"The Hunger" received mixed reviews upon its release, with criticism given towards its pacing and plot, while being heavy on atmosphere and visuals. Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times" described the film as "an agonizingly bad vampire movie," remarking that the sex scene between Deneuve and Sarandon is effective, but that the film is so heavy on set design and scene cuts that any sense of a story is lost. In a brief review in "Rolling Stone", Michael Sragow similarly called it "A minor horror movie with a major modern-movie problem: director Tony Scott develops so many ingenious ways to illustrate his premise that there's no time left to tell a story."