Rhapsodies

I officially declare the Halloween season started, and to start things off in my month of horror films  the subject vampire girls!

The first on my list was one I’ve been hearing quite a bit about Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. The film tells the story Arash (Arash Marandi) a young man living in “Bad City”, an imaginary city in Iran, struggling to make a living while supporting father is a heroin addict. One night when confronting his father’s dealer, he sees a girl (Sheila Vand) dressed in a traditional chadur walking out of the dealer’s apartment. It turns out she’s a vampire who has made short work of the dealer. From here things get interesting.
This Persian language film described as the first “The first Iranian vampire Western” is the best film about a chadur wearing, skateboarding vampire ever. It’s wonderfully done in a stylized black and white with a nice moody vibe of an empty run down town where in the middle of the nigh the only people on the street are the predator and her prey. The Girl is one of the best recent takes on the vampire archetype. She’s whimsical and playful, almost catlike (as in she will play with her food) but when it matters, she is deadly.

The next film on my list was Matt Reed’s Let Me In.
Owen(Kodi Smit-McPhee) is not a happy boy. He’s very religious mother is in the middle of a divorce. And he’s bullied in school.   He copes with this by nursing some very dark and sadistic fantasies, not good for a boy his age. One night he meets a girl who has just moved into the neighborhood named Abby ( Chloë Grace Moretz). She’s a very strange person. Along with seeming out of touch with everything, she doesn’t seem to have any trouble with the cold, walking in the snow barefoot. Despite all of this, and Abby‘s efforts to push him away immediately, they become fast friends.
I have heard good things about this remake, Tomas Alfredson’s of Let the Right One In and I’ve heard that it was a good example of how to do a cultural translation of a film right. For the most part I agree with this in that it shares most of the quality of the original film with a few deviations, (for example it’s a detective hunting Abbey, rather than the boyfriend of one of her victims) nothing was perfect however. For example the terrible CGI cats from the original film replaced by the almost as unconvincing animation of Abby attacking people.