This paper examines Ana Lily Amirpour’s Iranian vampire western as a radical reimagining of horror cinema’s gendered tropes. By relocating the vampire narrative to the fictional, oil-ravished “Bad City,” Amirpour transforms the figure of the chador-clad Girl into a vehicle for feminist resistance and melancholic agency. Drawing on Laura Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze and Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject, this analysis argues that the film subverts the traditional predator-prey binary by positioning the Girl as both a spectral observer and an ethical arbiter. Furthermore, the paper explores how the film’s black-and-white cinematography, minimalist score, and intertextual nods to American pop culture (from James Dean to garage rock) create a liminal space where Iranian social critique and transnational genre aesthetics coalesce. Outline:
The Bad City as a Psychic Landscape: Vampirism, Femininity, and the Subversion of the Gaze in Ana Lily Amirpour’s “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night”
