A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a well-regarded Iranian-American independent horror film from 2014, written and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour. The film has been widely acclaimed for its feminist themes, as well as its unique perspective as a film made by a female Iranian-American filmmaker. The film follows the dual stories of Arash, a young Iranian man looking after his drug-addicted father, and an unnamed girl (The Girl) who the narrative reveals to be a vampire. Eventually the two characters' paths cross and they begin a romantic relationship, and the film explores how their personal issues and flaws affect their desire and ability to have this relationship. The film subverts many conventions of the “female vampire;” she is modest and usually covered in loose-fitting clothing, as opposed to the incredibly sexual costuming and behavior of female vampires in other films. The film also calls upon hybrid film genres such as western and film noir, and this injection of different genre elements, filtered through a very different cultural point of view, creates an entirely new approach to vampires in general and female vampires specifically. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night presents a new idea of the female vampire, an impactful and complex figure born of an intersectional feminist perspective, that rivals the hypersexual, second-wave feminist vampires that came before, creating a more impactful and complex figure.
(A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, 2014)
In order to contextualize how The Girl is depicted in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, we must first look at the female vampire’s traditional role in the films that came before it. In Barbara Creed’s book The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis, she dedicates an entire chapter to the subject of Woman as Vampire. Here, she identifies the female vampire that rose to prominence in the films of the 1970s as a figure who was positioned as either a lesbian predator or a corrupted virginal victim. These depictions vary wildly from her male vampiric counterpart, and the type of fear she evokes often comes from a different place. It is commonly held that the vampire represents a fear of sex, sexuality, and sexual desire. If so, the female vampire represents men’s fear of women’s self-directed sexuality.
The 1970s was the era where the women’s liberation movement and the ideology of second-wave feminism really came into itself. It is not surprising, then, that many social anxieties at the time were highly centered around women having autonomy over themselves, and especially over their sexuality. In her book, Creed observes that the female vampire “threatens to seduce the daughters of patriarchy away from their proper gender roles.” Female vampires being depicted as lesbians was also hardly new; as Creed put it, “Her lesbianism arises from the nature of the vampire act itself,” since there is an inherent eroticism to vampires and how they feed, with passionate embraces and an exchange of bodily fluids.
However, the 1970s was also the era when the queer rights movement began gaining serious political traction in the United States, and another big anxiety of mainstream America at the time was the idea that corrupting homosexuals were coming to seduce their pure children. Out of these two fears came a massive influx of films about seductive lesbian vampires, one that has thrived to this day. So from films in the ’70s and ’80s such as The Hunger, The Vampire Lovers, and Daughters of Darkness, to extremely recent films such as 2019’s Bliss and the 2012 Kiss of the Damned, the Woman as Vampire has primarily been depicted this way.
The Girl in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night breaks from this traditional representation of the female vampire as a hypersexual predator, playing with traditional imagery to explore her character. Unlike her more well-known contemporaries, be it the corrupted vampires of Dracula’s Lucy or The Hunger’s Sarah or the predatory corruptors of Countess Marya Zaleska and Miriam in Dracula’s Daughter and The Hunger, respectively, we do not see The Girl’s transformation into a vampire, nor do we see her transform anyone else into one. Her vampiric nature positions her as neither metaphorical mother or child; it is simply an aspect of her existence. This allows The Girl to exist as her own being, operating entirely by her own agency throughout the entire story. Her choices and her motivations are hers alone.
In regards to the hypersexual nature of the female vampire, the film plays with it complicatedly. Like her vampiric peers, The Girl does use sexual suggestion in order to lure her victims, but she does so in a far less aggressive and hypersexual way. In their essay on the film, “Queer utopias and a (Feminist) Iranian vampire: a critical analysis of resistive monstrosity in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” Shadee Abdi and Bernadette Marie Calafell wrote, “Unlike other female vampires who are often highly sexualized, calling attention to their bodies as a source of power, the vampire in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night finds her empowerment in her quietness and her ability to blend in.” The Girl stalks through the night in quiet confidence. Her reserved nature allows her to blend into the background without standing out or frightening off her prey. In fact, it is her very lack of overt sexuality that hides her status as a predator.
The first person we see The Girl kill is a drug lord and pimp, Saeed. The first time we ever see The Girl in the film is when we enter her point of view watching Saeed sexually assault one of his prostitutes, Atti. The presumption here is of course that this is why she selects him as a victim: he is a bad man who hurts women. She does not “seduce” him as Miriam Blaylock does, erotically removing clothing to lure a fly into her web; rather, she merely exists as a woman who says nothing, and the only idea Saeed can take from that is that she’s a woman for him to have sex with. The Girl does not lure him into a web – the fly invites the spider into his own house. The most sexually suggestive thing she directly does is suggest oral sex by sucking on Saeed’s finger, as he had forced Atti to do, only for her to immediately bite it off before feasting on his blood in traditional Dracula fashion.
(A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, 2014)
Speaking of Dracula fashion, though! This is as sexual and erotic as The Girl gets. The rest of the scene is violent and terrifying, arguably the most horrifying scene in the film. Like most female bloodsucking, her feeding can be read as a metaphorical sex scene, as female vampire bloodsucking often does, but it is an ugly and violent feeding. The less sexualized nature of The Girl is communicated largely through her wardrobe and presentation. By and large, she mainly is seen in long-sleeved shirts and pants; the only time we see her dressed in less than that is when she’s taking a contemplative bath, in a simple medium shot that keeps her face as the focus. However, the most important and interesting wardrobe choice for The Girl, is the chador – . A full-body garment commonly worn by women in Iran that The Girl wears every time she goes outdoors in the film.
The chador serves a few purposes in the film. Most obviously, it gives The Girl a silhouette unlike any other female vampire that came before her, one reminiscent instead of the most famous vampire of all, Dracula. The manner in which she moves in her chador – skateboarding down the street or attacking victims with her arms raised like bat wings – evokes the classic imagery of Dracula more than any other female vampire has in any of the other aforementioned films. The use of that piece of clothing to evoke that imagery seems so obvious upon having seen it, that it’s utterly astonishing that no one had ever thought to do it before this.
Another important type of imagery invoked by the chador, as Abdi and Calafell point out, is that of the superhero: “By re-imagining the chador as a superhero’s cape and a source of strength, Amirpour’s vision embraces the complexities and contradictions that many (queer) Iranian and Iranian-American women must live within.” As previously stated, most of The Girl’s chosen targets are bad men who hurt women. This positions The Girl as a heroic figure, a protector of women swooping in with her heroic cape to save the day. Due to the sexually violent nature of the men’s crimes, this places The Girl in comparison with another female-led subgenre of ’70s films popular at the height of second-wave feminism, the rape revenge film.
The main contrast between The Girl’s role in her story, as opposed to say Jennifer’s role in I Spit on Your Grave, is that The Girl is punishing men for hurting other women rather than retaliating against her own assault. This positions her as more of a protector or hero than an avenger, which perpetuates a much more collectivist approach to empowerment and women’s liberation. This collectivist approach is much more a theme of modern intersectional feminism than the far more individualistic self-empowerment largely put forth by second-wave feminist discourse.
However, the chador does not just represent an evocation of Dracula's cape, or the inspiring presence of a superhero. It also says rather loudly to an American audience that this is an Iranian-American film, made by an Iranian-American woman. As Abdi and Calafell observed, Amirpour has “embrac[ed] the complexities and contradictions that many (queer) Iranian and Iranian-American women must live within,” and indeed, the film’s unique hybrid nature could only have come to be through a perspective as hybrid and unique as Amirpour’s.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night has been described as a “hybrid film”. Abdi and Calafell described Bad City as an “in-between” place, “neither the Islamic Republic of Iran nor the United States” that “exists as a transnational middle or hybrid borderland of hope and belonging for a diaspora.” That The Girl walks around Bad City wearing a chador without a single person looking at her side-ways communicates just how much this town is a hybrid world of both California and Iran. Moreover, the film itself is a hybrid of several disparate genres. Often touted as “the first Iranian Vampire Western,” the film borrows heavily in theme, content, and aesthetic from the horror, the western, film noir, and melodrama genres. In an interview with Roger Corman, Amirpour listed among her visual influences the comic art of Frank Miller, which is also known for pulling from those genres. The film is such a “hybrid” of things that people collectively struggle to put a name to it, so unique that it can only be described by a word salad of influences. To again quote Abdi and Calafell, “The film, in its feminist and queer leanings, uses the genres of spaghetti western and horror to imagine spaces of possibilities that don’t yet exist.”
This hybrid nature is emblematic of the film’s intersectional feminist perspective. It not only comments on the status of (white) women and their personal sexual liberation, but also reflects the complicated lives and existence of middle-eastern women in America and in the Middle East. It grapples both with the sometimes contradictory nature of being a self-empowering woman and with preserving and celebrating one’s own culture in an environment that rejects it. Amirpour’s perspective as an Iranian-American woman forces a new intersectional feminist perspective that must account for the cultural and ethnic backgrounds of people, and not simply their gender. Amongst these intersections, of course, also comes accounting for queer identity.
Queerness, as it exists in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, is less overt. After all, the main thrust of the story is the budding romantic relationship between The Girl and Arash. Instead, the film’s queerness presents itself in its theme, in the idea of queerness in its most traditional meaning of otherness. The film uses what Abdi and Calafell describe as “queer doubling”, intentionally mirroring The Girl’s otherness against other characters and deliberately allowing these characters to recognize their otherness in each other. This is most interesting in how it manifests in The Girl’s relationship with Atti. In the film, The Girl pivotally defends Atti twice: first in the previously discussed scene where she murders Saeed, and then later on in the film in a scene where Atti is forcibly drugged and nearly assaulted by Arash’s father Husain, whom she kills in front of Atti.
One key difference between the murders of Husain and Saeed, and largely the reason The Girl kills Husain with Atti as a witness this time, is that by the second murder, Atti and The Girl now know each other. Earlier in the film, The Girl approached Atti to gift her with jewelry she had stolen from Saeed and provide Atti with further freedom. The main purpose served by this scene is to establish the two women’s different approaches to existing in a patriarchal world, as the women exchange their perspectives on change. The Girl clearly believes she is doing something good, protecting women and making a change in Bad City, while Atti claims that, “Idiots and rich people are the only ones who think things can change.”
There are a few things going on here. This scene could be read as establishing the divide between the second-wave and modern intersectional approaches to feminism. Atti could easily be read as a disillusioned second-wave feminist primarily seeking to protect herself from the patriarchy she lives in, while The Girl could be read as the hope for the future, an intersectional feminist seeking to change things for the better for all women. This scene is also an example of queer doubling, which is further reinforced by the later scene of The Girl killing Husain in front of Atti.
The indisputable thing that the first scene does is establish both Atti and The Girl as victims of patriarchy, forced to live on the outskirts of a society that does not accept them as they are. Recall Abdi and Calafell’s definition of queer doubling, “mirroring one another’s sense of being outsiders and lonely;” this can be seen happening between a number of other characters in the film and The Girl, but the doubling with Atti is the most significant because their doubling, otherness, and loneliness, exist as direct result of the confining roles of the patriarchy. They have been deemed “unworthy” in some capacity, and thus must exist as outsiders.
This is further compounded by the scene of Husain’s murder later on. Atti now knows The Girl to be a literal monster, and her monstrousness is one Atti sees in herself rather than the white patriarchy that has caused her harm. The reflective queer doubling of Atti and The Girl here results in Atti becoming even more like The Girl, now not only trying to protect herself, but helping hide Husain’s body to help protect The Girl as well. If Atti represents disillusioned second-wave feminism and The Girl is modern intersectional feminism, then as Atti comes around to the idea of changing the world around her by helping protect other women from the patriarchy and not just herself, she is progressing forward into a modern intersectionalist perspective. The inherent empathy that is sparked in the characters by queer doubling brings forth character development.
All of these elements, from the film’s use of queer doubling and Iranian feminist roots to the wide hybrid of genres that it calls upon, work together to create a new type of female vampire, a monstrous-feminine figure that is clearly based upon her foremothers, but is unafraid to challenge ideas that are outmoded or wrong. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night provides a different idea of the female vampire, born of an intersectional feminist perspective, that responds to the more hypersexual second-wave feminist vampires that came before it by creating an even more complex and nuanced figure, one that could only have been brought to light from the mind of Ana Lily Amirpour and her experiences.
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