A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night or Un Chat Andalou

What is Iranian noir? Like The Blair Witch Project it’s shot in black and white and maybe recalls 60’s B movies like Succubus with a little bit of Rebel Without a Cause, thrown in.  Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night stars a vampire in a chador (Sheila Vand) who rides a skateboard. She sucks the blood out of Saeed, a drug dealer and pimp with “sex" tattooed on his Adam’s apple. Saeed has a stuffed antelope over his bar and modern art on the walls of his pad. She tells Atti, a prostitute  (Mozhan Marno), “You’re sad. You don’t remember what you want. You don’t remember wanting.” And she falls for a James Dean look alike, Arash (Arash Marandi) who drives a Thunderbird and pierces her ears with a safety pin at night in the front of the bilging smoke- stacks of the local power plant. As you may be able to tell A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is totally over the top. Like its heroine, it sucks blood-- this time out of a number of genres rather than people--including that of the morality tale. But it’s the settings of the movie, the oil fields, the domiciles of Arash, who lives with his father Hossein (Marshall Manesh), a heroin addict, of the vampire herself, of the prostitute and of a wealthy prima donna, Shaydah (Rome Shandaloo), who is recovering from a nose job, that tell the story. Though this vampire is an avenging angel, you may have to search in vain for political allegory, despite the fact that the movie takes place in, yes, Bad City, Iran. Amirpour, is obviously in love with film style and particularly the haunting postmodern surrealism found in filmmakers like David Lynch and David Fincher. Looking for a message in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night would be like trying to analyze the politics of Un Chien Andalou and with the film’s resident cat perched enigmatically between the vampire and her lover in the film’s final scene, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night might also have been called Un Chat Andalou.

Vampire Academy

The teaser for a forthcoming movie called Vampire Academy reads “They Suck at School.” This is an ingenious triple entendre. “Attention must finally be paid to such a person,” was what was said about Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. Well, attention should be paid to this advertising locution. Of course vampires suck blood. But what the teaser is also saying is that vampires who are thirsty for blood also have no time for their studies. Naturally, when they're not sucking blood, vampires are also sucking other things. And the reference to fellatio is the coup de grace. You can almost hear the Witches of Macbeth alternating  the addictive combination of blood, semen and failure in between their “double, double toil and trouble.” Vampire Academy is based on the young adult series by Richelle Mead, of which six volumes have already been published (in addition to Vampire Academy, they are Frostbite, Shadow Kiss, Blood Promise, Spirit Bound and Last Sacrifice) and the poster of the film, which locks onto you like a drone as you exit the subway, features the two fetching leads, Zoey Deutch (who plays Rose Hathaway) and Lucy Fry (in the role of Lucy Dragomir). Okay students are always admonished  to "stick with the winners,” and stay away from those kids who are bad news, but even if these girls are at the bottom of the class, it’s obvious they won’t have any trouble honing in on their prey. The promo for Vampire Academy is almost as successful as that for a l968 film called Succubus, which lured filmgoers with the prospect of sexy paranormality. The difference is that the succubus doesn’t suck at school or anywhere else. According to Merriam-Webster Online, it's merely “a demon assuming female form to have sexual intercourse with men in their sleep"