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‘A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night’: A Vampire with No Name

Enter The Girl, a mostly silent observer to the rotting underbelly of Bad City. She shares a kinship with the likes of Shane and The Man with No Name — a hero with mysterious origins and questionable morality who ultimately defends those who cannot help themselves. … Once The Girl arrives, it’s essentially Amirpour’s playground as she honors and subverts Westerns and horror films.

This guest post written by Samantha Cross appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

The vampire as metaphor has had a fascinating staying power since Bram Stoker’s Dracula turned Eastern European folklore into a gothic tale of sexual repression and liberation. At times, vampires are feral beasts of horror or sexy, brooding heroes tortured by their own immortality. Or… Twilight. The point is that vampires, while we may associate them with certain traits, can be as powerful, vulnerable, and insightful as the narrative allows. Their monstrosity is subjective, giving storytellers ample room to explore the nature of vampires and the worlds they inhabit. In A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour crafts a vampire that is neither virtuous nor villain, but somewhere in between. Though she is what we would typically classify as a “monster,” it becomes clear that Bad City has more than its fair share of demons.

Billed as “the first Iranian vampire Western,” A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night exists in a deliberately nebulous space, keeping it open to interpretation. One can view it through a feminist lens as The Girl (Sheila Vand) primarily attacks men who bully and exert their own power on others, mainly coming to the defense of a sex worker, Atti (Mozhan Marnò), who’s connected to both Saeed (Dominic Rains) the local drug dealer and Arash’s (Arash Marandi) father who struggles with addiction, Hossein (Marshall Manesh). There’s also commentary to be gleaned from the frequent shots of oil rigs, the open, almost casual display of dead bodies in a ditch, and the stagnant feel of Bad City that appears to be stuck in several time periods as the director’s feelings on Iran and the country’s culture. Amirpour, however, finds the interpretation to be more reflective of the interpreter. As for her own view on the themes in her film, she told the Los Angeles Times:

“In this case, it’s really about loneliness. A vampire is the loneliest, most isolated cut-off type of creature. She also has something very bad to hide about who she is and it’s a brilliant disguise. It becomes a way to stay under the radar and underestimated. There are a million ways to read it. It will tell you more about you than it does about me.”

Upon a second viewing of the film, through my most critical eye (the left one), I think Amirpour’s ideas of loneliness, coupled with the elements of disguise and isolation, fit in perfectly with what should be called an “industrial” Western. Like John Ford, Amirpour uses her wide shots to establish the vast landscape of the film’s world, but instead of lush valleys and sweeping canyons we get a flat, barren desert where oil rigs have replaced the painted hills. We’re not meant to look upon Bad City and its surroundings with awe. We’re meant to understand how singular it is, a mirage of a vibrant city filled with vagrants and criminals who prey upon the less fortunate; a place where everyone who can is trying to get out of Dodge by any means necessary. Basic setup for your Magnificent Sevens, Silverados, or Unforgivens, right?

Enter The Girl, a mostly silent observer to the rotting underbelly of Bad City. She shares a kinship with the likes of Shane and The Man with No Name — a hero with mysterious origins and questionable morality who ultimately defends those who cannot help themselves. It’s a slow buildup to her first appearance in the movie, roughly fifteen minutes, but Amirpour devotes that time to crafting the right circumstances for The Girl to enter and sets up how one decision leads the rest of the film onward.

One such means of exploration is through a tried-and-true staple of Westerns: the standoff. The highlight of many films, it can be as simple as a duel at high noon or as action-packed as a ragtag group of hired guns staring down another group of hired guns for possession of a small town. It’s a moment of tension designed to make the payoff, ya know, killing someone, that much more intense. Amirpour flips the script, so to speak, using the standoff for the deliberate purpose of taunting The Girl’s potential victims as well as the audience. She establishes a pattern early on: observe, follow, and strike. The cover of night adds to the horror element and the heightened sound makes her footsteps audible, but The Girl stays far enough away that her marks are unnerved just enough by her presence. I’m especially fond of her shadow game with Hossein. It’s humorous but still cut with the right amount of suspicion over how it will play out given her previous encounter with Saeed earlier in the film. It’s only when she’s ready to strike that the gap closes and the standoff ends. The kill becomes an intimate yet feral moment because, unlike her male counterparts who brandish guns at a distance, The Girl’s sole weapon is her own body.

The standoff within A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night also applies to Amirpour’s use of close-ups. A lot of time is spent in keeping the tension as tight as possible, especially once we know The Girl’s game and how she executes her brand of “justice.” Because The Girl is a taciturn character, the emotional beats and her contemplative nature have to be seen up close, which, in turn, heightens the anxiety of the scene even more. The intimacy of the shots between The Girl and Arash are rife with romantic tension, but there’s a similar feeling of dread as the camera cuts back and forth. Her proximity may very well mean death for the second party. It’s a standoff created by the camera, somewhat reminiscent of Sergio Leone, but Amirpour relies more on letting the takes breathe instead of intensive cutting, letting Vand and Marandi’s eyes convey far more than the dialogue.

In many ways, The Girl resembles a comic book vigilante as much as a cowboy anti-hero. I mean, come on; a silent avenger of the night draped in black who inspires as much fear as the monsters she fights? Where have I seen that before? Batman, obviously. The heroic element was not lost on Amirpour either, though her inspiration came more from The Girl’s choice of costume:

“In Iran, I have had to wear a hijab [headscarf], and personally I find it completely suffocating. I don’t want to be covered up in all that cloth. But there was something about the chador though. It’s made of a different fabric. It’s soft and silky and it catches the air. When I put it on, I felt supernatural. But I also get to take it off.”

The themes of disguise and concealment are as endemic to Westerns as they are to superheroes. Cinematic cowboys are always running from something — the law, their past — so remaking themselves and hiding from their previous actions requires some measure of disguise, whether it’s a new name or a handy little domino mask. Either way, the conclusion is the same: you can never truly escape who you are. The Girl goes through a similar struggle. Atti asks The Girl, after a very strange conversation, “What are you?” Amirpour then cuts to The Girl back on the streets, seemingly contemplating this question, as she slowly approaches and feeds on a homeless man. It’s not the subtlest piece of character development, but it serves to address the supposed virtue of the The Girl. Stalking the villains of Bad City is easy enough, but what’s a vampire to do when they’re not readily available?

The Girl, for all intents and purposes, is hiding from herself. The chador acts as her cape and cowl but it’s also a line of demarcation. When she walks the streets of Bad City, she’s a shadow, a spectre haunting the less than savory elements of the city. When she takes off the chador, she’s a seemingly young woman who finds solace in sad songs and dances to synth-pop surrounded by musical icons. Her hunger and the nature of that hunger are never addressed until it begins to conflict with the small yet complicated entanglements known as human relationships. As a side note, when The Girl and Arash meet and speak to each other for the first time, Arash – high as a kite – is wearing a Dracula costume from a party. It’s a brilliant juxtaposition that the two begin to form their romance when both are essentially in disguise. And it’s probably my favorite scene in the movie.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, is still well worth your time if you have any interest in the work of upcoming directors like Amirpour or desire something more substantial from your vampire-themed entertainment. There are also two issues of a comic book written by Amirpour available for purchase that give you some background on The Girl.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Scares Us

Feminist Fangs: The Activist Symbolism of Violent Vampire Women

10 Women-Directed Films for Halloween

Samantha “Sam” Cross is best described as a poly-geek, soaking up as much information as possible to better appreciate the things she loves. An archivist by trade, she’s also a fan of comic books, movies, music, and television, never shying away from talking about or analyzing pop culture minutiae. You can listen to her as the host of That Girl with the Curls podcast where she chats about her pop culture obsession in the company of friends or with special guests. Follow her @darling_sammy on Twitter.

‘A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night’ and Scares Us

This repost by Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

Nice girls aren’t supposed to walk alone in the dark, even in the movies. So in the generically titled A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, the debut feature from writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour, we in the audience wonder what a woman in a black cloak (a traditional Iranian garment called a chador) is doing on the streets of a largely empty desert town in the wee hours. We see her witness a pimp (Dominic Rains) exploit and then cheat a sex worker (Mozhan Marnò). We soon find out the woman in the chador, The Girl–we never find out her name (played, unforgettably, by Sheila Vand) is no ordinary woman, but a vampire with fangs that retract like a cat’s claws–or a switchblade.

The film takes place in a parallel California which contains a Farsi-speaking, Iranian enclave called “Bad City.” We know we’re not in Iran because the pimp has visible tattoos and later we see a woman in public with her hair and much of her body uncovered. Also The Girl wears her chador in such a way that we see her hipster, stripey, boat shirt (too short for modest dress) and skinny jeans underneath.

In spite of its surface differences, the film to which Girl has the greatest parallel is probably David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Like that film, every sumptuous, black and white shot is framed and lit with care, creating an alternate universe for the audience to lose themselves in. And as in Eraserhead, even what we hear is fussed over in a way that grabs our attention: incidental sounds are recorded close. The proximity doesn’t alienate us, the way less skillful dubbing in other films often does, but gives us a heightened sense of intimacy, as if we are almost touching the characters.

When The Girl interrogates The Street Urchin (a young boy played by Milad Eghbali) the film shows a truth that many films, including horror films, elide–but that the other recent acclaimed horror film directed by a woman, The Babadook, also addresses–the first person who scares us when we are children is often a woman, whether it’s a mother or another woman authority figure. Tilda Swinton has said that her character in Snowpiercer was based on a particularly terrifying nanny from her own childhood. Few lines in films this year have been more chilling than the one The Girl leaves The Street Urchin with after she threatens him: “Be a good boy.”

Like Michael Almereyda, who, in the ’90s made a stylish black and white film about a woman vampire among New York hipsters, Nadja (its star, Elina Löwensohn, had eyes you couldn’t look away from, much like Vand’s) Amirpour combines familiar elements in an unfamiliar way for maximum resonance. In Almereyda’s modern day New York Hamlet (from 2000), he famously incorporated a video of Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh talking about “being” in the background of a scene, priming us to later hear Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy.

In Girl Amirpour gets at how women in modest Muslim dress (including those from Iran) are used for xenophobic and anti-Islamic fear-mongering (often in the guise of “feminism”) in the US (like in the recent ad campaign for Homeland) but also uses a chador’s resemblance to a cape to give us an eerily familiar–but new–“Dracula” silhouette. When The Girl rides on the skateboard The Street Urchin leaves behind (after he runs away from her in terror) the chador billows around her as she rolls down the road, and she becomes, without CGI trickery, a bat in flight.

Americans often read chador on women to mean vulnerability, but like the frail-seeming, pale, young, blonde Mae in another beautifully-shot, vampire Western (also directed by a woman, the pre-Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow) 1987’s Near Dark, who, when her cowboy boyfriend lassoes her as a “joke” takes hold of the rope and pulls him in, The Girl has hidden reserves of strength. The Girl becomes an avenging angel in black, attacking the men we see abuse women, using her “traditional” quiet passivity to draw these guys close. As the abusive men do with the cat who is many times in the frame (rarely has a filmmaker caught how much of our daily lives our animals witness) they ascribe motivations and personas to The Girl which are more about their own perceptions than about who she is or what she is thinking.

Like a number of films Girl has an early scene, fast becoming a campy cliché, in which a woman suggestively sucks the finger of a man. But when The Girl takes the pimp’s forefinger into her mouth, he gets more than he bargained for.

And as we do with Mae, we see that The Girl is lonely, and a hapless, good-looking guy, Arash, played by Arash Marandi touches something in her. When they meet, he’s coming from a costume party where he’s taken some of the club drugs he was dealing and is still wearing a vampire cape as he stares into a street light. She immediately becomes protective of him.

Vand’s presence burns through the screen. She has the intensity of the great silent actresses–and in many of her scenes, the ones in her room plastered with ’80s music posters, dancing by herself to Farsi synth-pop records or even when she interacts with other characters, she often does not speak. This film is low on back story but Vand’s face, especially her huge dark eyes (we see her put on her heavy eyeliner in the bathroom mirror before she goes out) tells us what she is feeling in every scene.

Amirpour’s camera (the magnificent cinematography is by Lyle Vincent) lingers over Arash’s beauty–his high cheekbones and large, long-lashed eyes under a dark, curly version of James Dean’s pompadour–in a way few male filmmakers would. His clothes (a plain white t-shirt and jeans that hug his muscled body) also evoke Dean’s. And even though the pimp, Saeed, is a villain, meant to repel us, Amirpour lets us take in the attractiveness of his body, especially in a shirtless scene with The Girl when his pants hang very low and we see the full extent of his tattoos–and his muscles.

LA has enough Iranian-Americans in it that some have nicknamed it “Tehrangeles” (after Iran’s capital), but I can’t think of another film produced near there (Girl was actually filmed in Bakersfield) in which most (or all) of the cast is of Persian descent, but no one is a terrorist or a relic from the old country. These characters speak Farsi to each other but, except for Arash’s father, with his drug addiction and collection of pre-revolutionary framed photos of family (complete with 60s-style teased hair on the women), these people aren’t living in the past–even The Girl’s retro record collection, clothes and bobbed hair reflect present-day fashion.

We can never know for sure, but just as with Black actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw giving two terrific, completely different star-turns in movies in one year but the media still largely ignoring her, I wonder if Amirpour’s flawless visual sense, skill with actors and unique reworking of a genre many of us thought didn’t have an original angle left would garner more attention if she were a white guy. Girl is distributed in partnership with VICE‘s film arm and has even made some year-end, top-10 lists, but I had to go to New York to see it and whole countries (like Canada) have yet to get even limited distribution. Nevertheless Amirpour continues to work on films unimpeded. Her next work is about cannibals. I can’t wait until its release.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YGmTdo3vuY” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

‘A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night’ and Scares Us

Nice girls aren’t supposed to walk alone in the dark, even in the movies. So in the generically titled ‘A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night,’ the debut feature from writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour we in the audience wonder what a woman in a black cloak (a traditional Iranian garment called a chador) is doing on the streets of a largely empty desert town in the wee hours. We see her witness a pimp (Dominic Rains) exploit and then cheat a sex worker (Mozhan Marnò). We soon find out the woman in the chador, The Girl–we never find out her name (played, unforgettably, by Sheila Vand) is no ordinary woman, but a vampire with fangs that retract like a cat’s claws–or a switchblade.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YGmTdo3vuY”]

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