A Classic: Thirst (1979) - n/r

Several vampire films made in the late Seventies and early Eighties challenged the tropes and conventions of the vampire film. The Gothicism of Hammer's vampire films, even the modernized and gleefully exploitational The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), had become too formulaic to continue affecting audiences. Polanski's Dance of the Vampires (1967), however critically derided, essentially put the stake in the heart of the Gothic vampire film. Al Adamson's Blood of Dracula's Castle (1969) with its comically effete Dracula continued the progress of Gothic vampire films into camp. The level of camp to which the Gothic vampire film had developed is exemplarized in the August Rieger-penned The Vampire Happening (1971). For better or worse it lives up to its tagline, "The Adult Vampire Sex Comedy!" Fleeing Gothicism and its supernaturalism, a new school of filmmakers, nearly all with recourse to science, brought realism to the vampire subgenre. Moctezuma's Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary (1975) depicts vampirism as a biological mutation causing the overdevelopment of blood vessels. The only way to keep the rapidly-expanding blood vessels filled is to drink blood. It's not good science, but it's a valiant effort. Vampirism is the result of a parasitic implant designed by medical science in David Cronenberg's Rabid (1977). Colin Wilson's novel Space Vampires (1976), adapted by Tobe Hooper as Lifeforce (1985), depicts vampires as energy-sucking extraterrestrials. Somewhat an epigone but still worthy of mention is Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark (1987), in which vampirism can be cured via blood transfusion. The exception is George Romero's masterpiece Martin (1977). Romero employs neither science nor the supernatural, relishing the ambiguity of Martin's ontological status, hence refusing us any epistemological system that might yield solid answers. This makes Martin easily the most radically challenging of all these radical vampire films. Finally in the mid-Eighties when filmmakers began to integrate Gothic tropes into modern settings, a Hegelian synthesis of sorts, the best instance of which is probably Fright Night (1985), this period of the radical vampire film came to an end.

Thirst (1979) was created in the middle of this trend. In many ways Thirst is the most radical of them all, even more so than Martin. Thirst concerns a vampire society administration's efforts to convince the oblivious Kate Davis (Chantal Contouri) that she is truly a vampire. Kate is a normal, modern, and very successful woman. She owns a fashion design company. She sees a handsome architect exactly three times every week. Her life is organized on her own terms. We know all this because a vampire private investigator reports this information to his superiors, Drs. Fraser (David Hemmings) and Gauss (Henry Silva) and Mrs. Barker (Shirley Cameron). They believe Kate is descended from the noble vampire lineage of Countess Elizabeth Bathory. Without Kate's knowledge, they not only plan to bring her into their community, effectively ending the lifestyle she now enjoys, but have also arranged her marriage to another descendent of a noble vampire family (Max Phipps). As such, Thirst is structured more as a psychological drama than as a vampire film. The final question becomes not whether the vampires will be staked or whether they will bite her, but whether Kate will acquiesce to her vampiric destiny or whether she will assert her independence and humanity.

The way Kate becomes a political pawn within the vampire community is one of Thirst's most interesting and innovative features. Her conversion to vampirism becomes the Ace of Spades, so to speak, for the three administrators of the vampire community. Her noble lineage and arranged marriage implies favour with the noble families for whomever successfully accomplishes Kate's conversion. The vampires try various means to arouse in Kate 'the thirst'. In this sense, Thirst plays somewhat like Dracula's Daughter in reverse. Kate doesn't hear 'Dracula's call' or 'the thirst,' but others want to make her do so. Dr. Fraser is a sort of Toranaga, treating Kate kindly and with respect, trying to reason her into the community, all the while aware that she's the key to securing his position as director of the facility. Mrs. Barker, on the other hand, is a cruel and results-driven mad scientist, willing to use brainwashing techniques resembling those employed by the No. 2s of Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner should Kate put up any resistance, in order to usurp Dr. Fraser's position.

Vampires traditionally have certain features that remain present even in most of the radical vampire films. Vampirism itself is nearly always taken to be an evil in the Augustinian sense of a negation: It sets the vampire against all that is considered good beyond the bare minimum of continued existence. While vampires can put on a veneer of civility for the sake of acquiring victims, as Bela Lugosi's Dracula does, the vampire within is ultimately a savage beast: it is without reason, civility, or love; it is appetitive, predatory, and profoundly alone. Dracula's Daughter (1936) explores this to some degree in that Countess Zaleska (Dracula's daughter) struggles to be a part of society, to find love, to resist the vampiric urges she refers to as 'Dracula's call'. She fails. This solitary and destructive quality of the vampire persists throughout Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary, which follows but modernizes the model of Dracula's Daughter, Rabid and even Martin. What makes Thirst so radical is that its vampires are reasonable, civilized people who live together on communes as well as all over the world in human society. The only prior instances of vampire civilization are in the camp films Dance of the Vampires and The Vampire Happening and, the sole serious instance, The Vampires' Night Orgy (1973). Thirst is the first film to realistically depict a vampire society, with internal, political struggles. They're ordinary people. So ordinary that they cease to be monsters. So ordinary that the question of staking them never arises as a potential resolution. So ordinary, in fact, that, should 'the thirst' not be aroused, they can go through life never even realizing they're vampires, raising the ontological question first raised in Martin as to whether they're vampires at all and not merely a secret society of deluded people.

The ontological ambiguity of the vampires in Thirst is a direct consequence of its science. Not only is Thirst the most radical of the radical vampire films, it is also the most radically scientific. Where Cronenberg's vampire in Rabid is an instance of benevolent medical science gone wrong, the vampires in Thirst are in some sense a construct of science that is sustained by scientific activity, not merely physically but even conceptually. In Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (1979) Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, based on time spent studying scientists as anthropologists would any culture, argue that scientific facts as basic as the existence of the electron are as socially-constructed as myths. The electron's existence was not observed, but began as a speculative statement in order to explain abstract data. The machinery that is constructed to measure the electron is already determined to recognize the facticity of the electron. That the machinery will work is thus already decided by the design of the machinery to yield results favourable to the existence of the electron. Yet the results of the machinery is taken to support the facticity of the electron. The fact of the electron is therefore created in the minds of the scientists and their instruments of measurement.

I don't care to defend the theories of Latour and Woolgar in real life instances. They do, however, enlighten the way science works in Thirst. The vampires have a vast system of highly-developed machinery predicated on the notion that these people are indeed vampires. Yet the whole machinery, social and technological, is taken to simultaneously prove they are vampires. The commune itself is referred to as a 'dairy' where blood is 'milked' by sophisticated equipment from 'blood cows,' also known as humans. The purpose of doing so is perhaps to eliminate the need for predatorial activity, but mostly, as is explicitly stated in the film, to do away with dangerous impurities in the consumption of blood. So the dairy is predicated upon vampirism and the main concept of vampirism, "the thirst." At the same time, the inferiority of these 'blood cows,' their docility and apparent contentment at serving in the commune, is taken to prove that the "vampires" are really a superior race and not just humans. As one character states, drinking blood is "the ultimate aristocratic act."

More importantly, the existence of the 'thirst' itself is dubious. Mrs. Barker employs a series of brainwashing techniques, or what she calls 'conditioning,' in order to arouse the thirst in Kate. That it takes Kate so long to realize she has the thirst is attributed to Kate's being strong-willed. When Kate finally begins to exhibit some signs of the thirst, the machinery is believed to have been effective in arousing the thirst. But isn't it a more reasonable interpretation that the thirst was merely created by extensive brainwashing as a result of highly-sophisticated equipment and systematic injections with a mollifying serum? Like the electron in Latour's theory, the thirst here seems to be a fact only within the minds of the vampires and in their instruments. One could just as easily adopt the alternative interpretation. It would be too costly for them to deny the existence of the thirst, however. The thirst is the central proof these people have of their vampirism and with the superiority that entitles them to be vampiric. They use sharpened dentures as they don't have fangs. Though their eyes appear to glow red, this may or may not be an effect of contact lenses. It's left unclear in the film. It is only the thirst the makes the vampirism and all its paraphernalia authentic. Their existence as vampires depends upon belief in the thirst. And the thirst's facticity appears to be socially-constructed. Consequently, the vampire is purely a scientific construct and upon the ambiguous facticity of that construct rests the ambiguity of the vampires' ontological status.

I discuss the science in Thirst at length not only to describe the tenuous reality of vampires in the film, but also because science is integral to the film's horror. It is in its radical way as much a mad scientist film as it is a vampire film. Pinkney's screenplay reflects the late-Seventies' paranoia over the dehumanizing aspects of sciences that demystify the biological and psychological aspects of humanity. In the scientific community of the vampires the only options are to lose one's humanity to vampirism or to adopt the bare minimum humanity of the blood cows. Perhaps it's not a coincidence that Kate is involved in fashion and her boyfriend is an architect. Both are involved in the arts and live fulfilled human lives, free lives. Under the gaze of the scientific community, they must be either vampire or blood cow. The scientific community orders everything rigidly, including genetics (arranged marriage), permitting only illusory freedom. The blood cows are not free to leave. So lacking in blood are they that they behave as though lobotomized. And the vampires are slaves to their own science: the thirst and the machinery. If horror films are nightmares that present us with the social and personal desires we repress, perhaps the horror of this scientific order is because we on some level desire it but have a still stronger desire to repress it, just as Kate as a capitalist in some sense desires to have her financial superiority biologically confirmed and yet fears such a visceral acknowledgment.

On another level, the whole film is structured as a way of 'breaking' a strong-willed, modern, independent woman. Thirst is, after all, Kate's nightmare. Her everyday life is subverted by intrusion from a patriarchal community. They have determined that she's valuable to them for her genetics, in other words, for her reproductive merits. Instead of being valued as a mind, she's valued as a womb. Her mind is manipulated cruelly to make her a willing womb. On the other hand, the males in the film are strangely effeminate and gentle, the women strong and results-driven. Kate's arranged husband is a bundle of nerves who requires brainwashing to get the strong Kate as his wife. Derek the architect sees Kate on her terms. In the vampire hierarchy, Dr. Fraser is gentle, albeit a commanding presence. Mrs. Barker, however, is assertive and dominating. There's no question, though, that Dr. Fraser is presented in a much more sympathetic light than Mrs. Barker. So perhaps Thirst is not just a nightmare of dehumanization, but a nightmare for female independence: a perversely cathartic vision of the rising female independence threatened of destruction by a highly intelligent male force. Since humanity and this independence are co-extensive terms in the nightmare of Thirst, this vision is at least treated as an equally perverse desire and one that is to be repressed.

Thirst is not the work of art that Martin is nor the philosohpical excursion Rabid is. It is an Australian exploitation film lifted by an efficient director (Rod Hardy), a daring producer of the Australian New Wave (Anthony I. Ginnane) and a strange and original script from one-timer John Pinkney into its unique radicalism. Both highly idiosyncratic and a product of its cultural and cinematic milieu, Thirst is in many ways the ultimate Seventies vampire film as well as one of the most original vampire films ever made.