The Thinking Machine 36

“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”. This is the philosophical arc pitilessly traced by Abel Ferrara’s remarkable punk-horror film The Addiction (1995). Arcs of pained, twisted, tortured movement also define the performance choreography of Lily Taylor and her partners in crime. Abstracting the trajectory of the film away from its plot – and ablating its spiritually redemptive aspect – we arrive at the purest cinema of abjection: the dance of the vampire.