Blood is a drug in a stylish vampire movie from the director of Bad Lieutenant
Film Features Recommends
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: Morbius has been pushed back to 2021, but you don’t have to wait that long to check out these other vampire chronicles and bloodsucker tales.
The Addiction (1995)
The metaphor of Abel Ferrara’s vivid reimagining of the vampire film is as obvious as the title: the vampire as addict, shooting up with a syringe of blood. Without a fix of the red stuff, the vampire goes into withdrawal; once fed, they stumble around in a woozy high. Other elements of vampire lore are given drug connotations beyond heroin. The sunglasses so necessary to bloodsucker fashion could be hiding bloodshot eyes or dilated pupils. The eloquence we like to ascribe to sinister immortal beings is translated into a volubility that suggests cocaine. The movie’s high-contrast black-and-white cinematography gives it a classic sheen, but it also makes it hard to tell where blood ends and darkness begins.
In fact, there are no Van Helsings waiting in the shadows of the movie’s grimy New York City, no threats of staking or death-by-daylight. These vampire are completely immortal. However, they do share a weakness with the traditional Draculoid: They are repelled by crucifixes. This is in part because the vampires of The Addiction are nihilists, a point that is not lost on Kathleen (Lili Taylor), a grad student who gets bitten on the neck under noir lighting and begins to transform into a creature of the night.
That this scene is preceded by a needle drop of Cypress Hill’s “I Want To Get High” is perhaps too cute, but the fact that The Addiction actually opens with a discussion of the Mỹ Lai Massacre should give some idea of where it’s going: Among the most accomplished vampire films, it’s the one that isn’t about sex. Instead of the usual Transylvanian seduction techniques, the vampire’s bite has overtones of rape; even the less messy business of extracting blood via syringe requires the victim to be passed out or drugged. The combination of bodily fluids and transmission might lead one in the direction of AIDS paranoia, but it’s an interpretation that the film bluntly dismisses early on.
In actuality, the metaphor is double-sided: The vampire is an addict, but the addiction is our propensity for violence and evil, weighted with Catholicism and references to war crimes and genocide. By the time he made The Addiction, Ferrara was no stranger to nocturnal subjects or Dracula imagery. One of his best-known films, King Of New York, includes a clip from the granddaddy of all vampire movies, Nosferatu, highlighting certain undead qualities in the crime lord played by Christopher Walken. Though his screen time is less than 10 minutes, Walken makes a terrific appearance in The Addiction as Peina, an elder vampire who claims to have mastered his habit.
Of course, as in so many of Ferrara’s dramas of spiritual turmoil, there are strong autobiographical elements. Inspiration presumably came from the heroin habit that defined a large part of his career, and to anyone who has seen one or two interviews with Ferrara, it’s hard to ignore the fact that, at a certain point, Kathleen’s newfound attitude begins to resemble an impression of the director.
Nonetheless, The Addiction, which was one of Ferrara’s last collaborations with longtime screenwriter Nicholas St. John, is among his most literary films. Vampirism is an existential philosophy for Kathleen—a predatory species’ perspective on humanity, providing a thematic link to Ferrara’s only studio-backed foray into horror, Body Snatchers. These films are surprisingly thoughtful works for a director who started in the lowest depths of exploitation. Not unlike the alien pod people of the earlier film, the bloodsuckers of The Addiction can reproduce rapidly. Perhaps in the future, we will all be vampires.
Availability: The Addiction can be streamed on Hulu with a STARZ subscription. It’s also available to rent or purchase on Amazon Prime and Microsoft.
19 Comments
The Addiction is indeed pretty good and it’s almost surprising nobody beat Ferrara to the punch with a similar take. Body Snatchers is better than its mostly forgotten status would indicate, but unfortunately looks like something filmed for the WB (even though that didn’t exist at the time).
Body Snatchers kinda farted to an end but up until that it was pretty great. Joins The Puppet Masters and Darkman as otherwise-good 90’s sci-fi thrillers that suddenly have the worst bluescreening in town for a helicopter scene.
I have not yet seen this movie, but it was the go-to answer I saw every time whenever horror fans asked the question, what is the most pretentious horror movie? (second place was usually Ken Russell’s Gothic)
Gothic is #2 on this list, which was unfortunately written years before the #1 on this list. Both contain the black-and-white mid 90s vampire film Nadja, but not The Addiction.
Death Bed is on both lists, that surprises me. Otherwise I’m not sure if The Addiction comes up much on lists of anything these days, so that’s suitable enough for a Watch This! article.
Huh — I didn’t know Patton Oswalt did stand-up. I mostly know him as an actor and writer.
You are very late to the party, but better late than never.
Just like The TITANIC in Ghostbusters 2.
Gothic! I haven’t seen it so can’t speak to its pretentiousness, but it’s easily top 5 in the Most Unsettling VHS Boxes.
I mean, the protagonist is not just a grad student but a philosophy grad student, there’s going to be some long-windedness here. But Ferrara and St. John mix it well with visceral charge, especially at a post-dissertation party to end all post-dissertation parties, and as Ignatiy notes the heavy themes are the real deal, not just hot air.
Well Christ, put “The Shining” and “Only Lovers Left Alive” at the top of that list.
Definitely The Shining — the most pretentious pile of art-fart hooey pretending to be a horror film I’ve ever seen.I paid Sutton Place prices to see it when it first came out because I love A Clockwork Orange and Dr. Strangelove — back when that was real money for me. A couple impressive images aside, it was nothing other than waiting for Jack Nicholson to go Full Nicholson, and watching Shelley Duvall play a neurotic dishrag.
You don’t have to like Stephen King, but there’s a reason he’s an incredibly popular author — and to show off how much better you are than him by pissing all over his book and calling it a “Masterpiece” is a waste of time for those of us who are his fans. To do it while emotionally abusing a woman, a child, and a (then) living legend for months on end, while not directing Jack Nicholson so he gives one of the worst performances of his career, is unconscionable. You can be a filmmaker without being an abusive asshole — a lesson Stanley Kubrick never bothered to learn.
I was JUST about to post about how this is the most pretentious damn movie I have ever watched! I rented this back in 97 with a friend, we literally looked at each other and said “Christopher Walken is a vampire…how can it be bad?” Ugh. Lily Taylor’s character is a philosophy grad student, the overly stylized, though admittedly, very beautiful, black and white cinematography, the drug addiction allegory, it was too much. And then Walken is in the movie for only one scene! Fuck this movie.
“In actuality, the metaphor is double-sided: The vampire is an addict, but the addiction is our propensity for violence and evil”And addiction is weakness, embraced by the addict (even the experienced Walken defines himself by how he manages this weakness). Largely removing sex from the equation means there’s no erotic thrill from being seduced, no excuse for falling under the spell. When Taylor is bitten and her attacker hisses “collaborator” it is a slap across the face — is there a more loaded, viciously accusatory word, especially for someone who’s studying evil? YOU wanted this to happen. YOU helped make it happen. And Taylor is ready to throw this on the woman she attacks in her own time, dismissing her despair and outrage and beating Anton Chigurh to the punch by several years: “It was your decision… My indifference is not the concern here. It’s your astonishment that needs studying.” Ferrara (and St. John) goes into a morality that is ruthless and terrifying, this is part of why he’s such a fascinating filmmaker, he does not hesitate to follow thoughts and characters to dark places and let them find judgment for themselves.Also, this looks and sounds incredible, the black and white photography on the cheap looks fantastic and anyone using candyass acoustic noodling for their New York movie needs to be smacked upside the head with the Oynx and Cypress Hill on the soundtrack here. This one got under my skin when I saw it last year, it’s a great movie and awesome to see it getting some attention here.
The gun shots in the trailer totally throw you off from the premise of the movie.Also produced by Russell Simmons!
I saw The Addiction on UK TV in the 90s.I saw the black and white header image on the AV Club landing page of a woman being bitten and thought “this looks like The Addiction”But then the heading “Blood is a drug … From the director of Bad Lieutenant” left me unsure for a minute. Seemed more like a crossword puzzle clue than an article heading … All it needed was (3, 9) tagged at the end of that.
I see how the AVC is going down that path in bringing out DTV movies just for shits and giggles to fill this, but I’m still waiting for the day (it’s non-vampire related) that ya’ll showcase the Billy Zane wonderfest that is Blood and Concrete: A Love Story. Neo-noir idiocy that predated anything that Tarentino did by a couple years. The “so bad it’s good” genre that I find it hard to believe that I’ve only ever watched it twice (once on Cinemax in like 1991, and a few years ago). I’m amazed it hasn’t become a cult classic. ‘
There’s not a single Ferarra film without a lot to recommend it.