A mysterious stranger abducts you from the street and turns you on to a new poison. Previously, you had never tasted the poison, and had no urges for it. But now you are hooked. All you can think about is your next fix, and turning your friends and acquaintances into fiends as well, so you’re less alone. You feel sick without it, your body calling out for its next fix. And when you finally get that fix, all is right with the world. You learn to dread the light. You can’t be around your old friends anymore and everything bores you. And when you get your fix, you don’t care if you take too much. There is no concern for safety. Are you a vampire or an excessive drug addict?
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Executive produced by rap kingpin Russel Simmons and yet directed by the gritty, subversive Abel Ferrara, The Addiction is a unique hip-hop look at drug addiction, vampires, and the underworld they populate. They exist in an underground big city culture (long before Blade or Underworld) and can spot those in need as if they have supernatural powers, letting them know who is a vampire and who is a potential target. The movie, though modern, is filmed in black and white, and vampires had rarely appeared so stylish or noirish up to this point.
Ferrara has made his share of transgressive, violent, and disturbing movies, including classics like Bad Lieutenant, King of New York, The Funeral, and his debut film, The Driller Killer. The director’s work is populated by violent characters with extreme and disturbing desires, and while The Addiction is a bit of an outlier, these themes apply to it as well.
The Addiction Shows the Vampire as Drug Addict
October Films
In The Addiction, Ferrara takes on the vampire genre, but with a twist, as the vampirism becomes a metaphor for drug use, particularly heroin addiction. The movie seems to argue that people are not forced into addiction but voluntarily go there, after which point they are largely helpless. The film begins with a mysterious appearance by Annabella Sciorra (The Sopranos) as Casanova, who abducts a philosophy student named Kathleen, played by Lili Taylor.
They go into a deserted alleyway and Casanova tries to push Kathleen away, but Kathleen won’t leave; Casanova assault her, biting her neck and drinking her blood in a scene that is filmed sensuously. The movie is undeniably erotic and sensual, with the neck-biting scenes meant to cause arousal more than disgust. Or perhaps the goal is to do both, as drug use can be both ecstatic and nightmarish.
After being bitten, Lilly starts to change. She covers up the mirrors in her apartment and becomes moody and sick. She develops her own urges. She walks around with dark sunglasses in the daytime, looking like a rock star. And she hungers for her next fix, going so far as to drain blood from her closest friends and colleagues. She wants to introduce everyone to her newly discovered drug of choice, in contrast to Casanova, who recognized the dangers and tried to initially push Kathleen away.
One by one, she infects her friends and acquaintances, including Black, played by Fredro Starr of the band Onyx, whose song Betta Off Dead appears throughout the movie, as does the Cypress Hill song, I Wanna Get High. These two songs embody themes in the film — the fact that maybe we are better off as undead monsters (the Cypress Hill song indicates that drug use correlated with immortality), and at the same time acknowledging that immortal life has its drawbacks.
AIDS and Syringes in The Addiction
Kathleen, confused about the new changes in her life, meets the mysterious Peina (an incredible Christopher Walken performance), who is a vampire in remission (like a drug user who is now clean), and he brags that he hasn’t tasted human blood in 40 years. He’s practically human, he boasts, and has the answers to some of Kathleen’s questions, but she proves to be too much a temptation for him, and he has a relapse, sucking blood from her neck.
In several ways, this film is about heroin addiction. When Lucy attacks her first victim, she uses syringes to extract the blood she will drink, which is followed by a scene in which she invites a professor to her house and asks him if he wants to try, presenting him with a drug kit — syringes filled with blood, spoons, candles, and everything else you would need for a heroin fix, and presumably spreads the disease to the professor. In this way, it is clear that the film is not only about the spread of drug addiction but also about the spread of AIDS during the epidemic.
The syringes are reminiscent of the ones used in the underrated George A. Romero movie, the bizarre vampire movie Martin, another low-budget film about someone who is either a vampire or just addicted to human blood. The Addiction uses its titular bloodthirst as a metaphor for drug addiction (something which can spread AIDS and other diseases through injection) and the vampire legend, and there are no innocent victims in either. The characters in the film are first asked to tell their predator to go away, leave them alone, and none of them do, as if the victim is partially at fault, unable to “just say No.” The temptation and desire is just too much.
The Nihilistic Vampire as Gen X Angst
When Kathleen finally attacks her best friend Jean, played by Edie Falco (The Sopranos, Nurse Jackie), she does it the way she was bit, mimicking Casanova in the way she tries to push her away. But nobody can ever get pushed away from this immense temptation, and Kathleen ends up attacking them, and in this way the insatiable appetite spreads. A kind of nihilism and fatalism develops that is perfectly suited for Kathleen, the philosophy student who is a perfect representation of Gen X angst.
Part of this nihilism and philosophical darkness is seen in the excessive and lurid close-up photographs of dead victims of war crimes, as part of another philosophy student’s exhibit. We see piles of dead Vietnamese bodies and plenty of concentration camp footage of huge ditches full of corpses. Showing these things allow us to graphically perceive Lucy’s philosophical and political views, though they seem as if they were gratuitously thrown into the movie purely for shock value. At one point Kathleen eschews the library, saying it is a big building filled with lies. Peina recommends coping by reading legendary novelist William S Burroughs, author of Junky and Naked Lunch.
After the final orgy of violence, Kathleen “overdoses” from too much blood and must be rushed to a hospital, where she is saved, although she wants to die and shed her mortal coil, no longer wanting to live. The Addiction has totally taken over and the desire to live dissipates into the atmosphere. Kathleen, now an addict and a vampire, has lost everything due to her addiction, and her status as a bloodsucking vampire.
The highlights of this film are the supercharged performances of both Annabel Sciorra and Christopher Walken, both mysterious and violent, secretive, hiding in the shadows. Lili Taylor is perfectly cool and almost a ‘doomer’ decades before it was common. This is the world of addiction, a lifestyle you can never leave, but leaves you burning with the desire to rest forever in a grave, all your pain and intense urges and desires and addiction put to rest. Eternally.
