Better movies preceded it and will almost certainly follow, but
The Hunger is the first great surprise of my scattershot viewings for this list, a stylish rejiggering of vampire legends into a sort of horrific urban fairy tale/psychodrama. Deneuve, in probably the most effective use of her "ice queen" mode I've seen yet, plays the matriarch of a small vampiric coven preying on social stragglers in early '80s New York. All of them are gifted with eternal life, but only Deneuve remains eternally
young, with the rest cursed to age and decay forever, conscious but immobile. (Unable and unwilling to kill her life partners, Deneuve keeps them in her lavish apartment's attic in a grim parody of the baggage normal people retain of their past loves). When her current partner David Bowie(!) begins to age (a sign of his impending functional death), he seeks out the assistance of gerontologist Susan Sarandon, and the film gradually reveals itself to not be so interested in the mechanics of its vampirism so much as in the irrationality of the human drive to achieve immortality in light of the agony (physical, emotional, philosophical) it would bring. Those familiar with some past posts I've made may remember that this is a sort of sore point of mine, so maybe I'm a little biased towards a film that treats such subject matter with such an elegant respect for the pain that can come out of wrestling with one's mortality or mortality in general, but I was really impressed with how the film used even its most brutal moments to sell this weight.
The best scene in the film, and one of the saddest I've seen in recent memory, is the second murder scene, which works in exactly this fashion. After being rebuffed by Sarandon, who thinks that the prematurely-aged Bowie is just a crank, he returns to the apartment to find the teenaged girl that he and Deneuve have been giving music lessons (and who he now realizes Deneuve has been grooming to be his eventual vampiric replacement). The girl doesn't recognize him, so he introduces himself as a family friend and asks her to play a song that he and Deneuve taught her. Partly out of jealousy of the girl's importance to Deneuve and partly out of his own desperate desire to live, Bowie kills her as she plays and drinks her blood, but to no avail; he "dies" shortly thereafter. This seems an almost objectively unconscionably callous action to take, contemptible both because it's a murder of a child and, on a more conceptual level, because it's a usurpation of the way age dynamics are supposed to work (in that the old are supposed to protect the young, not destroy them for the benefit of the old). I know at least a couple critics at the time reacted to this scene with revulsion, but to me it perfectly encapsulates the film's philosophy when it comes to seeking immortality: it's a drive that by its very nature alienates one from fragile human existence and makes one capable of brutality. This is of course the essence/dichotomy that motivates most vampires in fiction, but in other stories, they're usually presented as inhuman villains or else pubescent goth self-parodies (as in the Twilights et al); we're let into their verisimilitudinous psychology here in a way that rarely happens for works about fantastic beings, in a way that's somber and melancholic but still recognizable.
There are a few too many other parts of the film that slip into a greater and unfortunate silliness, so I can't go as far as I'd like to and call this a masterful tone exercise or anything. But the core of it hit me hard, and the slick presentation of the film's good and bad ideas alike (a lot of the apartment-set stuff certainly resembles a hyperbolic visual first draft of the formalist and formality-concerned ideas that the cinematographer would later use in his work on the superior HBO movie
Conspiracy) makes it merit a blind watch.
