A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night And The Melancholic Beauty Of Gothic Horror

The 2014 film A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is maybe one of the greatest examples of a modern-day gothic horror story, and one of my favorite films of the last decade. It’s a film that ironically exists within the decaying bones of a genre that places most of its stories within crumbling castles of bygone ages. Except, instead of simply borrowing the tropes and settings of the gothic stories of the past, it modernizes their themes and shadowy corridors, giving new life to the genre that inspired it. But what makes this Iranian-American vampire film truly great is not only how it breathes new life into a dormant cinematic subgenre, but how it highlights one of the more ignored features that make gothic media so appealing for so many people, myself included. Like in other horror stories, death is present and frightening, and it’s meant to be a sobering reminder of our mortality, to not take ourselves too seriously. However, in addition to that, gothic horror presents us with ruminations on life that express a kind of melancholic beauty alongside the horror. It’s a feature of the subgenre that’s equally comforting, and simultaneously terrifying. Source(s): A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (Film, 2014) Talking to the Star and Director of 'A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night' - VICE Meets Interview with Ana Lily Amirpour, Director of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night - The Vilcek Foundation A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night Q&A with Ana Lily Amirpour & Roger Corman - Hammer Museum The Gothic - The British Library (Youtube Channel) The origins of the Gothic - The British Library Website (Article By: John Mullan)