Remarkable because, for all we recognise the genius of The Addiction, the folkloric trappings of vampirism are almost entirely absent from the finished film; notions of pungent garlic, fusty castles and wooden stakes mean nothing. The crucifix we see at the close is less weapon than instrument of redemptive control. The key to The Addiction lies in its title - in its oft-repeated but never over-worked fusing of sanguination and narcotics abuse. These creatures are working through the meaning of who they are, so to emerge, for better or worse, as what nature (or, this being St John, God) has ordained. Eternity, as Schooly D’s credit song narrates, is a very long time.

Kathleen Conklin (Lili Taylor) is a New York University philosophy student with an academic stake in Vietnam, the Holocaust, Bosnia - very twentieth-century atrocities. On the way home she is assaulted by a mysterious woman (Annabella Sciorra), who proceeds to gnaw her way through Kathleen’s neck. Over the ensuing hours and days the victim is wracked with pain and consumed in blood-lust. She shoots up with a vagrant’s blood tapped-off in a hypo and entices a professor back to her apartment where, after scoring heroin, she avails herself of his veins. Thus begins the spiral of use and abuse that climaxes in a massacre of Kathleen’s devising and, ultimately, the last rites.

There is little by way of plot promoted in St John’s largely episodic script, more snapshots of a journey; Kathleen is travelling through theory and into practise. Instead it chooses to alternate depravity and philosophical discourse: this is a vampire film in which the names of Nietzsche, Sartre and Heidigger are more authoritatively dropped than those of Stoker or Rice. No matter if you find the end results risible - and some will find argument aplenty in the grisly historical footage Ferrara handles - you cannot deny the film’s deadly serious intent.

From the off Kathleen is a pupil, but it’s only through her addiction that she learns the truth of evil - not of its outward manifestations but from deep within the sins of the individual. She passes her finals because her mind is galvanised, her education exercised now from shadows more than textbooks. The final bloody destruction is a truth too painful for these victimised, existentially-minded academics to learn: unleashing the students of evil on its willing spectators. The disparity between knowing and being, Kathleen’s education belongs to jaded sophisticate Sciorra, and to the bohemian male vampire she follows home one night (Christopher Walken, in a brief but emphatic cameo). His lesson is to live through damnation, detailing how he can still drink tea and eat and hold down a job. I can still defecate, he tells Taylor, asking her how long it has been since she were able to claim the same. He offers her the mundane facts of her condition and advises she read Naked Lunch: ‘You know nothing!’

‘We are not evil because we do evil,’ Sciorra explains with a weary air at the climax. ‘We do evil because we are evil.’ When she first attacks she tells Taylor to make her leave, something Taylor subsequently echoes in her own journey up-river: ‘Look sin in the face,’ she tells one victim, ‘and tell it to go.’

Ken Kelsch, a former CNN news cameraman, captures all of this like a guerilla-shot RKO picture; Film Noir for a new dark age. Joe Delia’s score is dense and unforgiving, finding space only for the severe Rap Ferrara favours and a piece by Nietzsche himself.

The film certainly cements Taylor’s mercuric rise to the forefront of US screen actresses; her brilliantly essayed Valerie Solanas in 1996’s I Shot Andy Warhol hinting at the weight of work here. She commands the picture, occasionally donning wraparounds to summon up a terrifying amalgam of Lou Reed and Ferrara himself. Walken is all too soon gone but lingers on the mind like a shadow, and, bizarrely, director Jonathan Demme’s campaigning cousin Father Robert Castle (subject of the documentary Cousin Bobby) cameos as the priest who offers Kathleen redemption.

The Addiction is about up-dating legend for the fin-de-siecle. It has none of the period trappings of the miserable Interview With The Vampire, the self-conscious surreal of Coppola, or Near Dark's flip MTV-hip. Or perhaps it dispenses with legend entirely in favour of what, deep down, we know for the fundamental truth of vampirism - what happens hour on hour, day on day when the cameras look away. It’s about blood and injury and pain, about hospital corridors and the wounds on the arm of Kathleen’s professor, marked IN and OUT. Like so much of Ferrara’s work, this is a film about users.

It also has few precedents. The chiaroscuro lighting has echoes of Michael Almereyda’s recent, underrated vampiric dissertation, Nadja, but none of that film’s playfulness. Its notions of sin and redemption are pure Ferrara/St John - this passage leads through a hell of their own devising, reflected only in their work together. When we see Taylor we think of Harvey Keitel’s naked guilt in Bad Lieutenant, the sapping emotional maelstrom that is Dangerous Game.

Grim, demanding, draining, the delay in bringing the film to the UK is perplexing. It is difficult, certainly, but exists as a considerable extension of the Ferrara cannon; every bit as ferocious as King of New York, as driven as The Funeral, and as terrifying as Bad Lieutenant. Be very afraid.