A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014)

For years I thought this film was made in Iran, and my research for this review quickly showed that I was not alone. Shot in Farsi with an entirely Iranian cast, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night transports you to a faraway land that you would never recognize as Taft, California. Made in only twenty-four days on a 56k crowdfund, this film is truly a masterwork on a budget.

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night quickly feels like a classic vampire film that belongs among the ranks of the greats. Even so, the modern plot and score for this spooky feature continually remind you that this isn't your grandad's dusty old Dracula. Every scene has some familiar trope refreshed with new (un)life. Vampires glide effortlessly on skateboards in breathtaking terror, vigilante feminism is a dish best served cold, and they've even got the most cooperative movie cat to ever grace the silver screen. The whole thing is delight, terror, familiarity, novelty, and the intoxicating mystery of a vampire that mirrors the mystery of Iran itself.

Speaking on vampires in a 2014 interview, director Ana Lily Amirpour remarked, "a vampire is so many things: serial killer, a romantic, a historian, a drug addict – they're sort of all these things in one." These comparisons are central to the film, and the audience is constantly challenged with juxtapositions of desire, both natural and artificial. By shooting in California, these themes were able to be fully explored without the limitations of Iranian censors--notably including a presumably genderqueer character named Rockabilly. "If there's one political thing [in the film], it's not the chador, it's Rockabilly," Amirpour said in the same interview, "because it's not okay to be gay in Iran."

A lifelong skater, Amirpour serves as a stunt double for all of the skateboard scenes in the film. When asked in 2020 why she chose to make A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, she answered "...I was lonely—that's why. But taking that a step further, the truth is that I make films to make friends and find real intimacy; a connection with others based on something that's meaningful to me. The people who make these films with you, your cast and crew—it's like they're on a vision quest with you. That is an incomparable experience. And then when the film is done and out there, the people who are attracted to your film—the audiences, festivals that embrace it, other filmmakers, artists, the critics who like what you do—those are my friends."

Put on your turtlenecks, folks. This one's got teeth.