Ana Lily Amirpour names her favourite horror movie of all time
Since Ana Lily Amirpour was 12 years old, she has been making films. When her debut feature, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, was released in 2014, Amirpour announced herself as one of the most promising filmmakers on the movie industry circuit and has followed up with a number of further acclaimed pictures.
The likes of The Bad Batch, Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon have been premiered at the Venice Film Festival, showing that the Iranian-American director is well admired by her peers in the cinema world. When Amirpour moved to America in the 1980s as a child, she experienced something of a culture shock, but the film of the United States helped her assimilate into her new society.
She once told The New Republic: “I got hooked on them. It’s how I assimilated and became American through American pop culture and music – Madonna, Michael Jackson. And movies.” Cinema was an essential part of Amimour’s early life, and with movies in mind, she once named her favourite works of cinema of all time, and one that sticks out is her favourite horror movie.
Discussing Lars von Trier’s 2009 art horror film Antichrist, Amirpour told Criterion: “When this came out, the hysteria over the clit-scissors scene was all I heard about, and when I watched the film, that was the least shocking thing for me. That scene with the crow in the foxhole and Dafoe beating on it trying to get it to die – that reminded me of an anxiety dream I’ve had, like a déjà vu from my own emotions.”
Antichrist stars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, who suffer from the anguish and pain of losing their son to an accidental death. They decide to take a retreat to a woodland cabin, but the husband begins to experience strange visions, and the wife starts acting in increasingly violently sexual ways, leading to, as Amirpour notes, the “clit-scissors scene”.
The director continued to express her admiration for von Trier, saying, “It’s comforting when someone else’s darkness mirrors your own. Lars is brave with how intimate he is in his films. He goes off and says things that get him in trouble, and his bravery gets overshadowed. I see him as wonderfully vulnerable and brave. This is one of my top-five favourite films of all time.”
None of von Trier’s films are for the light of heart, but perhaps Antichrist is the most provocative of all, which is saying something indeed, seeing as the Danish filmmaker is considered a certain provocateur of the highest order. But there’s often beauty in his films, too, an expression of darkness that one doesn’t find elsewhere, and this is clearly something that Ana Lili Amirpour admires deeply.
