A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night brings a Refreshing New Perspective against Real-World Gender Norms
(Contains brief mentions of SA related topics and gender based violence.)
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) wallpaper (https://www.wallpaperflare.com/a-girl-walks-home-alone-at-night-wallpaper-mnywe)
Seeing the title "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night" the first time got an immediate negative reaction from me. I remember saying out loud, "thats a big nope from me."
To see it instead be described as "the first Iranian Vampire Western", I was so relieved.
Obviously as a woman my first assumption was something along the lines of kidnapping, SA, etc. I looked up the plot, and watched the film. Completely the opposite- in fact- it’s a slap in the face to everything I thought it would be. Which was refreshing… and necessary.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) follows the story of Arash (Arash Marandi) who later meets a Vampire Girl (Sheila Vand) who kills men that disrespect and harm women, mainly the prostitute Atti (Mozhan Marno). Arash and the Girl soon form a bond that falls atypical of normal romantic subplots.
Still from A Girl walks Home Alone at Night. (https://youtu.be/WuN4wcDGlIc)
The character of the Vampire Girl can in a sense be representative of what some of us women want to be able to do deep down. It’s obviously not realistic to be able to kill men as punishment for their gluttenous and harmful sexual actions without consequence, and women do not generally wish to kill men outright; If women felt safe doing so, whether it be in The U.S or Iran, we’d probably take whatever preventative measures needed to keep ourselves unharmed. Too often do we hear about men attacking, killing, and/or raping women as a response to rejection of some sort, and yet going unpunished or being held with very little accountability. I personally wish to see more headlines about women defending themselves from said people, successfully, simply because of the encouragement it can provide. The kind of encouragement that this film and its characters unintentionally provide.
While it stays common to see headlines about women being targeted by men, it’s not a common anticipation to see the other way around, especially without investigation- such as in the film when Arash’s dad was killed and everyone found his body outside the next Morning. As a viewer, I was expecting a witch hunt to start, but nothing of the sort ever turned up. Instead, it seems that the locals somewhat forgot about it; they saw the body, mourned, and moved on. Even when Arash figured out that it was the Vampire Girl he had fell for that done it, he took a breather then accepted it and moved on as well.
The Girl, Arash, and Arash’s cat. (https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/reviews/girl-walks-home-alone-night/)
As absurd as such an event seems in the real world, this can be seen as commentary on the public attitude of women and girls suffering; girls that go missing, murdered, assaulted, especially girls of color or queer. There’s a pattern of the public eye touching on said events briefly, if at all, and then moving on to the next story. Just as the community in Bad City moved on from Arash’s father to the unnamed homeless man in an alleyway, to Saeed, introduced in the very beginning.
What makes this film even more relevant is the current context going on in the country of origin/setting:
At this moment, thousands of women are protesting the strict policing and brutality responsible for the September killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, along with how often these punishments occur- punishments following a system established and enforced by men built to restrict and oppress women, to the point where they would hurt their women for the sake of maintaining their form of religious order.
What we see in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a refreshing break away from this real life system of power and constant portrayal of such torment through film and media, as it is all about reversing the long-established partiarchy through powerful female characters; we gain a form of encouragement that we still have the ability to combat our oppressors, and a story that can be used as a symbolic form of fighting back against oppressive societies all around the world, and especially the country this story was set in.
The Girl riding on a skateboard (https://aminoapps.com/c/movies-tv/page/blog/a-girl-walks-home-alone-at-night-2014/rlce_uZVZzBdrDN8nP4eD4mBmNxLp)