One of the biggest underground horror hits of the 2010s was "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night," a 2014 black-and-white vampire film from Iranian-American director and writer Ana Lily Amirpour. Touted at the time as "the world's only Iranian vampire Western" (via Wired), the film is both an impassioned genre pastiche and a genuinely haunting and soul-piercing foray into the eternal themes of vampire fiction, from loneliness and despondency to power and desire.
Despite being an American production, "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night" is also notable for being set in Iran, in an unidentified ghost town, and featuring all Persian-language dialogue, thereby zeroing in on a corner of the world that horror movies haven't always elected to explore.
The film follows the titular, unnamed Girl (Sheila Vand), a vampire, as she wanders around the city in search of potential victims, eventually striking up a romance with Arash (Arash Marandi). At a certain point in the film, the Girl forms an unexpected connection with Atti, a prostitute who is caught between the abusive whims of pimp Saeed (Dominic Rains) specifically, and the cruelty of a patriarchal society more broadly. Atti is played by Mozhan Marnò, who gets to hold the focus of one of the film's most memorable scenes in which the Girl confesses to Atti that she's been watching her, and comes to the conclusion that the cynical, hard-edged woman "[doesn't] remember wanting."
