Meet the Girl. With big eyes and dark hair like Anna Karina, and Breton shirts like Jean Seberg, she skateboards around the fictional town of Bad City at night. She’s Iranian and wears a chador, loves dance music and has seen Elvis and Black Sabbath live. Also, she’s a 187-year-old vampire. And she’s fallen pretty hard for Arash, with his floppy hair and James Dean white T-shirts. Arash’s father Hossein is an addict and swamped under a mountain of debt to a pimp named Saeed. Maybe The Girl can help.

Director Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut feature takes the prize for coolest sub-genre of recent times – Iranian vampire western film. Critics have praised A Girl for its slick, cool, surreal look, beautifully shot in moody black and white. It was chosen for the ‘Next’ program at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and has been backed by executive producer Elijah Wood. Cinephiles will love spotting all the allusions embedded in the film, which references everything from Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, to Nosferatu, Near Dark, and Giant, drawing inspiration from filmmakers as diverse as Jim Jarmusch, Robert Rodriguez and Jean-Luc Godard.

Crawl out of your crypt and join our friends at Four Pillars Gin for The World Is a Vampire: A Bloody Shiraz Gin & Film Festival this winter. Throughout August, we’re bringing you a season of vampires so hot, you’d never guess their blood runs cold.

Spanning five weeks, the series ventures from A Date with Dracula (What We Do in the Shadows, Bram Stoker’s Dracula), The Vampire Chronicles (Interview with the Vampire, Queen of the Damned), Undead Icons (The Hunger, Vampire’s Kiss), Bloodsucking Blockbusters (From Dusk Till Dawn, Blade), all the way to Modern Vamps (Only Lovers Left Alive, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night).

And of course, each week gets a Bloody Shiraz Gin cocktail to match. For Only Lovers Left Alive and A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night we'll be serving Not Twilight, a sparkling mix of Four Pillars Bloody Shiraz Gin with ginger and lime.