A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

There is something weird and eerie going on in the oneiric Iranian ghost-town Bad City. A mysterious female vampire, clad in a long-black veil, imbued with occult and erotic power, has newly arrived in town and is summarily dispensing with its unsavory characters. Through a chance encounter in a night of luminal darkness, an eternally dark romance begins - baptized in love’s blood. Shot in dazzling anamorphic black and white cinematography and accompanied with an intoxicating and mesmeric soundtrack, Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut feature film A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014), was an instant popular and critical success. Dubbed ’the first Iranian vampire western’ the genre-bending film is a pastiche of genres such as vampire cinema, gothic and horror films, spaghetti westerns, graphic novels, and Iranian cinema; yet the film stands as a new vampire fairy-tale with a unique style all its own. The first full-length study dedicated to the film since its release, this book in the Devil’s Advocate series provides a unique approach to the film situated within three theoretical coordinates: the vampire genre, psychoanalytic (film) theory and German Idealism.

Farshid Kazemi is a postdoctoral fellow at the School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University. His research interests combine an interdisciplinary and theoretical approach to Film and Media Studies/Film Theory, Iranian Studies, and Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies. He holds a PhD in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Edinburgh with a thesis on Iranian Cinema and Psychoanalysis. His work has appeared in academic journals such as Camera Obscura, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, and Iranian Studies.