On Thursday, February 19, Plazadrome digs deep into the ’90s art-house underground with a screening of Michael Almereyda’s sleek and chilly 1994 vampire film Nadja.
The film takes shape as a soft, postmodern reimagining of Dracula’s Daughter (1936), transplanting familiar nocturnal lore—alienation, desire, and immortality—into 1990s Brooklyn.
This screening features a newly released 4K restoration (Arbelos and Grasshopper), the highest quality presentation Nadja has received yet—an ideal excuse to revisit a film that has long existed in the margins.
Before the lights go down, Videodrome’s Jordan Kady will offer a short video introduction that digs into the film’s famously fraught production history. Chief among the hurdles: the sudden departure of actor Eric Stoltz just days before shooting was set to begin, which resulted in the film’s financiers bailing on the project. Executive producer David Lynch stepped in and personally financed the film, a rare act of filmmaker solidarity.
Stylistically, Nadja is as striking as it is unconventional. Almereyda’s use of the Fisher-Price PXL2000 aka Pixelvision toy camera in select scenes gives the film a ghostly, degraded texture, nodding to the expressionist techniques of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece Nosferatu, while firmly rooting it in the DIY aesthetics of the ’90s.
Composer Simon Fisher Turner’s haunting score adds to the film’s hypnotic pull, while the film’s soundtrack—featuring music by My Bloody Valentine, Portishead, Verve, and Spacehog—anchors Nadja firmly in its era. As Kady puts it, “Almereyda once described the film as ‘sucking the blood out of all other vampire movies,’” reconstituting centuries of lore into something singularly stylish and deeply strange. Three decades later, these sensibilities still feel radical and irresistibly seductive. Nadja is a must-see on the Plaza Theater’s big screen.
$16.49 (+tax). 9 p.m. The Plaza Theater, 1049 Ponce De Leon Ave NE.
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