The Addiction
Vincenzo Natali Selects
•
1h 22m
1995 • United States • Directed by Abel Ferrara
The mid-nineties were a fertile period for the vampire movie. Big-name stars such as Tom Cruise and Eddie Murphy flocked to genre, as did high-caliber filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola, veterans Wes Craven and John Landis, independents Michael Almereyda and Jeffrey Arsenault, and up-and-comers Quentin Tarantino and Guillermo del Toro. Amid the fangs and crucifixes, Abel Ferrara reunited with his King of New York star Christopher Walken for The Addiction, a distinctly personal take on creatures of the night.
Philosophy student Kathleen (Lili Taylor, The Conjuring) is dragged into an alleyway on her way home from class by Casanova (Annabella Sciorra, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle) and bitten on the neck. She quickly falls ill but realizes this isn't any ordinary disease when she develops an aversion to daylight and a thirst for human blood...
Having made a big-budget foray into science fiction two years earlier with Body Snatchers, Ferrara's approach to the vampire movie is in a lower key. Shot on the streets of New York, like so many of his major works - including The Driller Killer, Ms. 45 and Bad Lieutenant - and beautifully filmed in black and white, The Addiction sees the filmmaker on his own terms and at his very best: raw, shocking, intense, intelligent, masterful.
Up Next in Vincenzo Natali Selects
-
Tideland
To escape her unhappy life in a remote part of Texas, nine-year-old Jeliza-Rose dreams up an elaborate fantasy world. But the reality of having junkie parents - played by Jeff Bridges (The Big Lebowski) and Jennifer Tilly (Bound) - and the influence of her eccentric neighbours begins to encroach,...
-
Tokyo Fist
Once again Shinya Tsukamoto steps out from behind the camera and stars as Tsuda, the archetypal Japanese salary man, a cog in the machine seemingly cut off from his own being by hours and hours of work. He's married to polite and compliant Hizuru (Kahori Fujii), the dictionary definition of an id...
-
Blind Beast
1969 • Japan • Directed by Yasuzô Masumura
Blind Beast is a grotesque portrait of the bizarre relationship between a blind sculptor and his captive muse, adapted from a short story from Japan’s foremost master of the macabre, Edogawa Rampo (Horrors of Malformed Men, The Black Lizard, Caterpilla...
