In the 2014 film Dokhtari dar Shāb Tanhā be Khāneh Miravad [A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night], the Iranian-American director Ana Lily Amirpour takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to historical layering, genre mashup, and diasporic community formation. She has described the film as an “Iranian vampire spaghetti western,” and the way she draws on the spaghetti Western subgenre diverges from its American counterpart’s social dynamic of cowboys and Indians; that is, native and non-native. “Classic” American film tropes, and those from spaghetti Westerns, are layered over sensory elements and rituals from Iran as well as stereotypes specific to the Iranian-American diaspora. “The thing tying [all the characters] together,” according to Amirpour, “is that they’re all on the margins of their respective societies.” Her protagonist is a skateboarding, femme fatale vampire whose chador doubles as a cape – the ultimately, multiply marginalized figure at the center of the film.
Ken Gelder argues that vampire films challenge our preconceptions of genres as distinctly vertical and horizontal, “monogamous (a genre has a certain loyalty to itself)” and “promiscuous (since genres are routinely inhabited by other genres)”. In this paper, I propose that Amirpour uses both the spaghetti Western and the vampire genre self-referentially to reflect her own position as a diasporic filmmaker. The Girl in the film is not primarily sucking the blood of others to nourish herself; her vampyrism is a blend of feminist self-defense, underground lifestyle choice, sexual and spatial freedom, and cross-species interrogation of life and death. This multiplicity reflects the film’s complex relation to its stylistic reference points, which is more like diasporic bricolage than exilic vampyrism. “I did go to Iran, finally, but that’s completely alien to me,” Amirpour says in an interview. “With this movie, we kind of made our own place that was as Iranian as we are, which is a mash-up of so many things.” The pieces of Amirpour’s cultural montage of the Iranian-American disapora are the cinematic genres and tropes themselves: spaghetti westerns, vampire attacks, and others.
