Lifeforce

• Cannon bankrolled it at roughly $25 million, the most money Tobe Hooper ever commanded and the studio's biggest production at the time. It earned back only about $11.6 million domestically, a flat-out box-office failure.
• Dan O'Bannon adapted Colin Wilson's 1976 novel The Space Vampires, with Don Jakoby co-writing. Cannon's Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus produced.
• John Dykstra's Apogee handled the effects, including the animatronic shriveled corpses and the energy-drain beams. For the rivers of light, Dykstra's team bounced lasers off flexible mylar and shot the spray onto a rear-projection screen.
• Mathilda May, a French actress who couldn't speak English at the time, learned her lines phonetically and is nude through nearly the entire film. She picked up English over the six months she spent filming in London.
• Henry Mancini scored it, but for TriStar's 101-minute US theatrical cut, producers had Michael Kamen add 'scarier' cues that partly replaced Mancini's work; the longer 116-minute international cut keeps Mancini's score more intact.
• Patrick Stewart, pre-Star Trek, plays asylum director Dr. Armstrong, whom the entity possesses; the role gave Stewart his first on-screen kiss (with co-star Steve Railsback), plus a notorious gore beat where a plaster cast of his head erupts blood.

The film is less a vampire picture than a study of desire as a weapon. The Space Girl never bites; she seduces, and her victims consent right up to the drain. Carlsen's psychic obsession with her, the way he keeps insisting he can feel her, reads as addiction dressed as romance, the monster as the thing you want too much to refuse.

Read it as Cold War contagion paranoia in space-vampire drag. An invisible plague spreads body to body through London, the government quarantines and incinerates, and the infected must feed or die, mirroring the AIDS-era dread brewing in 1985 around an invisible, intimacy-transmitted killer with no cure.

The shrouded-soul imagery, the energy plumes leaving the body, the cathedral finale where life-force streams up a beam of light, frames the whole thing as a literal war over souls. The 'vampires' aren't drinking blood; they're harvesting spirit, making the film closer to old-school demonic possession than to Hammer's fanged aristocrats Hooper was openly riffing on.

A joint British-American shuttle finds three naked humanoids drifting in suspended animation inside an alien craft hidden in Halley's Comet. Hauled back to London, the female specimen wakes, drains a guard to a husk, and walks out into the city stark naked and untouchable. What follows is a soul-draining plague: victims revive as desiccated corpses that must feed every two hours or crumble to dust. As the carriers turn the capital into a shambling wasteland, the shuttle's lone survivor and an SAS man chase the entity that's wearing London like a coat.