1 - Blood, Bodies, and Borders

Summary

Ana Lily Amirpour's black-and-white A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night seduced audiences with a skateboard-riding, feminist hijabi vampire. It reimagined the socially and emotionally isolated female vampires in classical Hollywood's Dracula's Daughter and later art-house films, such as Michael Almereyda's Nadja and Abel Ferrara's The Addiction. Amirpour promoted her film as “the first Iranian vampire western,” playfully reworking national and generic assumptions. She purposefully confuses and deliberately fuses spaces of national histories, identities, and geographies into transnational ones. She challenges nationalist certainties within the political theatrics by US and Iranian leaders, which extend from the US-backed Pahlavi monarchy (1925– 79) through the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis (1979–81) into political disagreements between Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005–13) and US president George W. Bush (2001–9) over nuclear programs that resur¬face today in debates on lifting the US trade embargo and normalizing rela¬tionships. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night asks us to think about—and to feel—what it is like to inhabit this history across space. Amirpour's film does not tell the story of a vampire, who migrates from one place to another, infect¬ing humans with vampirism, so they mutate into vampires. Instead, she tells a story of a world that has mutated due to human migrations, where things might not be what they appear—and where systems of human relations may themselves be vampire-like. Vampires appear where histories meet.

Like classical Hollywood's first vampire films, Amirpour's film raises ques¬tions about immigration and belonging through motifs of blood, bodies, and borders. These motifs can be traced both to literary sources, such as Bram Stoker's novel Dracula (1897), and to cinematic ones, such as early films on immigration and assimilation. The figure of the vampire accumulates meaning, as it moves from folklore and literature to theatrical stage and cinematic screen. Supernatural qualities in vampire stories allow social assumptions to find overt expression, whereas other kinds of stories demand that they remain hidden in covert agendas. Vampire hunters murder vampires—and are seldom arrested. Although scenes of violence, sexuality, and interspecies coupling were discreetly hidden behind the vampire's black cape—yet exploited in stills for advertising and promotion—Béla Lugosi's portrayal of Count Dracula excited imaginations with his sexually predatory and socially destabilizing sugges¬tiveness in Dracula.