The Hunger: The Swords


Through a discussion of something else on a friend's Facebook page, I learned of a tv series I ought to have known about before: The Hunger, which played on Showtime in the US, the Sci Fi Channel in the UK, and The Movie Network in Canada from 1997 to 2000. It was a co-production between Ridley and Tony Scott's company Scott Free and others, and Tony Scott directed the first episodes of the two seasons. It's an anthology show, so has a "host" — in the first season Terrence Stamp, in the second David Bowie. The show can currently be seen on Freevee, Amazon's ad-supported channel.

There are many reasons I should have known about this show, but I did not have a tv from 1994 to 2008, so most shows from those years are ones I am unfamiliar with if I did not catch up on them later or have friends who insisted I come over and watch them at the time (and that was basically just Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica; understandably, friends obsessed with one became obsessed with the other). Still, I am quite shocked that I didn't know until this week that Tony Scott directed an adaptation of Robert Aickman's "The Swords".

That's right. Tony Scott directed an adaptation of Robert Aickman's "The Swords".

Robert Aickman is one of my favorite writers, someone whose work I've been obsessed with since I first encountered it in David Hartwell's anthology The Dark Descent when I was in high school (it was a cherished Christmas present, the price of which I always remember because my parents couldn't believe a book could cost $30). "The Swords" is in The Dark Descent along with two other Aickman tales (including "The Hospice", perhaps his most famous, and "Larger Than Oneself"). Thus, it was one of the first Aickman stories I read. I remember being fascinated and perplexed by all three stories, none of which I found satisfying — I still considered Stephen King the height of achievement in horror — and yet I also knew there was something there. This sense was aided by Hartwell's story introductions. He writes that "The Swords" is "a story of male sexual initiation in which the overt is transformed into the absurd and the surreal, a fantastic language. The effect is unusually powerful and horrifying, complex and devastating, and darkly humorous, because the reader is aware of so much more than the character. Aickman's work is perhaps best called symbolist."

I wrote about Aickman for Electric Literature in 2016 and I created a video essay about Tony Scott when he died in 2012. The importance of both Aickman and Scott for me only continues to grow.

And what do we make of Tony Scott and Robert Aickman together? Not an obvious pairing, that's for sure! I think Aickman would have perhaps appreciated elements of Scott's film The Hunger, but I'm quite sure he would not have appreciated Scott's frenetic later style nor what Scott did with "The Swords".

Nevertheless, I think Scott did a nice job capturing some of the weirdness and eroticism of the story, and I enjoyed the updating to late '90s London. Because of that updating, in some ways Scott's version of "The Swords" feels more dated than Aickman's, because Scott really leaned in to the particular sounds and visions of the milieu. Additionally, Scott didn't have the technological and budgetary resources of his feature films, so the style of cinematography and editing feels very video — both music video and video as a tool — which places it very much in a specific era, one now distant and easy to feel superior to, but since I have fond feelings for that bygone era, these qualities only enhanced my appreciation for the episode. And I always love some bleach-haired nasty gays.

"The Swords" is very minor Tony Scott, and more shallow than Aickman's story, but it is nonetheless effective for what it is and, I think, worth watching.

Sonya Taaffe recently wrote wonderfully about another episode in the show, the 2nd season adaptation of Tanith Lee's vampire tale "Nunc Dimittis". I also watched (and enjoyed) that one, and I think Sonya's take on it is quite right. It was a nice opportunity to go back to Lee's story, as well, which is a marvel.

I have only watched a couple other episodes of The Hunger, and the quality varies quite a bit, but it's interesting to note some of the writers whose work they adapted in addition to Aickman and Lee: Gemma Files, Graham Masterton, David J. Schow, Lisa Tuttle, Karl Edward Wagner, Ramsey Campbell, Cornell Woolrich, Harlan Ellison...

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