Thoughts on The Addiction

In February, I went to the Museum of the Moving Image screening of Abel Ferrara’s 1995 film The Addiction, and, not having seen the film since I was a teen and only vaguely remembering it, really enjoyed it a lot. It’s a black and white vampire film where Lili Taylor is a grad student named Kathleen who gets turned into a vampire by a mysterious Annabella Sciorra, and her cyclical existence of binges and painful withdrawals are meant to mirror heroin addiction, especially comparing it to other random people struggling with addiction in the film. Such quotes from Taylor are “We drink to escape the fact we're alcoholics. Existence is the search for relief from our habit, and our habit is the only relief we can find,” and “Dependency is a marvelous thing. It does more for the soul than any formulation of doctoral material.”

I really got into this. I like the shadows and light in the black and white cinematography, the way the light casts across the actors’ faces, or in one scene, light from open window blinds slowly making their way down the wall to Taylor in an attempt at suicide that was beautifully filmed. I liked the mid-90s NYC-centric hip-hop soundtrack, the haunting look of downtown NYC at night, how the film featured future Sopranos cast members (Edie Falco, Michael Imperioli, Annabella Sciorra), Taylor’s purely physical performance as a woman who is empty inside like a hollow shell but thrives on blood binges to survive, and Christopher Walken in an extended cameo as a longtime proselytizing vampire who has fasted for years and sees Taylor as weak without self-discipline, which doesn’t help when she’s curled up on the floor and clutching her stomach in withdrawal pains. Walken as Peina states “You know how long I've been fasting? Forty years. The last time I shot up, I had a dozen and a half in one night. They fall like flies before the hunger, don't they? You can never get enough, can you? But you learn to control it. You learn, like the Tibetans, to survive on a little.”

I liked the random dark humor in it, like Taylor just attacking a random guy trying to help her or blaming a young and freshly bitten Kathryn Erbe for trusting her.

This is a great and unusual vampire film that felt like its own strange thing, I liked it a lot.