The purpose of this research is to examine the use of the recursive image of the mirror in the film The Hunger, directed by Tony Scott. The plan of the research will be to set forth a breakdown of sequences in which the image occurs and then to discuss how the recurrence of mirror imagery in the film supports its narrative structure and the manner in which the mirror images locate the film in the context of the vampire and horror cinema genre, as well as signify commentary on, quotation of, and hommage to that genre. In Bram Stoker's novel Dracula (25) and its cinematic progeny, the relationship of characters to mirrors signifies their ontological (and deontological) status. The Hunger rejects Stoker's hypothesis, instead exploiting reflective images as a device of both narrative cohesion and purposeful poetic ambiguity, all in the service of cinematic horror.
Replication takes various forms and comes in at various levels in The Hunger. At one level, it reflects and imitates the action and images of other vampire movies, from Murnau's Nosferatu through Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula. These films can be considered some versions of a "take, entering into what Eco refers to as the era of repetition (18) by way of the remake, or the "telling again [of] a previous successful story" (19). However, the multiple vampire movies can also be considered as instances of what Eco refers to as intertextual dialogue, "the phenomenon by which a given text echoes previous texts" (Eco 21). The fact that a particular vampire movie, such as The Hunger, departs from the formula is irrelevant, especially since none of the Hollywood renditions of Dracula that claim Stoker's tale as their provenance have done anything like a faithful adaptation of the novel. Thus where vampire movies are concerned, intertextuality has been a fait accompli for some time. It remains, therefore, to identify the shape that an intertextual exercise such as The Hunger takes vis-...