Fangs for the Forgotten: Unmasking Sex Trafficking in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Every once in a while, a movie comes out whose genre can only be described with a phrase you never thought you’d hear, and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is one of those films. It’s a Persian-language vampire western, and if you ask me, that alone is enough to make it worth a watch. However, if you’ve ever seen this unique piece of genre cinema, you know its unprecedented classification isn’t the only thing it has going for it.

The vampire in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night primarily stalks men who abuse and mistreat women, so in hardcore horror circles, the movie is renowned for its pro-woman message. But what’s not so well known is that this film isn’t just about abuse in general. The story homes in on a particular (and particularly heinous) form of exploitation that doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it deserves, so let’s dive into this modern arthouse classic and see what important lessons we can learn from it.

The Truth About Trafficking
Let’s start by taking a close look at the vampire’s first victim, a drug dealer named Saeed. From the moment we meet this character, it’s clear that he’s a terrible person, but when A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night first introduces him, we don’t realize how evil he truly is. As the story goes on, we quickly find out that Saeed doesn’t just sell drugs. He also sells women.

More specifically, he pimps a thirty-year-old woman named Atti, but you might not catch the extent of her exploitation right away. Atti isn’t chained to a bed and drugged out of her mind like the trafficking victims in Taken. She appears free to leave Saeed’s employ whenever she wants, but if you know anything about real-world sex trafficking, you know the truth is much more diabolical.

See, this monstrous crime involves more than just kidnapping women and physically restraining them so they can’t leave. The legal definition of sex trafficking is “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, obtaining, patronizing, or soliciting of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age.”

And when we understand Saeed and Atti’s relationship through that lens, it’s clear that their “business” relationship is far from consensual. Early on in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, we see these two characters in a car together after Atti’s “shift,” and almost everything Saeed does just screams sex trafficking.

He takes all the money Atti made that night, and when she asks for her cut, he makes her perform a sex act on him first, beginning with sucking his finger (that admittedly odd detail will become important later on). Then, once she’s done, he still doesn’t give Atti her fair share of the profits. He says she’s “light” (in other words, she didn’t make enough money that night), and to shut her up, he throws the poor woman out of the car and yells, “Next time, you focus on your job. Understand? And quit your crying, hag!”

It’s just one scene, but it’s enough to establish Saeed as a legit sex trafficker. For one, sexual demands and irrational fits of violent rage are typical of traffickers, and more importantly, the man’s horrible treatment of Atti fits the legal definition of the crime. At its core, this definition involves three elements–force, fraud, and coercion–and all three are present in this one scene.

We see force when Saeed throws the woman out of the car, and when he yells at her to focus on her job, that’s coercion (the implication being that he’ll hurt her again if she doesn’t). Finally, refusing to give Atti her cut because she’s supposedly “light” is fraud, so this is about as clear-cut as it gets. Saeed is more than just an abusive employer. He’s a sex trafficker, so when the vampire kills him, she’s not simply feeding her inhuman thirst. She’s meting out some much-needed justice to this heinous criminal.

Protecting an Exploited Woman
And in case there’s any doubt about the bloodsucker’s motives, let’s look at a couple of scenes that hammer the point home. For starters, the creature watches Saeed and Atti’s car conversation from a distance, and almost immediately afterwards, she finds Saeed and lets him bring her back to his apartment. The cold-hearted pimp clearly thinks he’s going to have sex with this strange woman, and at first, the vampire plays along. She sucks his finger just like Atti did, but that’s where the game ends. Instead of ramping up the sensuality, she bites the guy’s finger off, and then she kills him.

On the surface, this might seem like just another fun horror scene, but if we dig a bit deeper, we can see that it’s actually much more important than that. It’s no coincidence that the vampire starts the encounter the same way Atti did in the previous scene. She’s intentionally mirroring that interaction but reversing the power dynamics, so Saeed’s death is not-so-subtle payback for all the abuse he’s doled out to Atti.

Later on in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, there’s a moment when Atti and the vampire meet face to face, but it doesn’t play out the way you might expect. If this were a more typical bloodsucker, she probably wouldn’t think twice about feasting on Atti’s blood just like she did with Saeed. But that’s not what happens.

Instead, the creature makes a comment about the emotional scars Saeed’s abuse has left on the poor woman, and then she gives Atti a bunch of jewelry to make up for the money the pimp refused to pay her earlier in the film. Again, it’s clear that this vampire remembers Saeed and Atti’s conversation in the car, and she’s doing what she can to right the wrongs Saeed has inflicted on the woman.

The Other Half of the Problem
Last but not least, we have to talk about a scene that tackles the problem of sex trafficking from the other side. See, the people who sell women are only half of the problem. The other half are the men who pay to have sex with trafficked women (sometimes without even realizing the women are being trafficked!), and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night has something to say about them as well.

We don’t get to see too many of Atti’s “clients,” but the one we do meet gets his just desserts. He’s a severe heroin addict named Hossein, and he interacts with Atti twice in the movie. Both times, the vampire lies close at hand, watching and protecting the vulnerable woman, and the second time, she makes her deadly presence felt.

Hossein buys some time with Atti (like many sex trafficking victims, she’s so emotionally and psychologically scarred she finds it hard to leave the life even after her pimp dies), and at first, he just wants the woman to do a sensual dance for him. But as you might be able to guess, he soon demands more than that.

He tells Atti to do heroin with him, and when she refuses, he holds her down and forcibly injects her with the drug. To be fair, that’s not the normal abuse trafficked women tend to experience, but the scene is filmed in such a way that it initially looks like Hossein is going to rape the poor woman.

It’s a horrific moment that makes for a nearly perfect allegory for the forced sexual encounters trafficking victims have to endure day in and day out, so it’s no surprise that the vampire swoops in and kills Hossein almost immediately after he sticks the needle in. She’s clearly looking out for Atti, and she seems to have a special concern for the various ways this poor woman is abused and exploited as a victim of sex trafficking.

Fighting the Good Fight
Once we understand all that, it becomes clear that A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night isn’t just about the mistreatment of women in general. It’s about sex trafficking, a crime that overwhelmingly targets women and girls, and as Catholics, we can’t turn a blind eye to this heinous sin.

Granted, most of us will never rescue a trafficking victim or lead a raid on an underground trafficking ring, but we all have a role to play in this fight. We can all help build up a culture that recognizes the dignity of women and refuses to reduce them to objects for men’s selfish pleasure, and if every Catholic in the world did their part, buying and selling women wouldn’t just be illegal. It would be unthinkable.