Thanks to endless parodies, countless cheap actioners and, biggest of all, Twilight, the general consensus is that the vampire movie is spent. The logic is outdated, the subtext no longer relevant and the terror utterly neutered. Yet flying in the face of that is a run of incredible movies that take the blood-sucking figures and find totally new ground. And, sitting right alongside modern classic likes Let The Right One In is this year's A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, the self-proclaimed "first Iranian vampire Western". It's a mash-up that works, thanks in no small part to it not feeling like a mash-up at all. There's stylistic similarities to various other auteurs, but in a macro sense the film is one of the most unique pieces we've had a good long while, with a cool air to the eerily-empty fictitious Bad City making it, and thus the film, incredibly alluring. It's never clear if you're supposed to be scared, elated, sickened or touched by The Girl, with scenes juggling all those feelings at once, and that's entirely the point. A pivotal scene sees young man Arash goes back to her home, where the pair slowly give themselves to each other to. The audio fluctuates and the bodies move with an ethereal slowness, making it tense and romantic in equal measure.
