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The Addiction
Lili Taylor and Christopher Walken star in Abel Ferrara's raw, intense and intelligent take on the vampire myth - selected for the Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time Poll by The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw.
Director: Abel Ferrara
Overview
Philosophy student Kathleen (Lili Taylor) is dragged into an alleyway on her way home from class by Casanova (Annabella Sciorra) and bitten on the neck. She quickly falls ill but realises this isn’t any ordinary disease when she develops an aversion to daylight and a thirst for human blood…
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-calibre 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. 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.
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