THIRST

d. Rod Hardy (1979)

The 1970s was an interesting time for Australian cinema, producing perhaps half a dozen indelibly brilliant and original films. Thirst isn’t one of them, but it is rather good, and provides an interesting and cliché avoiding half turn on the standard horror mythos, depicting vampires as a powerful, hidden class of people who have money, resources, influence and their own way of doing things, a sort of undead Illuminati. 

These vampires are bound together by blood in every way, not just through their appetites but through their family connections and hundreds of years of heritage / inbreeding (so often the same thing). The most nagging detail is that the vampires have created an industrial process to ensure they have all the blood that they need, running large dairies where listless but good looking young people have their blood drained from them on a  daily basis until they are desiccated husks. The blood is then bottled or put into cartons for consumption at breakfast. I don’t suppose it’s too much different to the Gold Top I used to drink in the 1970s, which, delicious or not, most closely resembled mucous in a glass. 

My only real concern was a technical query: if vampires are born into vampirism, and are immortal, when do they stop ageing? I mean, If David Hemmings (featured here as one of the few sympathetic characters) is going to live forever, why doesn’t he do so in his young and pretty 1960s form from, say, Eye of the Devil, rather than as he appears here: grey, a bit baggy, slightly tipsy and tired, tired, tired? 

Quiet, forceful, strange, compelling, Thirst is intriguing and interesting for most of its running time, only letting itself down with some poorly fitting fang dentures and a rather silly red eye optical effect that kicks in just before the bloodsuckers bite.