16世纪,日本爆发应仁之乱,战火瞬时蔓延全国。国内征伐不断,百姓流离失所。是时妖魔邪祟趁虚而入,祸乱人间。吸血鬼在魔王鬼源真祖的率领下大肆屠害生灵,与之相对,另有一部分吸血鬼猎人挺身而出,与这群恶魔展开斗争,彼此缠斗近400年。
20世纪70年代,猎人集团以“红盾”的名义存在,他们中的少女猎人藤本小夜(全智贤 饰)尤其出众。小夜是吸血鬼和人类结合生下的女孩,她表面上是一个16岁的普通女高中生,实际上却是年龄接近400岁的吸血鬼猎人。她受命潜入美军基地内一所美国人学校,在此结识了将军的女儿爱丽丝(Allison Miller 饰),并将其从吸血鬼的手中救出。真祖及其手下蠢蠢欲动,他们和猎人绵亘了数百年的恩怨终于要做个了断……
Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman), a worn-out private detective, is hired to look for a 16-year-old girl who has run away from the luxury home of her mother, formerly a small-time actress in Los Angeles. The more the weary cynic tries to get under the surface of the seemingly simple case, the harder it is for him to find his bearings among the lies and deceptions that surround him. Eight years after the key New Hollywood film Bonnie and Clyde, Arthur Penn and Gene Hackman reunited to collaborate on what was to become one of the most undervalued films of the decade. Like Polanski in Chinatown or Altman in The Long Goodbye, in his revisionist film noir, Penn also allows the 1940s classic genre to pervade the complex reality of the 1970s. The feelings of bitterness and emptiness in the modern Chandleresque protagonist originate not only in the “public” sphere of the strange, increasingly convoluted case, but in his private life as well (boyhood trauma, a broken marriage). As Moseby remarks of a sporting event, “nobody’s winning … one side is just losing slower than the other.”