Amirpour's film is shot in high-contrast black and white and uses the silent-era vampire's visual grammar: the figure held still in a doorway, the long shadow arriving before the body, and a predator who moves at walking pace and is frightening because she does not hurry. The chador the character wears is used the way Murnau used Orlok's silhouette, as a shape that reads as a vampire before anything supernatural has happened on screen. The setting and the politics are the film's own; the way the figure is photographed is inherited.