Vampires are, in a sense, easy to do on a low budget. They’re monsters, but they look human most of the time. Just about every culture on Earth features some sort of version of the vampire story, a walking corpse that sucks the life out of living victims. Blood just happens to be the most recognizable method, at least in the West. So, really, lots of cultures should have their own vampire stories, and it doesn’t need hordes of monsters to be effective like a zombie movie generally does.
This is all to say I watched A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night which, despite filming in California, is generally seen as the first Iranian vampire movie.
Set in an unnamed city and filmed entirely in Persian, A Girl Walks Home Alone at NIght is actually something of a love story. On the one hand, there’s Arash (Arash Marandi), a young man whose prized car is confiscated when his heroin-addicted father Hossein (Marshall Manesh) can’t pay his dealer Saeed (Dominic Rains). Arash is a hard-working young man, and his opening scene shows him finding a cat and taking it home. His attempts to find an alternate payment method to get his car back may not be necessary. That’s because Saeed also meets the Girl (Sheila Vand), and the Girl seems to have two interests: pop music and draining the blood out of bad men.
The two encounter each other after Arash, high on ecstasy and dressed like Dracula for a costume party, somehow captures the nameless Girl’s affections and she decides not to drink his blood down like a vampire usually would. Arash doesn’t quite know much about the skateboarding woman in the chador head scarf, but the two seem to be falling for each other. By this point, Arash has taken to selling the drugs that he found in Saeed’s place, and the Girl is still a vampire. Can these two make it work when they find out each other’s dark secrets?
First off, this is the sort of horror movie that relies more on atmosphere than anything else. There aren’t a lot of jump scares or gore so much as slow scenes that gradually build tension until the Girl does something, and it isn’t always to kill someone. Arguably, many of her victims if not all of them deserve it, but she also spends time spooking young boys who are out late and getting to know a local prostitute. But take the cat for instance. I knew this was a vampire movie, and I saw Arash pull the cat out of a spot before taking it home. Would the cat become a meal of some kind for the Girl? Well, no. This isn’t that sort of movie. It’s more about the aforementioned atmosphere where a young man and what looks like a young woman bond over pop music without really saying a word.
Factor in as well the black-and-white cinematography, and what comes out is a moody piece of horror, one where the setting and the imagery give the movie a very unique look. The Girl moves suddenly in the shadows, and her feeding is never all that graphic while still making her look more like an animal or a vague shape. There’s even a really nice shot of her skateboarding with the head scarf billowing out behind her like a pair of wings. This is a horror movie by way of the arthouse, and I rather liked it for that.
Grade: A-
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