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For director Jim Jarmusch, Only Lovers Left Alive was never meant to be a horror movie along the lines of True Blood or Twilight, neither of which he’s seen. Jarmusch told IndieWire, “I really like the whole history of vampire films that are more the kind of marginal, the less conventional ones, starting with Vampyr by Carl Dreyer in the ‘30s.” Jarmusch had been thinking of writing a love story for quite some time when he decided to work within the genre of vampire films, giving us characters who, due to their longevity, were able to appreciate, bear witness and even lament the changes in world culture over the course of many centuries.

Named after Mark Twain’s The Diaries of Adam and Eve, the vampires in Only Lovers are very old souls who often reminisce about bygone areas, remembering the exact date when they wore a specific article of clothing, surrounding themselves with stacks books and eclectic instruments and worshipping music with almost religious devotion. “The idea of seeing history in a timeline by having lived through it, but from the margins, from the shadows: observing it half in secret is very interesting to me,” says Jarmusch. “I’ve always been drawn to outsider type of characters, so what more perfect shadowy inhabitants of the margins are there, than vampires?”​

Besides underground culture, the vampires also serve as metaphorical representations of the geopolitical uncertainties of the coming century. Adam has become melancoholy over the heartlessness of humanity, referring to them as zombies. He’s sick, Adam laments, of “their fear of their own imaginations.” Ben Sachs of The Chicago Reader describes Adam’s sardonic use of the term “zombies” as an evocation of “the predatory nature of capitalism, wanton destruction and cultural amnesia…Neither vampires nor zombies are really alive, and the film’s canny references to widespread ecological devastation hint at the possibility that all humanity might join their ranks in the next century.”