Virginia

Virginia is not destined to fair well in this film. Her purpose in the plot is to serve as a trigger to action for Lacke and also to provide a contrast versus Eli about how she deals with being a vampire. This being the case, her prospects were grim from the outset.

The fate that awaits Virginia is nicely foreshadowed in the scene where Virginia enters the Chinese restaurant and joins her friends. As she approaches the door, she pauses at the window and taps on the glass to her friends. In light of all of the symbolism that surrounds images of hands in this film, it is interesting that the film presents us here with an image of Virginia with her hand on the window. It is a small hint that something unpleasant is to come for Virginia.

After Virginia is attacked by Eli, the film moves to show us the effects of her transformation into a vampire. And the vehicle that it uses first to show us these effects is her hand - the same hand that knocked on the window. We see a close-up of her hand as the sun creeps though a gap in her blinds and shines upon the back of her finger. We see the finger char and smolder from just this small exposure to sunlight. This image both sets up and foreshadows Virginia's ultimate fate.

Then later when Virginia is in the hospital, we see a shot of Lacke's hand fingering Virginia's wrist restraint. Here we see in the frame Virginia's hand (the one that had been placed on the window) separated from Lacke's hand by the restraint. There is indeed now a barrier between Virginia and Lacke, and in the fact the barrier separates Virginia from the rest of humanity. She is now a vampire. Immediately after this shot we learn that Virginia realizes at least part of what has befallen her, when she says to Lacke,

That kid... She must have infected me somehow.
I don't want to live.

The restraint on Virginia's wrist is symbolizing that she has now been barred from her old human life. She realizes that her humanity is being taken from her. This shot also shows that Lacke is pondering this new barrier as well.

Now when the orderly unlocks Virginia's she has an opportunity to make a choice. Now she uses the hand that knocked the on the window, the hand that was burned by the sun, to reach out for a final human contact. The film shows her reaching out and grasping a hold of her humanity. Unlike Eli, she has decided that she cannot live without it. Although the film has shown us that Eli very much desires human contact, for Virginia it is a necessity. She has chosen to keep a tight grip on her human life even though it will consume her.

As Virginia meets her horrible fate we see her hand waving about, engulfed in flames. Having her hand be free was a natural result of the plot up to this point, so it is unlikely that this shot was specifically intended to put an exclamation point at the end of the story told by Virginia's hand. However it provides such a nice end cap the symbolism of her hand that I just could not ignore it.