lieutenant Allegraza, played by Dan Hedaya for 1940. We reference him all the time, I feel like, but this is actually our first Dan Hedaya film. I was shocked how cute Dan Hedaya is in this movie. I think of him as, oh, you know, a perennially crusty, mean, gristly, cantankerous old dude, or like the villain in Commando. But either way, a kind of perpetually older seeming character actor who just has a different energy than the Dan Hedaya we get in this film. I think the major difference being this is one of the only times I've ever seen him with his hair grown out this long. And he looks positively scruffy as a police detective, which is against type anyway. So I don't know what's going on, but strange, different turn for Dan. Yeah, yeah. If you're not familiar with Dan Adaya, a memorable character actor with a real talent for playing often sleazy characters, villains and so forth. Be it The Vengeful Husband in 1984's Blood Simple from the Coen Brothers or Richard Nixon in 1999's Dick. He's been active on screen and TV since the mid-70s. And let's see, at this point in his career, he had just appeared in Alan Rudolph's cattle mutilation thriller Endangered Species. Now, this just came up recently. That's different than the cattle mutilation movie that we did with Martin Landau. Correct. Yeah. Different film. This one is more of a conspiracy thriller and it's quite good. So I recommend it if you need to have a viewing party, back to back cattle mutilation films. Watch those two. Also, though, Dan Hedaya's character. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the police make any progress. No progress at all. He's completely ineffective. He doesn't even get killed. Like when he showed up, I was like, oh, he's getting the psycho treatment. This guy's going down the stairs. But no, they're just like nothing comes to the investigation. And then he comes up, comes back at the end of the picture and just kind of pokes around a little bit and figures out nothing. Why would they make him cute like this if Catherine Deneuve is not going to drink his blood? I have no idea. Maybe they had to drop a subplot. I don't know. All right. I said there were three Rocky Horror reference points in this picture. Well, the third is the actor Rufus Collins, who lived 1935 through 1996. He plays the character Charlie Humphreys. He's one of the other research scientists that that Sarah is working with. Yeah. So it's Susan Sarandon, Clifty Young and Rufus Collins together are the three gerontologists who were working in this lab, brutally rotting monkeys alive in order to discover the secret of aging. Yeah, it's a stop motion effect, by the way, when we see that monkey rot. That's pretty nice. But yeah, Rufus Collins, New York actor who started out in the Living Theater, which is an experimental acting troupe of the day. He worked in the UK as well, which may be why he's in this film, because most of it was filmed in London. But he has some wild credits, including Andy Warhol's Batman Dracula from 64. I'm not sure what that entailed. I've seen it referenced almost as like a lost film. So some sort of experimental Warhol project. But he's in both the Rocky Horror Picture Show and Shock Treatment playing an uncredited Transylvanian in the former. If you look in the background, there's like at least one black Transylvanian with like really cool hair and sunglasses. That's Rufus Collins. And then he plays a member of the camera crew in the latter picture. He wears like some neon sunglasses indoors in this movie. Lots of characters wear sunglasses indoors in The Hunger, but he is one of them. And his sunglasses are cooler looking than most. Yeah, there are a whole scene. My wife and I were commenting on this. There's a scene later on where I believe a gigolo is brought back by Miriam, purely for the purpose or mostly for the purposes of blood. And he's wearing sunglasses, as is she. She's a vampire. So we're like, OK, she can wear sunglasses at night. But this dude's wearing sunglasses at night anyway. And the apartment is so dark. Is anyone seeing anything? But yeah, everybody's wearing sunglasses. Everyone's smoking like a chimney. All right. And finally, it's worth noting that we have little more than a cameo here. Very bit part. But Willem Dafoe pops up playing second phone booth youth. And he was like he was 27 or 28 at the time. And it is this is the youngest I've seen Dafoe in a motion picture. This was only like his fourth screen or TV appearance. Dude, he is smooth. Yeah, like, you know, you think of Defoe or, you know, or I think of Willem Dafoe. I think of like that rugged face, you know, you know, very, very handsome face, but very rugged. The lines are important to the overall work. And it's almost a little jarring to see him this young. He doesn't have much to do here. He doesn't drink blood nor get his blood drank. But this would this still qualifies as the first of five Willem Dafoe vampire films that I know of alongside 2001 Shadow of the Vampire 2010 Daybreakers 2009 Cirque du Freak the vampire assistant and of course 2024 Nosferatu He doesn't play a vampire in this, but he looks like a vampire in his regular human makeup in Streets of Fire. Oh yeah, yeah, that would be that and I guess like 85's Roadhouse 66 and To Live and Die in L.A. were really, those are more the launching points of his career. So he was really under the radar at this point. If you've never seen Streets of Fire and you want to have a good time, just look up Willem Dafoe screaming Streets of Fire. That's a good face. All right. I'll try and speed this along. I realize we're taking a while on the connections here. But we mentioned Dick Smith. Makeup illusions is what he's credited with here. We have 22 through 2014. A host of talented makeup artists were involved in bringing these characters to life. But Dick Smith played a key role in David Bowie's on-screen aging effects. We previously discussed Smith in our episode on scanners, which features a number of amazing body horror effects. But he was also legendary for his aging makeup effects, most famously that of F. Murray Abraham's Salieri in 84's Amadeus, which earned him an Academy Award. His other credits include 73's The Exorcist in 1980's Altered States. Oh, does he do the just the I wonder if the exorcist was just demon makeup or if he also was making Father Marin look older? Hmm. Yeah, I'm not entirely sure. But, you know, he was clearly he was skilled beyond mere aging effects, but he he became well known for it. And to your point earlier about Prometheus, yeah, I feel like there are plenty of examples of movies that probably had more money behind them than films that utilized Dick Smith that ended up being less convincing in their aging makeup. He had a true gift for this sort of thing. Tony Scott mentions in the commentary track that Smith was disappointed that the lighting wasn't more intense in some of these scenes where David Bowie is aged. And, you know, Tony's basically saying, well, you know, that's part of it. It's not just the makeup. You've got to have the lighting, and, you know, it makes it more effective if things are not maybe completely in focus or completely lit. But it's kind of telling, like, that's how strongly Dick Smith believed in his makeup effects here. It's like shine the lights on them. They can go out in the sun. Well, he's good. I understand why he had the confidence. Yeah. Costume. We don't always mention costuming, but Melina Cananero was the key to the costuming here, born 1946. Another legendary behind-the-scenes figure and 33-time Oscar winner. Where do you even keep all those trophies? I'm not sure. But there's one story, and this is one that Tony shares on the commentary track. She famously fled the set of the film one day, and they were like, where is she? Where did she go? Nobody knew. Turns out she flew from London to Rome just to get the right cloth for like a pocket square on David Bowie's costume. She was like, there's nothing here in London. I have to go to Rome to get it. So she just flew on her own dime and came back with it. Wow. She's worked with such directors as Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott, Francis Ford Coppola and Wes Anderson. Some of them, you know, multiple times. We're talking such costume rich films as 71's A Clockwork Orange, 1990's Dick Tracy. and 1999's Titus. Those are all eye-popping films. Yeah. The director of photography was Stephen Goldblatt, born 1945, South African-born cinematographer who worked on such films as 1981's Outland, 85's Young Sherlock Holmes, and 1997's Batman Forever, for which he was nominated for an Oscar. That was the one? Yeah. It's boiling acid. I'm going to mention the editor we don't always mention the editor but the editing in this film I feel like is something else there's some very alarming editing choices at times Pamela Power born in 1942 she worked with Ridley Scott multiple times on 77's The Duelists his Apple Mac commercial from 84 85's Legend and 97's G.I. Jane okay now we get to the music and there are several people to mention on the musical note here. So much like the editing, the music is pretty wild. We have a mixture of needle drop classical tracks, experimental electronic sounds, and then a riveting opening performance by Bauhaus. Howard Blake, born in 1938, was the musical director on the film. He also served in this role on 1980's Flash Gordon, which we previously talked about. Let's see that multiple classical tracks are used here. There's also a score by Denny Jagera, who also did the theme song for TV's The Powers of Matthew Starr, and Michael Rubini, who also worked on Matthew Starr, but also went on to score the likes of 1984's What Waits Below, 1986's Manhunter, and 92's Nemesis. Oh, it's been a while since I've seen it, but I remember Manhunter having intriguing music. That's a stylish picture. Yeah. All right. And then finally, David Lawson or Dave Lawson is credited with performer, additional electronic music and effects, composer, additional electronic music and effects, uncredited on that latter point. But this guy's pretty interesting as well. There are a number of weird supernatural synth flourishes in the film. And when I heard them, I was like, this sounds like Jim Henson's labyrinth. you know, these sort of, there's sort of like cascading synth waterfalls of supernatural intrigue. And they happen a lot in this picture, and they happen periodically in Labyrinth. And sure enough, the same guy was involved in both of these pictures. Oh, wow. Yeah. So he, let's see, he did supply, he supplied synthesized electronic sounds for the Dark Crystal in 82, and also contributed to the Labyrinth score. Otherwise, he has a handful of film credits on the major databases, though sometimes he's not credited on the film. But if you look up the score album elsewhere, you can find that he's credited. Let's see. He worked on 94 as Frankenstein. He worked with Trevor Jones on such films as Angel Heart in 87, Mississippi Burning in 88. So he's a British keyboardist who was a member of the U.K. progressive rock band Greenslade. I was unfamiliar with Greenslade, but I pulled them up as I was working on notes here, and I like what they're laying down. It's kind of a neat prog rock sound with some synth in there. Maybe it feels a little old-fashioned, but in a good way. Okay. So he's something of a synth legend. He played on the soundtrack for 76's The Man Who Fell to Earth and worked with the likes of Jimmy Page and Kate Bush, said to own one of the largest synth systems in Europe. The largest synth systems? What does that mean? Like the physically largest? I guess it's kind of like maybe a collection of synths, but they're active and all like hooked together. I don't know. I found some. There's a Psychedademic Baby magazine has an interview with him from 2023. It includes a number of photographs of him back in the day and in present times. And, yeah, the ones from the 70s are pretty great because there's this like long haired dude, you know, of course, surrounded by synths and keyboards and all. So it looks like he was quite the synth wizard of the day. I was trying to see if I could recognize any brands to know what his style was, but I do not know what these are. I mean, yeah, even when I hear guys like this talk about their gear, I'm just not a gearhead for this sort of thing. So all the names of these various devices and innovations just go completely over my head. But I love the results. So you definitely hear his influence on the sounds of the hunger. But again, it's kind of all over the place. You have electronic, you have classical, and also some, I guess, more traditional score hidden in there as well. In addition to contemporary tracks like the Bauhaus track that opens up the picture. Hi, this is Joe Winterstein, host of the Spirit Daughter podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life. And I just sat down with a mini driver. The Irish traveler said when I was 16, you're going to have a terrible time with men. Actor, storyteller, and unapologetic Aquarian visionary. Aquarius is all about freedom loving and different perspectives. And I find a lot of people with strong placements in Aquarius are misunderstood. A sun and Venus and Aquarius in her seventh house spark her unconventional approach to partnership. He really has taught me to embrace people sleeping in different rooms and different houses and different places, but just an embracing of the isness of it all. If you're navigating your own transformation or just want a chart side view into how a leading artist integrates astrology, creativity and real life. This episode is a must listen. Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast starting on February 24th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, a.k.a. neuro-linguistic programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP, its crazy cast of disciples, and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What do you do when the headlines don't explain what's happening inside of you? I'm Ben Higgins, and if you can hear me, it's where culture meets the soul. A place for real conversation. Each episode, I sit down with people from all walks of life, celebrities, thinkers, and everyday folks, and we go deeper than the polished story. We talk about what drives us, what shapes us, and what gives us hope. We get honest about the big stuff. Identity when you don't recognize yourself anymore. Loss that changes you. Purpose when success isn't enough. Peace when your mind won't slow down. Faith when it's complicated. Some guests have answers. Most are still figuring it out. If you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to If You Can Hear Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief. The nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history. Everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict, a villain, a nurse named Lucy Letby. Lucy Letby has been found guilty. But what if we didn't get the whole story? The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Letby was. no voicing of any skepticism or doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level that the British establishment of this is wrong. Listen to Doubt, The Case of Lucy Lettie on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, well, is it time to talk a bit about the plot? Yeah, let's jump in. So this is not one of those movies where we're going to do a kind of chronological scene-by-scene talk through the plot like we often do. Sometimes it just doesn't feel right with what the movie is. I think this is one of those cases. I've already described some of the plot, but here I think maybe we can do a kind of general overview and then talk about some specific scenes and elements and themes. So at the beginning of the story, John and Miriam Blalock, that's David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve, They live in a house in New York City, and they have seemingly been together for hundreds of years. Miriam is some kind of ancient being. We see brief flashbacks of her in what appear to be palaces in maybe ancient Greece and certainly ancient Egypt. There are these different kind of costumes. I think we see some kind of Egyptian priesthood paraphernalia. Rob, I don't know if you had any particular observations about the ancient flashbacks, flashbacks, but I couldn't detect a lot of plot from them. They were not full of information. They were more full of vibe. Yeah, these are not flashbacks in the Highlander sense where it's like, all right, we're going back now and here's a definite time stamp of where we're going and when we're going to. It's presented very surrealistically and jarringly. There are multiple times like this in the picture where you're like, what's happening? Is this this is the past? Yes, it must be the past. And then you kind of piece it together later. But yeah, Greco-Egyptian is about the most I could make out of it. Though you could be forgiven for being confused when we cut to these palaces of the past, because in the opening, John and Miriam live together in this beautiful house in New York City that is very old world. Like they are apparently fabulously wealthy and their home is full of magnificent art. It's full of marble statues that they say are thousands of years old. And it's got these big, spacious Baroque rooms and musical instruments and stuff. So it seems like the kind of place you might suddenly go around a corner and be in a room that looks like it is a palace in ancient Egypt. When I am in New York and I get to walk around New York and I see a home where people live, I just assume these are the sorts of people that live there. And this must be ancient vampires with generational wealth and supernatural blood. so the flashbacks they showed that but they also show us miriam and john falling in love when john was a mortal and i believe this is supposed to be somewhere in europe in the 17th century i think i read somewhere it said france but i don't recall the movie saying france it feels very french so they're falling in love in in powdered wig land and uh she promises him eternal life and eternal love and they drink one another's blood to turn john into her youthful vampire lover for ages to come uh and there there's something about this scene where uh you know they promise the promise is forever and this promise of forever is repeated later in the story like uh i think i'm remembering this right there are scenes of them early in the film in their 1980s new york phase where they're still trading these reassurances. Like there's one part where I think they're in the shower and John just asks forever and she says forever. Now, maybe here we should do an aside on the opening sequence, because that gives us a flavor of part of what they do in their 1980s New York life. Before seeing this movie, I really did not know what it was going to be like, but I guess I assumed that the whole thing was going to be a lot more like the first 10 minutes. This was not the case, but the opening sequence rocks. Strictly in terms of what happens, it's just our two original vampires, Miriam and John, they go to a goth club, they pick up a couple of dates, they bring them back home, and they drink their blood. But the sequence is so fun. So there's the goth clothing, all this dark leather, people wearing sunglasses inside in the dark, and Bauhaus performing apparently inside some kind of animal cage. Yeah, you will observe many things in this film through slits, slats, blinds, cages, and, of course, translucent black capes and drapes and veils. And again, I also I hope you're not trying to quit smoking while watching this film, because there's a lot of cigarettes smoking. Yes. But yeah, that's Bauhaus lead singer Peter Murphy performing in the goth club, himself looking like some sort of an undead creature. And they're performing their biggest hit, Bela Lugosi's Dead. I do wish they'd included all nine minutes and 34 seconds of the track because it's a tremendous track. I got to see Bauhaus perform at Coachella back in 2005. And they opened with Peter Murphy performing Bela Lugosi's Dead whilst suspended upside down on stage. It was pretty great. So here, yeah, we get these scenes of the club, Peter Murphy, our vampire couple strolling in. But then we get also we also get some like crazy cuts. This is where we first start getting hit with like crazy cuts to them, like driving and stuff later on. And then we keep cutting back to Peter Murphy's performance during the vampire blood drinking scene that shortly follows. That's right. So Miriam and John, they both pick up someone. They bring them back together to their home and they start like they're going to have sex. But instead, they end up, of course, cutting them and drinking their blood. We'll talk more about the mechanics of the blood drinking in a moment. But we do see here something that is, I think, while a lot of this movie is different than other vampire movies and very fresh and unusual. A common convention you see in vampire films that's also present here is that some of the most erotically charged imagery is used in the lead up to blood drinking rather than to sex. this does imply a kind of blurring of the lines between like the vampires carnal desires and appetites like to them is the blood sexier than sex and if so how does this affect the way we should think about the vampires love stories yeah this is a great point yeah multiple points in the film including some very subtle moments it's clear that the desire to feed is also the desire for sex Yeah. And one, I don't know, I got the impression that one is not merely a stepping stone for the other. Like, I didn't get as much the idea that it's like, oh, well, they only do sex because they just want to do blood. Like, the two seem inseparable. I guess you're right. Yeah, they are kind of the same. Yeah. There's a great scene later on where John is aging rather rapidly. And he's in, I guess it's just a restroom, but it feels like a locker room. and there's like a shirtless man like splashing his face with water next to him and he's like eyeing the guy's throat and that too is also a very like less overt more subtle moment where there's a feeling of the desire both for flesh in the sexual sense and also blood in the vampiric sense now a note on the vampire mechanics here the vampires in this movie do not I believe have fangs, or at least I don't recall ever seeing them. I don't know what the novel describes, but I don't think we see fangs in the movie. And that would make sense because instead they slice, the way they get the blood from their victims is they attack with a particular dedicated tool. They slice their victims' arteries with this little onk blade, and then they wear it around their neck like a crucifix, except it's an Egyptian-style onk. And then they cut the neck and then they drink the blood like you would from a water fountain. Yeah, yeah, I believe you're right. No fangs. I never saw any fangs. And they're tool users and they're feeding. There's a really fun Key and Peele sketch from years back about where they discuss how vampires make too much of a mess when they feed. Like they bite and then there's just blood everywhere and they're not getting enough of the blood into their mouths. Well, this vision of vampirism at least excuses all the gushing and mess making because they don't have like dedicated like feeding mouth parts so much. They have to they have to stab. They have to allow for there to be a gush and then feed on it as best they can. I feel like the movie also takes seriously the mess. Yeah. Like you see them cleaning up afterwards. Yeah. Clean up seems to be a big deal. And there's some hauntingly beautiful and very powerful scenes. I'm thinking particularly after the first killing, we get the scene of the two bloody ox landing in the sink during the wash up. And then, of course, we see the incineration of the corpses of the drained victims. And they're like wrapped in black garbage bags and they're placed in the incinerator. And the plastic is like, you know, melting around the bodies, you know, all very well executed. The police do not seem concerned by the fact that John and Miriam have an incinerator in their basement. I guess it's like only murders in the building. Like all these buildings in New York have powerful incinerators, just completely atomized bodies. So I guess they're just used to it. So I wanted to pause for a moment here and explore the question of what other powers or limitations do the vampires have within the lore of the film? so we've established that they have arrested aging or unnaturally prolonged youth perhaps eternal youth in Miriam's case unclear I was wondering are they supposed to be invulnerable or resistant to regular injuries I really don't think so in fact several things happened in the movie that made it seem like the vampires can be harmed by standard physical forces I get the impression that in this world, like you could really wound a vampire, a human, regular mortal could really wound a vampire as easily as they could wound another human. But maybe I'm forgetting something to the contrary. No, I think I think that's right. Yeah. The vampires do need to drink blood. In fact, they have this insatiable craving. And that is really framed more. I mean, I guess this is actually quite common, but it's framed more as a weakness than a power. You know, it's like they need they need to state this hunger and it causes them to do things that are in some cases destructive to their own well-being. Right, right. Vampires in the movies often have a kind of super strength. I think Miriam does have super strength because at one point we see her throw Sarah clear across the room. Does John have inhuman strength? I don't recall ever seeing any evidence of that. If he does, he never employs it. So if he has that supernatural strength, using it is not really a part of his character. But I guess I'm inclined to think that maybe he doesn't have it. Like maybe that's one of the limitations of him being the vampire spawn, the vampire thrall or a half vampiric being, however you want to describe it. Yeah. Now, there's no problem with them going out in sunlight. They venture out in the daytime throughout the film and they don't have to sleep in coffins or in their native soil. They sleep in a big kind of, you know, windblown music video bed. Yes. Yes. I mean, I get the impression they sleep in a lot, but it's not like they can't go out in the sun. Yeah. I don't recall any apparent influence of religious imagery or material. I think there's I think one of the phone booth guys, not Willem Dafoe, but the other guy maybe has a cross on. But it's ambiguous if it actually has any effect on the the vampirically affected character who views it. Yeah. So maybe Miriam has super strength that unclear if John does. But apart from that, really, the only great kind of power we see of the vampires, I think, is just the fact that they live eternally or so-called eternally, that they do not age. They can maintain youth for a long time. Would you say that there's any other apparent power on display? I think that's mostly it. Now, Miriam in particular is quite seductive and charismatic. People are drawn to her. But I never thought that this was presented in a definite Dracula's gaze sort of way. Like she, to an extent, you could say she casts a spell on Sarah, but I don't think in the literal sense. not in a way that overrides Sarah's agency in the seduction, you know? Yeah, Sarah doesn't seem like hypnotized. She seems more, I don't know, encouraged to give in to something that she does want. Yeah, it'd be more like being starstruck, except, you know, it's like the vampiric version of that, I guess. Yeah. So anyway, worth noting that the vision of vampirism in this film is quite mechanically limited compared to most vampire lore, many of the standard horror tropes do not apply. Yeah, no garlic in this picture, no steaks, nothing like that. There is steak in the picture. There is steak, yeah, there's rare steak, of course. There's a quite significant steak scene. After Susan Sarandon has been turned, she's at a restaurant trying to eat some steak and just like, yuck, only want blood. Yeah, and he's like, I can't believe you spent three and a half hours with that woman. You need to go to a doctor. Yeah, I think you have bisexualitis or something. I don't know. Anyway, all right. So to come back to our sort of zoomed out overview of the plot in the opening again, John and Miriam, they're living this apparently fabulous life. They live this big, beautiful house in New York when they're not hunting for victims at goth clubs. They appear to spend a lot of their time on artistic leisure. They are both musicians. I think Miriam plays the piano and John plays the cello and they like to play music. with a talented young teenage violinist from the house across the street named Alice. Does she take music lessons from them? I was unclear on that. She just jams with them or she takes lessons. At any rate, it's probably fine. This is probably totally okay that she's coming over here and hanging out with these two ancient vampires. Yeah, not going anywhere good. Anything else to say about their apparently somewhat happy life in the beginning? um i mean not much other than it does seem like they are happy content that doesn't seem like they particularly have any vampire hunters breathing down their necks or anything yeah uh and i guess they've been going at it for a long time and they're staying on top of the fashions like sometimes i mean there are so many ways to treat uh longevity and vampires in fiction and sometimes vampires are depicted as like totally out of keeping with modern um uh fads and so forth, and certainly technology, and also maybe being rather bored, like they just run out of passion. These two seem to still have a lot of passion for what's popular in the world, changing musical genres and so forth, and, you know, they're staying active. They're still killing people and drinking their blood and then burning them in the basement. And the way in which their hip seems to be, I don't know, basically just keeping pace with culture, You don't get like that that saltation view where or it's like in Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula where Gary Oldman, you know, he's got the big bun head and he's decrepit and old world. And then suddenly all at once he's rejuvenated and hip and stylish. Anyway, the trouble of the plot starts when John notices that he is losing his hair and he can't seem to sleep. And he notices several things and realizes he is aging rapidly. Apparently, years are falling off of his life every day. Now, one question here I was trying to remember is, what is the level of openness between John and Miriam about this? I seem to remember they do talk about it as if he knew this might happen at some point. like I remember he asks Miriam how long it took for another person to to decay in this way presumably this was a previous lover of Miriam's but I also don't get the impression that he knew this would happen before he was turned did you take that all the same way I mean it's this is one of the more thought-provoking mysteries of the film I think because like logically in the film Yeah, he seems to be aware that there were other lovers in the past, that they they went away, that they faded away one way or another and that something like that could happen to him. On the other hand, there is the whole reassurances of things being forever. And then of course this also ties into how I think we all to varying degrees deal with or don deal with aging and mortality Like we all know that that we will grow old and that we will die That that is like the biological trajectory and that you know very little can can occur to to to change that path And yet I think we often carry on like John, not thinking about it, finding ways to avoid the reality of it. And then when it does begin to occur, it comes as a shock. But it's not a shock because we knew it all along. Yeah. Though, I mean, for John, there's this interesting dynamic because it's like he short-sold his life, essentially. He had all these many, many years, unnaturally extended life and youth. He's been young and vigorous for so long. And now it's all coming home. It's all coming home at once. It's happening so fast. Yeah. So anyway, John is in this in this state and on TV, he sees a report about the work of a gerontologist named Dr. Sarah Roberts. This is the character played by Susan Sarandon. She's written a book about her work and she's performing experiments along with a couple of colleagues, Charlie Humphreys and Tom Haver. Tom, again, is Sarah's boyfriend. And together, they are trying to understand the process of aging at the cellular level and possibly halt or reverse it, particularly to help children who have diseases that cause accelerated aging and deterioration. And these characters, the scientist characters, are interesting because on one hand, we see what seems to me to be obvious care, a real desire to help people, especially children. Like their motivations are represented as not impure. And yet they're also not lionized. The scientists are not treated as saints. they in some ways come off as quite brutal. Like we see them performing these gory, horrifying experiments on monkeys where one of these experiments in a really great special effects shot, by the way, causes like a monkey to rapidly age and then turbo decompose in minutes, like when you drink from the false grail in the last crusade. We also see them, we see just sort of human failings of these scientists. Like when Sarah and John first meet, Sarah is rude and dismissive to him and he and she lies to him. John comes asking for help. And then also Tom Haver, her boyfriend, the other scientist, he comes off as a total jerk, though at the same time, there are also indications that he genuinely cares for Sarah. Yeah, I mean, he's put in a tough spot, I guess, to some to some degree. And we're not maybe as privy as much to his side of things. But but, yeah, that scene where where John is sort of cast aside by Sarah and she's like, just wait, wait for me in the waiting room and I'll get back to you later. And she's then she tells the security guy, it's like, there's another weirdo here. Just leave him alone. He'll probably get bored and leave on his own. And then we the viewer watch as John literally grows like decades older in the waiting room, a scene that I think could otherwise come off as comedic. Like, because when you're explaining, it's like you literally watch him grow old in the waiting room. It sounds like a comedic bit, but it's it's executed in a way that that does not feel funny. And in the effect, the makeup effects are, of course, so convincing. We don't see any kind of like transition effect. It's all, you know, checking back in with him and seeing that he's visibly aged. And and yeah, like he ends up leaving the waiting room, a much older man. Yeah. And then as he's leaving, Sarah sees him again. And he and he recognizes her knowing that she totally blew him off and lied to him earlier. But she sees now that he has visibly rapidly aged since earlier that day. And at this point, she tries to apologize. And she's like, oh, no, come with me. You know, we'll bring you in for tests. We'll see what's going on. But now John's pride is hurt and he refuses her help. And I think we kind of talked about that earlier, the way that John's personality is represented as kind of when he faces the, you know, these extreme troubles just kind of like taking it inside and pushing it underneath. Yeah, yeah. Like this was his last, his only attempt to like reach out for help. And it didn't turn out the way he hoped it would. And there's not going to be a second chance for him. Yeah. And then there's a section here where John is, you can tell he's hungry. So he's trying to feed. We see him have encountered, he's very, he's very rapidly aging, turning old in the course of this single day. And he goes into a bathroom, the scene you talked about, where he sees the man, I don't know, shaving or whatever in the sink. And he's staring at him. I think he tries to attack a skater in a park. Oh, it's a roller skater. Yeah. And like they set up this really cool scene where it's like, what's happening? Where are we now? Another music video has started. And this guy starts doing some cool skating. And then here comes John, attempts to stab him and drink his blood. But then it doesn't fully pull it off for some reason. So he comes home and then, oh, no, because he's so old now. When the neighbor girl Alice comes over to play music, John has to pretend to be someone else because she won't recognize him. He looks so much older. And then even worse, when she's in there, he talks her into playing some music for him. And we don't see it. It happens off screen, but we know what he kills her and drinks her blood. Yeah. And it gets more heartbreaking from there with John because he just gets progressively older. Miriam is walking this line between comforting him and keeping him at arm's length. And she's having to burn Alice's body in the basement. And then John comes down and he's he's sold at this point. He he asked for one more kiss and then he asked if she will kill him. and you know and in this and like heartbreakingly she tells him like you know it doesn't work like that you like you don't die you don't get to die um and uh and again it's maybe a little unclear to what extent he knew this was the case or remembered it was the case i'm not sure uh but yeah it's quickly made obvious that that yeah he's not going to grow old and die he's just going to grow perpetually older, but have eternal life in a very non-glamorous way. That's right. There is no death for a vampire. That's the twist. There is just aging and pain and decay, but actually no end. And then in a, oh, for me, a hair-raising scene where she takes him up to the attic and She deposits his aging body inside a coffin next to this huge stack of other coffins that are filled with Miriam's previous lovers, all of whom are reduced to husks inside the coffins but are not gone. They are all still conscious inside. And she bids her other previous lovers to keep him company and to treat him with kindness. Yeah, yeah, very haunting. You know, thousands of years worth of lovers here stored away in neat little stacks. Hi, this is Joe Interstein, host of the Spirit Daughter podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts and how to step into your most vibrant life. And I just sat down with a mini driver. The Irish traveler said when I was 16, you're going to have a terrible time with men. actor storyteller and unapologetic aquarian visionary aquarius is all about freedom loving and different perspectives and i find a lot of people with strong placements in aquarius like are misunderstood a sun and venus and aquarius in her seventh house spark her unconventional approach to partnership he really has taught me to embrace people sleeping in different rooms and different houses and different places, but just an embracing of the isness of it all. If you're navigating your own transformation or just want a chart side view into how a leading artist integrates astrology, creativity, and real life, this episode is a must listen. Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast starting on February 24th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, a.k.a. Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What do you do when the headlines don't explain what's happening inside of you? I'm Ben Higgins, and if you can hear me, it's where culture meets the soul, a place for real conversation. Each episode, I sit down with people from all walks of life, celebrities, thinkers, and everyday folks, And we go deeper than the polished story. We talk about what drives us, what shapes us, and what gives us hope. We get honest about the big stuff. Identity when you don't recognize yourself anymore. Loss that changes you. Purpose when success isn't enough. Peace when your mind won't slow down. Fake when it's complicated. Some guests have answers. Most are still figuring it out. If you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to If You Can Hear Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief. The nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history. everyone thought they knew how it ended a verdict a villain a nurse named lucy let me lucy let me has been found guilty but what if we didn't get the whole story the moment you look at the whole picture the case collapses i'm amanda knox and in the new podcast doubt the case of lucy let me we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it to ask what really happens when the world decided who Lucy Letby was. No voicing of any skepticism or doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level that the British establishment of this is wrong. Listen to Doubt, The Case of Lucy Letby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So here the story switches. Miriam is left alone. And who should come to the house now but Sarah? Sarah, the researcher, the gerontologist. Her initial line of inquiry is, where is John? She somehow got his address, and she is trying to find him because, obviously, somebody who's aging as rapidly as him would be of interest to her research. Miriam initially tells Sarah that he went to Switzerland, so she thinks he's at a clinic there. But she comes in and she begins to get to know Miriam. And this is where the story takes a really different kind of turn, because I think I think the way again, Miriam is often presented in a kind of ambiguous way. We don't always know exactly what she's feeling. She's more hard to scrutinize than than many of the human characters. But I suspect that the implication is that Miriam is now lonely because there was the idea, of course, she had John and she loved John. And there was also the implication that she and John discussed that maybe one day when Alice was older, she would turn Alice into a vampire as well. And she would become her new companion. And she'd been thinking about this. But, of course, John killed Alice and drank her blood. So now Miriam really doesn't seem to have a friend in the world. But then, oh, here's Sarah. And Sarah has a lot of things going for her. And there is an opening in the significant other market here in Miriam's house. That's right. Now, somewhere in here, I think actually Sarah comes twice to visit. In between their two visits, I think, are when the cops come to investigate. And this goes absolutely nowhere. Absolutely nowhere. But Sarah does eventually come back to visit Miriam again. And here is where things really take a turn. Upon the second visit, it becomes increasingly clear that Miriam and Sarah are interested in each other. Miriam is playing the piano and they're talking about what the music is. Miriam is explaining the piece of music. And Sarah keeps commenting that it sounds like a love song. Yeah. And on this second visit, Sarah also shows up wearing a sexy outfit. And it's not long before that outfit gets some sherry spilled on it. And, you know, things things progress, as you might expect. Much is said about the fact that she doesn't even like sherry. Of course, that's the other part of it. But but somehow it's different with Miriam. And and so they they they imbibe. Now, I guess this leads to the scene that Roger Ebert liked. Yes. This is the love scene between Sarah and Miriam, which, as we talked about earlier, it there is a kind of mingling of the of the romantic desire and the desire for blood. And it's pretty clear what Miriam's aims are at this point. Miriam wants not only to drink Sarah's blood, but to give of her blood to Sarah as well to turn her into a vampire. Yeah, she wants companionship. Yeah. And so it's this weird dreamlike scene where ultimately, I think in this scene, they do drink of each other's blood. So there's like a wound in Sarah's arm where she's been pierced by the onk, but she has also taken of Miriam's blood. Yeah. And again, this is very artful, stylish sequence. It's certainly by by today's standards, there's nothing very explicit about it, though it is it is very erotically charged. and yeah and no Susan Sarandon in her comments on you know says that she thinks it was probably ahead of its time you know for 83 but but yeah I mean and to Ebert's point it is a highly effective sequence. Now we do see Sarah kind of trying to go back to her own her old life after this but it's just it's not going to work out at this point so there are several different scenes there there are scenes of her increasingly tense and failing relationship with Tom her boyfriend like they go out to dinner and they discuss things. Tom airs his suspicions and they, you know, they're fighting about that. She doesn't seem to want food for some reason. It's like she orders a steak, but she's like, I can't eat this. And I think it makes her throw up later. She sent the oysters back. There's oysters or muzzles. She sent them back and he's like, I can't believe you did that. Also, she starts doing some tests on herself in the laboratory. and their colleague Charlie, he explains what's going on. He's like, whoops, we're looking at your blood. We see that you actually have some kind of alien blood in you. There's you blood and then there's some other non-human kind of blood and they're fighting for dominance within your veins and the other blood is winning. And so in this, Sarah is feeling the titular hunger. She is craving the blood. She is herself becoming a vampire and like Miriam needs to feed. And but but she doesn't know how to do any of these things. She needs Miriam's guidance in order to to fully transition into this life as a creature of the night. That's right. So there's more negotiation on these fronts. We see that Sarah is not immediately into the idea of drinking blood to survive. But she kind of ends up without a choice. in it, doesn't she? So she's like extremely weakened and she ends up staying at Miriam's house and she's like in a bed there. And at one point, they have more interactions but eventually Miriam's like, look, I'm going to do the work. I'm going to show you what to do. I'll go get a guy. And there's like a great scene where she goes out and gets a guy wearing sunglasses at night and brings him back to the house for Susan Sarandon to eat. Yeah, this is the gigolo character and boy, they really went out of their way to make sure you were okay with this dude getting fanged. Well, not actually fanged, onked, drained. Because he's like, he's rude. He's looking in the liquid cabinet. He like spits his chewing gum out in Miriam's apartment. So we're like, we're totally okay with this guy getting it. And it doesn't take long before he does get it. So at this point, you might be assuming, okay, well, is Sarah just going to embrace the new lifestyle? This is what I am now. I am Miriam's vampire lover. I am her vampire spawn. I can have eternal youth, and I just need to pick up people at the goth club, bring them back here, and drink their blood. And that's what we're going to do for, I don't know, however long it takes. I do recall, does she get any indication of that what happened to John will also happen to her eventually? Do they talk about that? I don't know that they talk about it at all, no. But, I mean, obviously we, the viewer, knows that that would be the end result, you know, some centuries down the line. But instead of the full embrace of what happens, there is a twist. Sarah proves a more recalcitrant kind of new vamp. There's something more of her original humanity left than it seems like happened with any of Miriam's previous lovers. So instead of fully embracing the new lifestyle, there's a confrontation and a big, terrible climax. Now, I forget exactly how it is triggered. What is it that Sarah does that that ends up with Miriam for like carrying her upstairs to like rapidly put her away with the other old lovers? Is it that she tries to make Miriam drink her blood? I'm a little unsure about how what exactly happens in this moment. But she ends up stabbing herself with the onk during a very close embrace. One of these embraces where you're not sure at first who is stabbed and by and who does the stabbing. Uh, but yeah, she stabs herself. And then Miriam is like, well, this is, you know, she's clearly heartbroken by this. You know, she clearly had very strong feelings for Sarah and saw a future with Sarah. But now she's going to have to take Sarah up to the attic and file her away with the others. Right. But then it is revenge of the zombies. The ex-lovers emerge in their withered, dusty husk forms. and they all come out and they take their vengeance. Or should it be thought of as vengeance? I don't know exactly how you frame it, but they surround and attack Miriam and destroy her. There are so many places in this film where I feel like a lesser film would have gone in a different direction. I think there are certain pitfalls that a movie like this might have naturally veered into. And I think this is a key example. I think in a lesser picture, it would have been a pure vengeance of the zombies. Like they would have attacked her, torn her apart or something. Because, yeah, the undying husks of her former lovers do come out of their boxes. Yeah. And I think a lesser film might have had them be a direct physical cause of Miriam's demise. You know, she would have been torn apart by her demons in a literal fashion. But we wouldn't have fit here because, you know, set lovingly aside, they still love her. They still pine for her. I don't think they would intentionally hurt her still, even in the reduced state. Plus, though their longing is strong, they're physically quite weak and powerless, like they're almost dust at this point. What could they do? And she clearly has heightened strength. So instead, it feels more like it's like it's it's not as much. It's their presence, certainly, but it's also the cumulative guilt of it all that overcomes Miriam and leads to what appears to be her physical death. death or physical demise. And this ends up ending the cursed existence of her thralls like they finally crumble to dust. It is not exactly clear what the mechanism, what it what all is going on here, but it feels like it works. I will say after this, I mean, it it's curious because this is not quite the end of the film. We also see something else with Sarah, don't we? That's right, because I really at this point in the picture, I thought Sarah was dead. I thought, OK, she killed herself via the Ankh. That's why she was being filed away. But at the end, we get this really excellent sequence where we see Sarah standing out on the balcony of this modern high-rise in what I believe is London. And it's quite fetching because you have the varied and at times quite old bits of architecture visible in the city. So it kind of meshes nicely with this idea of vampiric life but my i had several questions like okay is sarah a vampire now or is she free of the curse completely and is mortal again did she or you know did she dodge the fate and the curse um has the experience unlocked some key into her own research i assume she's keeping going with her work but is it going to take a new turn now that she has has either been a vampire or partially been a vampire or is still a vampire we don't know we're left to ponder it and what happened to Miriam? Like, is Miriam completely destroyed or is she in one of the boxes now? Yeah. Yeah. Good question. Yeah. So a lot of questions left open at the ending and I don't know exactly how to interpret it. But but yeah, despite I don't know exactly what to say about the ending, but I love the film overall. Yeah, I was I was quite impressed with it. You know, I like you. I kind I thought the first 10 minutes were going to set the tone for the entire picture. And it ended up being a much more poignant and thought-provoking motion picture overall. One last thing I wanted to mention before we wrap up here, and it was the thought about the interaction between the vampire themes of the story and a common thing that's true about, well, I was going to say love stories in movies, but actually just love in real life. and that is the way that the vampire setting really helps the us against the world feeling of being in love i'm not the first person to point this out of course you know this is a commonly observed thing but there is a way in which true love really kind of it it does encourage a kind of contempt for like the rest of reality you know that uh when people are in love they like to talk, you know, like to, you know, to say mean things about other people to each other and to kind of be in a conspiracy. When people are in love, they like to do kind of selfish or irresponsible things against other people outside of that two person conspiracy. It's just kind of it happens naturally. I don't know exactly why that is, but it just seems to be a thing that flows naturally from this two person bond. And that works so well when your two characters are vampires, because that's exactly the mechanic of the story. It's like we together are in on this great secret. We're working this little blood conspiracy. And so we can go out to the club and only you and I are in on the joke that the people that we bring home, we're just going to kill them. And their bodies end up in the incinerator. And so we've talked about that Us Against the World quality in other great love movies we've done before. It's kind of there, totally different themes. But they're in a danger diabolic, you know, the way that the two lovers are in on crimes together. And the same thing is present here. And that is such a fun and mysterious and interesting dynamic. Like, it's funny to see it play out and it feels good. But it also just raises these questions. Like, why is that so common that people feel and act that way when they're in love? Like, what is it about being in love that does that to us? that kind of makes us bad to the rest of the world. Yeah, I guess that's one of the appeals of paranormal romances and paranormal love stories because the experience of being in love, the experience of being in a romance does feel supernatural. It does have that kind of energy to it, you know. It feels like you have fallen in love with a vampire or a werewolf or a Sasquatch or a centaur, you know, whatever your interest happens to be. on the page or on the screen. All right. Well, happy Valentine's Day, everybody. All right. Just a reminder to everybody that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film here on Weird House Cinema. If you want to check out a list of all the movies we've covered over the years and sometimes a peek ahead at what comes next, you can go to letterbox.com. Our username there is weirdhouse, and you'll find a nice list of everything. And, of course, you can write into us as well. Let us know what vampire film we should do next. You know, sometimes weeks ahead. We're going to do some other non-vampire films for sure, but we'll keep coming back to vampires and werewolves and mummies. It's inevitable. Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to blow your mind.com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. 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