The Hunger

"Strieber was a really, really good horror writer. His horror was a little pulpy, but it was very well crafted and often had a lot going on under the surface. Strieber is the most famous in the States because in 1985 he claimed he was abducted by aliens and wrote a book called Communion about his experience. From then on he became a non-fiction writer trying to expose the truth about aliens, and selling workshops and seminars that would help other people who’d been abducted, and he became this UFO guru. But before then, he was a really good journeyman horror writer. The Hunger is about a love triangle featuring a woman called Miriam Blaylock, who would later be played by Catherine Deneuve in the movie adaptation with David Bowie as her lover. Miriam turns her romantic partners into vampires, and she’ll keep them with her and treat them as an equal. But she’s immortal, and they’re not. They live a very, very long time, but after a while they need more and more blood, and the blood works less and less, and they begin to age. And the thing that I love is that Miriam has always made a promise to her lovers that she’ll keep them with her forever, so they don’t die – they just turn to these little withered husks, and she keeps them locked in suitcases and trunks in her attic. It really is one of the creepiest images, I think, in all of vampire fiction: this attic full of chained up trunks, rustling with the husks of all her dried up lovers. She has literal baggage that she drags around with her. It’s a book that perfectly captures the late ’70s, early ’80s romantic vampire. It goes very dark. And like Carmilla , it walks this line between the vampire being someone you desire, but you know is bad for you. No one needs a werewolf; no one needs a ghost; but you need a vampire. It’s similar to drug or alcohol addiction. And it’s a part of victim-abuser relationships too, where the waters are muddied, and it’s hard to find the exact line where it turned from love to abuse. Victims often can’t put their finger on that moment, and so they blame themselves. Horror does such a good job of making metaphors literal, and I think that’s one reason people are so attracted to vampire stories – we have a hard time talking about the relationship between abusers and the abused, between what we need and what destroys us, and vampire stories give us a good way to look at that from different angles. Yes. The big decision writers have to make when they invent a vampire is: is it supernatural, or is it biological? If it’s supernatural, then they’re scared of crosses and religious symbols, they can’t cross running water, they can turn into a bat – that kind of thing. If they are more biological, then it’s the feeding on blood that’s central. You can’t turn into a bat, where does all that mass go? Of course you can cross running water, and why would you be scared of a cross? So it really depends on that choice. When you boil it down, the two things that differentiates vampires from all other monsters are that they look human and can walk among us undetected, and that they feed on humans. So they need humans as much as they destroy humans. There’s a problem called the vampire problem in macroeconomics: if every vampire turns someone they bite into another vampire, but they have to preserve a feeding pool or else they’ll drive themselves into extinction, what’s the tipping point where they have destroyed their food source and will begin population decline? Yes, exactly."