A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Strange things are afoot in Bad City. The Iranian ghost town, home to prostitutes, junkies, pimps and other sordid souls, is a place that reeks of death and hopelessness, where a lonely vampire is stalking the towns most unsavoury inhabitants. But when boy meets girl, an unusual love story begins to blossom… blood red.​

Amirpour's debut is a treasure trove of cultural and subcultural references, which give the world of Bad City an almost universal and timeless feel – from the skateboarding vampire, wrapped in a chador as she roams the night-time streets, to the white-tee wearing greaser looks of Arash, to the unbelievably sleazy pimp Saeed, who beneath his embroidered track-jacket is adorned in wonderfully vulgar tattoos in both Farsi and English. All of this against the backdrop of a setting with aspects taken not just from westerns but also from the haunting black-and-white industrial landscape of David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977). A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is a brilliant modern twist on the vampire film. ​