Near Dark (1987)

How exactly does one describe Near Dark?

Is it horror? Kind of.

Is it a western? It definitely has elements of one.

More than anything, however, it’s an incredibly strange and rad vampire movie!

The basic idea is The Lost Boys but in Oklahoma instead of the California Boardwalk.

Unfortunately, it’s been lost to time due to the fact that its rights are messy and therefore rarely available. But it’s absolutely worth seeking out and we hope to get that ball rolling!

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, Near Dark both follows in the footsteps and is the predecessor of a career made up of elevated genre work.

With her first feature, The Loveless, Bigelow creates an art film around the bikers of the 50s. As she continues in her filmography, she goes on to make movies like Point Break, a kitschy heist movie that is actually an exploration of male intimacy.

In this film, she tells a story of destructive influences. The way people drain us of our life force if we aren’t careful to who we open up to.

Bigelow is very smart in her understanding that some of the best films that mess around in genre work are doing so to tell a greater narrative, not through literalism, but through metaphor.

Vampires on film come out very early in Hollywood’s history, pre-dating even talkies with films like Nosferatu and Vampyr.

So when making a vampire film, what can one do to keep it fresh?

In the case of Bigelow, she understands a little bit goes a long way, and she does this in two ways.

First, she sets it in rural Oklahoma rather than the more traditional stuffy British colonial setting that we’re used to seeing.

Second, she gives the film a neo-western aesthetic that really helps set it apart from its contemporaries. Many films would ape this style, such as From Dusk Till Dawn and 30 Days of Night, but none do it quite as well as Near Dark.

The last thing we want to point out is that many directors who attempt the neo-western aesthetic are satisfied with just slapping a cowboy hat on a vampire and calling in a Western (sorry, Robert Rodriguez).

Bigelow goes above and beyond. What she does is ask the question of how to take old tropes and update them to fit the style of the story.

How do we incorporate modern sexuality? How do we address American gun fetishism? How do we take a look at the isolation of archetypical cowboys and draw a line from that to the isolation of a vampire?

She understands that what makes genre work interesting is not actually its style, but its substance, and this film has substance in spades.

Guess Tomorrow’s Film