The Hunger is a film about a female vampire who constantly needs to acquire ‘new blood’ in order to maintain eternal youth. Catherine Deneuve plays the vampire, Miriam, and she’s not fussy whether she seduces men or women – as long as she gets a good slurp of their blood afterwards.

The film is most famous for its lesbian sex scene (below), where Deneuve’s Miriam seduces Sarandon’s Sarah. It’s all soft-focus, billowing curtains and classical music (Delibe’s Flower Duet) as Miriam and Sarah unleash their passion.

And it was this portrayal of the sex scene – essentially, as a straight man’s lesbian fantasy – that got lesbian viewers offside. That and the portrayal of a lesbian as a predator. As Vito Russo’s book The Celluloid Closet had already shown, homosexual men and women were repeatedly portrayed in movies as sick, perverted or predatory. Whilst it may not have been the intention of The Hunger‘s producers to reinforce this theme, it certainly left some commentators feeling uncomfortable.

In the movie version of The Celluloid Closet (excerpt below), Susan Sarandon gives an interesting insight into the development of that particular scene. Originally the producers had proposed that Miriam (the vampire) got Sarah drunk in order to bed her. Sarandon argued for – and got – a more consensual approach on the grounds that “you wouldn’t need to get drunk to go to bed with Catherine Deneuve!”