by M. Keith Booker and Isra Daraiseh
According to Farshid Kazemi, the title of first Iranian vampire film should rightly go to Mustafa Usku’i’s 1967 film Zan-e khun asham, or “The Female Vampire” (2021, 39). But that film was released in the very different times of the pre-revolutionary Pahlavi regime, during which Western vampire films were also widely available for viewing in Iran. Since the 1979 revolution, vampire narratives have hardly constituted a prominent part of Iranian culture, though there are some key examples of recent works by Iranian directors living outside of Iran. Indeed, the Persian-language film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)—written and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour, who was born in Britain to Iranian parents, but grew up in the U.S. and learned her craft at UCLA film school—has been one of the most talked-about vampire films of the twenty-first century. Meanwhile, Babak Ansari’s British-produced Under the Shadow (2016), which has frequently been compared with A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, has also drawn considerable attention as a sort of vampire adjacent film in which the supernatural menace is provided by a djinn. Finally, “Iranian” vampires have also figured in some recent television series, from both America and Iran itself.
Iranian Vampires on TV
One of the most prominent vampires in recent popular culture is an Iranian vampire, suggesting significant historical links between Iran and vampire-like figures. The highly successful American comedy series What We Do in the Shadows (2019–2024) ran for six seasons on the FX network, featuring a group of vampires who are led (at least according to him) by one “Nandor the Relentless” (Kayvan Novak), a 760-year-old vampire who had once been the ruthless ruler of the fictional kingdom of Al-Quolanudar in what is now southern Iran, as well as a fierce Ottoman warrior. Nandor has more than a bit of trouble understanding the contemporary culture of Staten Island, where the vampires now live, and much of the humor of the series deals with the culture clash between the vampires and the human society around them. However, the series develops this “immigrant” humor regarding Nandor’s background quite skillfully, never reducing him to a mere ethnic stereotype. Placing his origins in a distant (and seemingly exotic) kingdom does help to establish his fundamental Otherness, but the evil-but-oddly-loveable Nandor is not used to satirize Iran or Iranians, except to the extent that much of his behavior would be abhorrent to the contemporary Iranian powers-that-be.
The repressive nature of the current regime in Iran has had a chilling effect on the once-proud Iranian film industry, sending much of the country’s cinematic talent into exile. Among other things, the militant prudishness of the regime makes the production of effective vampire films and television series extremely difficult, given the air of sensuality and decadence that so often pervades such narratives. Still, the Iranian TV film Derakula (2016, directed by Reza Attaran) does address a number of contemporary Iranian social issues through a retelling of the vampire story in a mode that often anticipates the comedy of What We Do in the Shadows, though it does deliver a serious pro-Iranian, anti-Western political message.
In Derakula. Attaran himself plays Javad, a young man who lives in the suburbs of Tehran with his wife and young daughter. Javad’s situation as an unemployed drug addict in the suburbs of Tehran acknowledges some of the serious economic and societal problems that plague the Iranian capital, though his situation soon changes when he is abducted by Masoud (Levan Haftvan), an Iranian vampire. Held captive, Javad attempts to get the upper hand over Masoud by feeding him drugs, in the hope that his lust for blood will be replaced by a lust for the drugs. As Simon Bacon notes, Javad’s world is constructed through a series of recognizable images and tropes that make his life seem very ordinary to Iranian audiences of the film, while the vampire is constructed as an alien Other, specifically associated with “outside vampiric influences from the West” (Bacon 2021, 18). In particular, this film was able to get by the strict censorship exercised by the Iranian regime on all media by suggesting that the social problems it explores in Tehran are directly caused by the corrupting influence of such outside forces. In particular, the film suggests that Javad’s unemployment is a result of damage done to the Iranian economy by U.S.-led sanctions.
The stark contrast between the everyday domestic Iranian world of Javad and the extreme, almost surreal world of Masoud is a key to the impact of this film, which (by associating the vampire with the West) suggests the insubstantiality, unreality, and menace of life in a Western world driven by a capitalist drive for profit, unmoored (from an official Iranian point of view) from any moral basis. It also suggests, in a sort of reverse Orientalism (one might say “Occidentalism”[1]), a binary opposition between the “authentic” world of postrevolutionary Iran (driven primarily by Islamist piety) and the corrupt world of the decadent West (driven primarily by the seductive, but misleading images of Western popular culture). Indeed, as Bacon notes, this film goes out of its way to associate the vampire with Western popular culture, as when it features a montage of images of Christopher Lee’s cinematic Dracula, along with images from other Western, “B-movie films” (Bacon 2021, 20). In any case, this film demonstrates, among other things, the malleability of the vampire narrative and its ability to be put to a variety of narrative purposes, allegorical or otherwise.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
The reverse Orientalism of Derakula opposes a long Orientalist tradition of associating vampires with the decadent exoticism of the East, a trend that goes back at least to the beginning of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), when Jonathan Harker describes his travel through Budapest and into the land of Dracula as a transit from the West to the East, from civilized Europe into the dark realms of former Turkish rule. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night also challenges this Orientalist tradition but in a more complex way that breaks down the polar opposition between East and West altogether. At the same time, A Girl almost revels in Western popular culture, in that sense making it the virtual opposite of Derakula, which was first broadcast only two years later. A Girl was something of a sensation, gaining widespread critical attention that made it the first Iranian-focused vampire film to gain such attention in the West.
Given the multicultural background of director Amirpour, as well as certain characteristics of the film itself, A Girl is an excellent illustration of the international texture of contemporary cinematic culture. Indeed, the film is centrally concerned with cross-cultural dialogues between the West and the Middle East. Set in a sort of alternate universe that draws upon both East and West, this film takes place in an underground dystopian city simply called “Bad City,” whose blighted black-and-white urban landscape might equally well be set in Iran or Southern California. Meanwhile, A Girl engages with Western popular culture in ways that are not entirely negative and that are much more nuanced than Derakula’streatment of that culture as the embodiment of capitalist decadence—even if their capitalist cities seem to be emblems of postmodern decadence and decay in general. In the case of A Girl, however, this function of the city is made more complex by the fact that Bad City, from its name on down, is an overtly allegorical construction that does not correspond to any specific real-world place.The characters in the film all speak Persian, and road signs and other linguistic markers are in that language as well. Otherwise, however, there are few geographical indications, and, if the film is seen to be taking place in Iran, it is a distinctively other-worldly Iran that has relatively little in common with the Iran of our world. It could be nearly anywhere and, especially given the black-and-white aesthetic of the cinematography, combined with the seedy nature of the city and the events that take place in it, it really looks more like a city out of film noir (perhaps as filtered through David Lynch) than like a city in Iran.[2] Actually, Bad City is reminiscent more than anything of the Sin City of Frank Miller’s graphic novels of that title—and especially of the 2005 film directed by Robert Rodriguez and Miller, a film that was itself heavily influenced by film noir.
One of the most important influences exerted by film noir was its strong impact on the films of the French New Wave, a movement whose look is also overtly recalled by that of A Girl. The New Wave is evoked in A Girl a number of ways, in fact, as when the male lead Arash (Arash Marandi) effects some of the world-weary coolness of Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard’s classic À bout de souffle (“Breathless,” 1960), though with a hint of James Dean thrown in for good measure. Meanwhile, the female lead, simply identified as The Girl (Sheila Vand), wears (beneath her chador) very Western-style clothing that indicates her multicultural nature. In particular, she a striped shirt that seems to have been borrowed from Jean Seberg’s character, also from Breathless. Then again, given that chador and given the use of Persian as the film’s language, the Iranian New Wave is evoked, as well as the French New Wave. A Girl is, in fact, very much a film about film—so much so that Eddy Moretti (CEO of Vice Media, which picked up distribution of the film after its debut at the Sundance Film Festival) has declared Amirpour to be the next Quentin Tarantino, a filmmaker known for the violence, cool music, and knowing references to other films that inform his own films (Beer 2014). A Girl has all of these characteristics as well, so the Tarantino comparison might be apt, even if Amirpour is yet to have the track record to fully bear out the prediction (made by an executive, after all, who was responsible for marketing the film).
Vice Media’s own promotion of A Girl, for example, described it as a “joyful mash-up of genre, archetype, and iconography,” arguing that “its prolific influences span spaghetti westerns, graphic novels, novels, horror films, and the Iranian New Wave” (Meyer 2022). Much of Tarantino’s work might be similarly described, while another prominent filmmaker whose work is informed by cool music and knowing references to other films (with perhaps more than a touch of violence thrown in as well) is Jim Jarmusch, to whom Amirpour has also been compared. Writing a review along with Mahnolo Dargis in The New York Times, A. O. Scott has argued that the “anger” of A Girl “is balanced by a Jim Jarmusch-like cool and by a disarmingly innocent outlaw romanticism” (2014).
Interestingly, the use of a vampire film to challenge Orientalist binarism was also an important feature of Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festivalin May of 2013, only months before the premiere of A Girl at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2014. In addition, A Girl’s Bad Cityis somewhat reminiscent of the ruined Detroit of Only Lovers. Indeed, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock’s comparative reading of these two films pivots crucially on their parallel urban settings, concluding that “the trick of both Only Lovers Left Alive and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is to make the vampiric taking of blood seem preferable to capitalist creation of human misery as it reduces once vibrant cities to cities of the dead” (2022, 115). A Girl resembles Only Lovers in other ways, as well.[3] Both films, for example, are constructed by similar techniques of bricolage and both feature central vampire characters who not only suck blood but also seem to suck up virtually any artifact that comes along in their quest to feed an insatiable culture lust. In this sense, Krumholz has noted the similarities between Only Lovers and A Girl, focusing especially on the way in which Amirpour’s Girl resembles Jarmusch’s vampires Adam and Eve in her accumulation of bits and pieces of culture, though Krumholz also correctly notes that Jarmusch’s vampires are a bit more discerning in their taste than is Amirpour’s.
Krumholz also notes that the projects of cultural accumulation (the rooms where Adam and The Girl spend most of their time are virtual museums) might be considered obsolete in the digital age, where sites such as YouTube make such museum-like collections easily available to all. It is certainly not insignificant in this sense that Adam seems to have such low regard for Youtube. The Girl is not a producer of music, but simply a consumer, and her tastes are quite democratic and eclectic—like the soundtrack of the film in which she appears. At one point late in the film, Arash asks the girl what was the last song she listened to. She says it was “Hello,” by Lionel Ritchie. He responds as if he pities her, then plays “Khabnama” (by the British/Iranian rock band Radio Tehran) for her on the radio in his sporty American car (a 1950s-era Thunderbird) that is a crucial element of the entire story. Music is a crucial element as well, and this scene indicates, among other things, the combination of American and Iranian culture that is so central to the texture of this film.
Interestingly enough, the most important element of the eclectic soundtrack involves the five tracks supplied by the Portland, Oregon-based band Federale, which specializes in “Spaghetti Western” music inspired by the scores of Ennio Morricone for any number of Italian-made Westerns. The centrality of this music to the film explains the mention of the Spaghetti Western genre in Vice’s promotions for the film, though in point of fact the film itself has virtually nothing to do with that genre. On the other hand, one could argue that this music fits in very well with the rest of A Girl—precisely because it seemingly doesn’t fit in. After all, the entire film seems to have been constructed through the juxtaposition of disparate elements, of which the intermingling of elements from Iranian and American culture would seem to be the central instance. Thus, while one could argue that the Spaghetti Western music is simply tossed in as part of an effort to seem surprising and cool, one could argue that the choice was an excellent (and carefully calculated) one, very much along the lines of the use of rockabilly music in Only Lovers Left Alive. Thus, much of the effectiveness of the score comes from the use of the Federale tracks and from the fact that, on a superficial level, they so clearly do not match the rest of A Girl. This rather Brechtian mismatch creates a sort of cognitive estrangement that contributes to the haunting and other-worldly atmosphere that pervades the film.
This atmosphere might also be described as one of decadence and decay. Bad City is indeed in bad shape, but it has probably seen better days. The buildings seem old, run-down, and generally in a state of disrepair, while the prominently-featured shots of pumping oil wells suggest the extent to which oil has disrupted the history of modern Iran and the history of the modern world in general, playing a central role in the global deterioration of the environment. Oil, we all know, has played a central role in the advance of capitalist modernization over the past century, but it is an advance that has been paid for dearly, in both environmental and political terms. Meanwhile, the presence of oil in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East has been responsible more than anything else for stimulating interactions between the West and the Middle East, but those interactions have not, by and large, been pretty.
More than anything, of course, the air of decadence with which A Girl is so saturated is produced by the plot itself, as when we are introduced early on to the fact that Arash’s father Hossein (Marshall Manesh) is a heroin addict who has, as a result of his drug habit, fallen under the sway of the smarmy pusher-pimp Saaed (Dominic Rains), surely the most decadent (and despicable) figure in the entire film. The drug motif plays a central role in the plot of A Girl and resonates with the very real drug problem in postrevolutionary Iran, a situation that would be central to Derakula only a couple of years later (while drugs are also important in Only Lovers Left Alive, as well as many other vampire films).When Hossein is unable to pay his debt to Saeed, the pusher insists on taking Arash’s beloved car in payment, driving Arash (a relatively decent figure, by the standards of Bad City) to try to buy back the car by stealing a pair of expensive earrings from the sexy (but decidedly decadent) young rich woman who employs him as a handyman.
Before Arash can try to get the car, however, we observe Saeed abusing Atti (Mozhan Marnò), a prostitute who works for him. This film puts a strong emphasis on gender, and its very title calls attention to the endangered situation of women the world over, a situation that The Girl overtly attempts to oppose. Thus, after observing Saaed’s mistreatment of Atti, The Girl decides to seek vengeance in keeping with her tendency to use her vampire powers to correct abuses, especially against women.
In this use of her vampire powers to wreak vengeance on men who have abused women, The Girl resembles Vera in the 2008 Swedish vampire film Not Like Others, though she also recalls the way the vampire of the much-admired Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In (2008) saves a small boy from bullies. Meanwhile, the Girl goes to Saeed’s lavishly, but tackily, decorated apartment, which is something along the lines of the home of James Franco’s Alien in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012), a character who might, in fact, have exerted some influence on the construction of Saaed’s character.[4] Saaed, despite being truly repulsive, seems to think that (in the topsy-turvy world of Bad City) he is irresistible to women, so he immediately sets about trying to seduce The Girl.
At first, she seems to go along, erotically sucking on his finger when he offers it to her in an imitation of oral sex. However, it comes as no surprise to anyone (except Saeed) when she suddenly extends her vampire teeth and bites the finger clean off. The referent here would seem to be to the folk tradition of the vagina dentata, in which rapists and other evil men are in danger of being emasculated during sex by a tooth-filled vagina. This legend hovers in the background of A Girl throughout, with obvious relevance to this story of a female vampire who uses her teeth to extract revenge against men who abuse women. In this sense, another of the many cinematic predecessors to A Girl would have to be Mitchell Lichtenstein’s Teeth (2007), which draws upon the vagina dentata legend more directly.
After biting off the finger, The Girl goes for the throat, as it were, and quickly kills Saeed altogether, pausing to steal his expensive but gaudy jewelry before she exits. Arash arrives at the apartment soon afterward, finding Saeed’s body. Conditions in Bad City being what they are, Arash matter-of-factly dumps the body, takes back his car, and also absconds with Saeed’s cash and supply of drugs, some of which he conveys to Hossein and some of which he uses to assume Saeed’s role as the local pusher.
In this role, Arash soon finds himself attending a costume party in a raunchy dance club that recalls the Detroit club of Only Lovers Left Alive. Tellingly, Arash attends the party dressed as Dracula, a motif that adds considerable ironic humor when he later (having taken one of the Ecstasy pills he had been selling in the club) encounters The Girl on the street. This costuming also helps to make The Girl and Arash a vampire couple of sorts, enabling a romance between them that in some ways recalls the one between Adam and Eve in Only Lovers. Realizing that Arash is impaired, The Girl helps him back to his apartment, where she is tempted to bite him as well, but refrains, given her preference only to attack men who have abused women. This motif is then emphasized later when she bites and kills Hossein after he has forced Atti (of whom he has apparently long been a client) to shoot up heroin with him against her will.[5]
In the end, Arash asks The Girl to leave Bad City with him, even though he is aware (or at least strongly suspects) that she killed his father. She packs up her treasure of stolen jewelry, grabs Arash’s cat (which has circulated throughout the film), and they all drive away together in the Thunderbird, leaving Bad City in a scene in which headlights playing on the highway ahead of them are reminiscent of similar scenes that are prominent in Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997). Arash and The Girl seem set for a long life together, though perhaps less in the mode of Jarmusch’s Adam and Eve than in that of the vampire girl who leaves town with her human “boyfriend” at the end of Let the Right One In.
Under the Shadow: The Vampire and the Djinn
The Iranian-born academic Hamid Dabashi (who now lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University) has described the thrill he experienced growing up in prerevolutionary Iran and discovering the power of cinema to evoke true fear through the Hammer Horror films featuring Christopher Lee as Dracula, beginning with the 1958 Dracula, thus anticipating the use of Lee as a figure of Western popular culture in Derakula. To the impressionable young Dabashi, Lee’s especially menacing Dracula brought a new power to cinema he had never before experienced:
Before Dracula ascended on our horizons in Iran, like a bat out of nowhere (no one knew where this scary place “Transylvania” actually was), the mysterious supernatural creatures called “Jinn” were all we worried about.
Jinns were supposed to come out of thin air and steal children, or creep into them and occupy their bodies. Jinns were as scared of the word “bismellah” (in the name of God) as Dracula was from the sight of a cross. But that was where the similarities ended. Jinns were harmless pets compared to Count Dracula.
Ansari’s Under the Shadow, released a year after Dabashi’s article,might beg to differ on the non-frightening nature of the djinn, a figure from pre-Islamic and then Islamic mythology that has recently made a number of inroads into horror film. For example, the Emirati horror film Djinn (2013), from imported American horror director Tobe Hooper, is a fairly overt ripoff of Rosemary’s Baby (1968), with Satan’s son replaced by an infant djinn. Meanwhile, in the 2021 American film of the same title, a young boy is threatened by a djinn, introducing a theme that resonates with Under the Shadow, in which a young girl is apparently threatened by a djinn, and perhaps even intermittently possessed by it.
While not a vampire film proper, Under the Shadow is the film that comes closest to being a followup to A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, in that it is a sort of vampire adjacent film in which the supernatural menace is provided by a djinn. Djinns, meanwhile, have a number of characteristics in common with vampires, serving some of the same symbolic functions. For example, in G. Willow Wilson’s novel Alif the Unseen (winner of the 2013 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel), the character Vikram is clearly identified as a djinn but is frequently called a vampire in the text. In fact, in an appendix to Alif the Unseen, Wilson defines the five different types of djinn, of which Vikram is clearly a “Vetala,” a type of djinn identified by Wilson as “the original vampires” (439). Wilson also refers to the Baital Pachisi, a classic Indian collection of stories that includes one sequence entitled “The Vampire and King Vikram.”
A British film that was made in Jordan by an exiled Iranian filmmaker, Under the Shadow is set in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980–1988. Indeed, the very real problems of life in postrevolutionary Iran during the war provide as much horror for the film’s central character, Shideh (Narges Rashidi), as does the supernatural threat of the Djinn. Shideh is a young wife and mother whom we meet in the first scene as she is informed by a patronizing male university official that her application for readmission to medical school (after a hiatus that began with the 1979 Iranian Revolution) is being denied due to her leftist political activism during the heady days of the revolution. Later, in a scene in which she rushes into the street with her young daughter Dorsa (Avin Manshadi) to escape an apparent assault by the djinn, she will be arrested and threatened with lashes for being in the street with her hair uncovered, though this time she is let off with a warning. Meanwhile, on top of these overtly political provocations, Shideh suffers more subtle insults as well, as when her husband Iraj (Bobby Naderi), himself a practicing medical doctor, subtly hints that Shideh might be better served to forget about being a medical doctor and concentrate on being a better mother. Shideh is also sometimes the recipient of disapproval from her neighbors as well, and she is depicted as a modern, Westernized woman (as when we see her exercising to a contraband Jane Fonda exercise video) who clearly finds the constraints of her life in postrevolutionary Iran galling. To add an extra complication, though, we learn that Shideh’s goal of becoming a doctor was actually her mother’s dream more than her own, while the film subtly links Shideh’s now-deceased mother to the djinn, suggesting that the djinn might be representative, among other things, of unresolved mother-daughter issues. Shideh has her own problems with Dorsa, as well, especially when the girl apparently falls under the influence of the djinn (through a mechanism that is not specified).
The central events of Under the Shadow are set in motion when an unexploded Iraqi missile lodges in the ceiling of the apartment above that of Shideh and Dorsa, suggesting the menace posed to them by the war. Significantly, the missile bears the Arabic inscription اللعنه على العدو, which translates to “a curse on our enemies.” Given that the djinn begins to menace Dorsa and Shideh soon afterward, there is a clear implication that this missile might have brought the djinn with it—with the broader allegorical implication that the long war with Iraq was a curse on Iran. At the same time, the film’s consistent focus on Shideh and Dorsa suggests that women suffer special hardships as a result of the war—and the postrevolutionary Iranian regime.
Ultimately, Shideh and Dorsa escape the apartment building and the djinn—though with the implication that it might still pose a threat to them. In the meantime, the entire texture of the film is informed by a number of fundamental interpretive uncertainties. Much of the time, reality, dreams, and hallucinations are freely intermixed, which perhaps suggests the unsteady nature of reality in postrevolutionary Iran, especially during the Iraq war. As Saljoughi notes, “There is a constant slippage between Shideh’s waking reality and her nightmares, between Dorsa as herself and Dorsa as possessed by the jinn” (2023, 133). At the same time, many aspects of this film have quite universal resonances. Shideh particularly suffers from the difficulty of being an intelligent, modern woman living in a repressive, misogynist theocracy. She also suffers from the particular circumstances of living in a war zone that is subject to constant bombing attacks. But many of the pressures to which she is subjected have to do with the psychological struggles of any mother trying to balance her desire to care for and protect her child and her need to be a person in her own right. We are thus reminded, therefore, that Iranians share a great deal with the people of the West, thus undermining Orientalist polar oppositions.
It is, indeed, Shideh’s particular position as a mother that provides most of the energy in this film, which is really more psychological horror than supernatural horror. Thus, one reason for the interpretive uncertainty that pervades this film is that Shideh is under so many pressures that the possibility that the seemingly supernatural events of the film are, in fact, a product of her own embattled psychological state. In this sense, Under the Shadow has less in common with vampire films such as A Girl Walks Home than with woman-centered horror films from around the world such as Rosemary’s Baby, Jennifer Kent’s Australian film The Babadook (2014), Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018), and Julia Ducournau’s French film Titane (2021), all of which feature supernatural threats that might, in fact, be at least partly the result of psychological pressures on their female protagonists. Critics have particularly compared Under the Shadow with The Babadook: as Saljoughi notes, Under the Shadow resembles Kent’s film in that it is “similarly preoccupied with the potential for maternal monstrosity and constructs it in part by isolating mother and a child in a bound domestic setting” (2023, 134).
Conclusion
Iran, like the rest of the Middle East, has often been associated in the Western imagination with Orientalist images of exoticism, decadence, and even depravity. Vampires, especially given the association of Dracula with a far-eastern Europe that was once a part of the Ottoman Empire, are also often associated with the East—and through similar Orientalist images. Until the 1979 revolution, though, Iran was very much a part of the global capitalist system of popular culture, and Western works (including vampire films) were widely available there. Since the revolution, the access to Western popular culture (including works featuring vampires) has been seriously curtailed, while domestic production of film and television in Iran has been heavily censored by the postrevolutionary regime. One result is a relative lack of production of vampire-based films or television series in Iran, though there have been exceptions, such as the 2016 TV film Derakula, which associates its vampire, not with the decadent East, but with the decadent (and imperialistic) West. Meanwhile, vampires with connections to Iran have continued to appear in Western popular culture, while filmmakers from Iran or with Iranian backgrounds have made some of the most interesting vampire-related films of recent years. Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home at Night (2014), with its chador-wearing feminist vampire, has drawn particularly extensive commentary, both for its challenge to conventional conceptions of gender roles and for its ability to break down the polar oppositions that have so often driven Western representations of both vampires and the Middle East. Meanwhile, Babak Ansari’s British-produced Under the Shadow (2016), which has frequently been compared with A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, has also drawn considerable attention. Here, the vampire is replaced by the Middle Eastern figure of the djinn but is used for similar symbolic purposes. In addition, this film humanizes its Iranian characters in ways that disrupt the Orientalist notion that the people of the Middle East are irreducibly alien to the West and its culture.
References
Bacon, Simon. 2021. “‘Real’ Iranian Vampires: Television Versus the Big Screen.” In Global TV Horror, edited by Stacey Abbott and Lorna Jowett. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 17–30.
Beer, Jeff. 2014. “Director Ana Lily Amirpour’s Guide to Filmmaking and ‘Back to the Future’ Approach to Creativity.” FastCompany,21 November, https://www.fastcompany.com/3038883/director-ana-lily-amirpours-guide-to-filmmaking-and-a-back-to-the-future-approach-to-creativ. Accessed 18 August 2024.
Dabashi, Hamid. 2015. “Watching Dracula in Iran.” Al Jazeera, 15 June, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/6/15/watching-dracula-in-iran. Accessed 18 August 2024.
D’Angelo, Mike. 2014. “In Jim Jarmusch’s Vampire Movie Only Lovers Left Alive, It Takes the Unearthly to Catalog Our Earthly Delights.” Nashville Scene, 8 May, https://www.nashvillescene.com/arts_culture/film_tv/in-jim-jarmuschs-vampire-movie-i-only-lovers-left-alive-i-it-takes-the-unearthly/article_afc8bec5-b8ed-51d8-b3f3-d7bccebe5180.html. Accessed 19 August 2024.
Kazemi, Farshid. 2021. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. Liverpool: Auteur-Liverpool University Press.
Meyer, Joshua. 2022. “The Inspiration Behind The Vampire In A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. SlashFilm, 1 April. https://www.slashfilm.com/796073/the-inspiration-behind-the-vampire-in-a-girl-walks-home-alone-at-night/. Accessed 19 August 2024.
Saljoughi, Sara. 2023. “A Woman Should Be Scared: Maternal Ambivalence in Under the Shadow.” Transnational Screens 14.2, 132–44.
Scott, A.O., and Manohla Dargis. 2014. “Pushing Buttons and Boundaries on Movie Screens.” New York Times, 18 March, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/19/movies/new-directors-new-films-festival-opens-with-bold-strokes.html. Accessed August 16, 2024.
Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. 2022. “Cities of the Dead: Urban Vampires in Only Lovers Left Alive and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.” In Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, edited by Stefan Rabitsch, Michael Fuchs, and Stefan L. Brandt. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 101–17.
Wilson, G. Willow. 2012. Alif the Unseen. New York: Grove Press, 2012.
Woltering, Robbert. 2011. Occidentalisms in the Arab World: Ideology and Images of the West in the Egyptian Media. London: I. B. Tauris.
NOTES
[1] There is, of course, a tradition of such Occidentalist representations of the West. See, For example, Woltering (2011).
[2] A Girl was actually filmed in Southern California—perhaps the single most common setting for film noir and for the hard-boiled detective fiction that inspired it.
[3] Only Lovers Left Alive premiered eight months before A Girl, so some direct influence is possible. Here, however, we are interested simply in the similarities between the films and not in any attribution of direct reference or influence.
[4] Interestingly, Alien’s ostentious display of “all my shit” has also been compared with the loving accumulation of things by Adam and Eve in Only Lovers, though D’Angelo notes that the vampires’ attitudes are “less narcissistic, more celebratory” than that of Alien (2014). Saeed’s gaudy collection is much more in line with that of Alien, however.
[5] In another scene, The Girl intimidates a young boy into promising to be good, suggesting that her role as a battler against the evil that men do extends to preventing that evil in the first place. On the other hand, in another scene, she attacks and feeds on a homeless man who doesn’t seem to have done anything. She is, after all, still a vampire.