#2,522. The Addiction (1995)

“Existence is the search for relief from our habit, and our habit is the only relief we can find”. 

This is a line spoken by Kathleen (Lili Taylor), the lead character in Abel Ferrara’s 1995 horror film The Addiction who also serves as the movie's narrator. A graduate student majoring in philosophy, Kathleen’s world is turned upside-down following a chance encounter with a vampire (Annabella Sciorra). As a result of being bitten, Kathleen herself begins to change, and before long her thirst for blood is unquenchable. 

At first energized by this transformation, a brief meeting with another vampire named Peina (Christopher Walken, in a brilliant cameo) soon has Kathleen seeing her “condition” in an entirely different light. 

Shot in stunning black and white, The Addiction is a fascinating take on the vampire mythos, treating those afflicted with vampirism as addicts (equating their desire for blood with alcoholism or drug dependency) while at the same time drawing comparisons between the so-called “evil” inherent in vampires and that of humanity itself. At one point, Kathleen attends a lecture about the My Lai Massacre, and later visits an exhibit featuring images from the Holocaust. With moments such as these, Ferrara seems to suggest that vampirism itself isn’t the root of evil; it's merely a magnification of the fundamental evil that is always lurking - dormant or otherwise - within mankind’s psyche. 

By way of his thoughtful approach to the material, coupled with a kinetic visual style, Ferrara has fashioned a vampire movie with an art-house mentality that also features plenty of blood and carnage, creating what amounts to a hybrid genre film likely to impress academics and horror fans alike. 

This, coupled with an extraordinary performance by Lili Taylor, has me believing that The Addiction is one of the finest vampire flicks I have ever seen. 
Rating: 9.5 out of 10 - don’t waste another minute… see it now!