The grooming of Alice is reduce quick by John, so Miriam has to race to indoctrinate Sarah, forcing the girl to kill her personal jealous boyfriend Tom (Cliff De Younger) with the promise that Sarah will quickly neglect who she was earlier than she turned a vampire. Miriam’s haste exhibits what a really insecure particular person she is, even after present as a vampire because the days of historic Egypt. Her habits is pathological: She actually can not stay in the future with no companion to eat different people alongside her with a purpose to survive. As they are saying, distress loves firm. On the finale of “The Starvation” Miriam’s centuries of victimizing others lastly come again to hang-out her, with all of her mummified former companions rising out of their coffins, their arms outstretched to engulf her. It’s a finale greater than somewhat paying homage to the notorious hallway scene in (convicted rapist) Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion,” which additionally starred Deneuve. In the long run, Miriam maddeningly rots in a coffin whereas Sarah survives, seen in London with two younger companions, a person and a girl. The cycle of grooming will certainly proceed.
Audiences witnessing the permanence of what Miriam does to her companions runs counter to what many victims have been taught simply previous to the time the film was made (earlier than the anti-rape movements of the ’70s), particularly that it was higher to cowl up traumatic occasions like assault or abuse, to suppress it and transfer on together with your life. Pedophilia in and of itself didn’t grow to be a severe public concern until the 1980s. These days the narrative has modified (albeit incrementally), and society is lastly starting to acknowledge the long-term post-traumatic hurt of surviving abuse, together with delayed recall. Displaying Sarah on the balcony of her London flat on the finish of the movie (set to Franz Schubert’s somber “Piano Trio in E-Flat,” used beforehand in “Barry Lyndon”) permits us to see a wistfulness, even an vacancy in her gaze. One may infer that the course of her life has been inexorably altered. The place as soon as she was a outstanding medical skilled and profitable author, now she is — like Miriam — utilizing music (a piano and cello are proven), style, and her female wiles to lure in her subsequent enticing victims.
The profundity of this ending is considerably tarnished by the truth that the character of Sarah was initially supposed to kill herself, refusing her personal transformation. This was modified last-minute to go away the door open for potential sequels, denying Sarah a stage of company. Susan Sarandon mentioned this within the movie’s DVD commentary:
“The factor that made the movie fascinating to me was this query of, ‘Would you need to stay perpetually should you have been an addict?’ However because the movie progressed, the powers that be rewrote the ending and determined that I would not die, so what was the purpose? All the principles that we might spent your complete movie delineating, that Miriam lived perpetually and was indestructible, and all of the people who she remodeled died, and that I killed myself reasonably than be an addict. Instantly I used to be form of residing, she was form of half dying … No one knew what was happening, and I assumed that was a disgrace.”
Whereas the unique intent might have been one factor, the ensuing ending is not a cheerful one, however reasonably an ironic one much less about habit and extra of violence begetting additional violence. One of many major functions of the horror style as an entire is to permit folks to course of worry and trauma in a protected means, and Tony Scott’s “The Starvation” helps us reckon with an insidious facet of human habits that tragically many have to hold with them eternally.
