Miriam Blaylock (Catherine Deneuve) is a beautiful and dangerous immortal vampire, promising specially chosen humans eternal life as her vampire lovers. As the film begins, her vampire companion is John (David Bowie), a talented cellist whom she married in 18th century France. The film opens in a night club in New York, to a live performance of Bauhaus playing "Bela Lugosi's Dead". There they connect with another young couple who are brought home and fed upon by slashing their throats with a bladed Ankh pendant. The bodies are disposed of by an incinerator in the basement of John and Miriam's elegant New York townhouse, where they pose as a wealthy couple who teach classical music. The only student shown is a young tomboy violinist named Alice Cavender (Beth Ehlers).Periodically killing and feeding upon human victims allows Miriam and John to possess eternal youth or what the latter was led to believe. Approximately 200 years after his turning, John begins suffering insomnia and ages rapidly in only a few days. John realizes that Miriam knew that this would happen and that her promise of "forever and ever" was only partially true: he will have eternal life but not eternal youth. Feeling betrayed, he seeks out the help of Dr. Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon), a gerontologist, alongside her boyfriend Tom (Cliff De Young), who specialises in studying the effects of rapid aging in primates, hoping she will be able to help reverse his accelerating decrepitude. Sarah assumes that John is a hypochondriac or mentally unbalanced and ignores his pleas for help. As John leaves the clinic in a rage, Sarah is horrified to see how rapidly he is aging. John rebuffs her once she tries to help him.After returning from the clinic, Alice drops by unexpectedly to say that she cannot attend the next day's lesson. While inside, she believes John to be his own father due to the accelerated aging. In a last attempt to regain his youth, John murders and feeds upon Alice, whom Miriam was grooming to be her next consort when she came of age, to no avail. As John's aging advances, he begs Miriam to kill him and release him from the agony of his decrepit body. Weeping, Miriam tells him that there is no release. After John collapses in the basement, Miriam carries him into the attic full of coffins and places him in one, then asks the surrounding ones to "be kind to him tonight." Like John now, Miriam's former vampire lovers are doomed to suffer an eternal living death, helplessly moaning and trapped in their coffins. Later, a police official comes to the Blaylock residence, looking for the missing Alice. Miriam feigns ignorance and claims that her husband is in Switzerland.Sarah comes looking for John at his home but only finds Miriam. With the two women feeling an attraction towards each other, Miriam acts upon this as she now feels alone after losing her lover and the young girl she was grooming. (In a memorable scene during a piano adaptation of The Flower Duet, Sarah says: "Are you making a pass at me, Mrs. Blaylock?") The two have a sexual encounter during which, without Sarah being fully aware of it, Miriam bites her arm and a blood exchange occurs in which some of Miriam's blood enters Sarah's body. Miriam attempts to initiate Sarah in the necessities of life as a vampire but Sarah is repulsed by the thought of subsisting on human blood.Sarah returns home and goes out to dinner with Tom, who becomes argumentative about her 3-hour disappearance at the Blaylock residence, of which she is strangely quiet. The next day at the lab, the team investigates Sarah's blood by Tom's authority and reveal she has some kind of infection that is taking over. Confused, Sarah returns to the Blaylock residence to confront Miriam about her sudden changes. Still reeling from the effects of her vampiric transformation, Sarah allows Miriam to put her to bed in a guest room.Shortly afterwards, Tom arrives on Miriam's doorstep, trying to find Sarah. Miriam informs him that Sarah is in the upstairs bedroom. Sarah, starving and desperate, tries to resist the urge to kill Tom but gives in to temptation, when Tom refuses to leave her side. Sarah then joins Miriam by the piano and Miriam assures her that she will soon forget what she was and come to love Miriam. As the two kiss, Sarah drives Miriam's ankh-knife into her own throat, attempting to kill herself as she forcibly holds her mouth over Miriam's mouth, forcing Miriam to ingest her blood, possibly working on a hunch regarding the "blood borne metabolic aging disease" and "host" relationship she was told about affecting her blood. Miriam carries Sarah upstairs, intending to place her with her other boxed lovers. A rumbling occurs and the mummies of Miriam's previous lovers emerge from their coffins, driving her over the edge of the balcony. As she rapidly ages, the mummies fall and become dust, ostensibly providing the trapped souls with release.As the film draws to a close, the police investigator returns only to find a real estate agent is showing the town house stripped of all possessions to prospective buyers. Sarah is now in London, standing on the balcony of a chic apartment tower (one of the three towers of the Barbican), in the company of an attractive young man and woman and is serenely admiring the gorgeous view as dusk falls. From a draped coffin in a storage room, Miriam repeatedly screams Sarah's name (an overlay of the audio from earlier in the film).Rewritten ending[edit]The final scene of Sarah on the balcony was added at the studio's behest, with a view to leaving the film open-ended and allowing for possible sequels.[2] Sarandon later expressed regret that this sequence seemed to make no sense in the context of the rest of the film: "The thing that made the film interesting to me was this question of, 'Would you want to live forever if you were an addict?' But as the film progressed, the powers that be rewrote the ending and decided that I wouldn't die, so what was the point? All the rules that we'd spent the entire film delineating, that Miriam lived forever and was indestructible, and all the people that she transformed [eventually] died, and that I killed myself rather than be an addict [were ignored]. Suddenly I was kind of living, she was kind of half dying... Nobody knew what was going on, and I thought that was a shame."[3]
Output: Question: Where does Miriam keep the bodies her rapidly aging former lovers?, Answer: in the basement