‘We keep odd hours…’
1987 was a seminal year for cool vampire movies with Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys and Kathryn Bigalow’s Near Dark both emerging in October of that year. While the former is a crowd-pleasing, theme park ride that has become a cult classic over time, Near Dark is just as entertaining and bombastic but it has a little more to say about the concepts of immortality and love…
When Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) picks up Mae (Jenny Wright) after a night of drinking, he doesn’t realise that he is to be turned into a vampire. Despite the fact that the particular troupe of vampires he is to be shacking up with contains Jenette Goldstein, Bill Paxton and Lance Henriksen (all fresh from filming Aliens with Near Dark director Kathryn Bigalow’s then-husband James Cameron), Caleb isn’t keen on being a vampire mainly because he has an aversion to murder.
Bigalow’s vampire western may not be as beloved as The Lost Boys (and if we’re being honest it’s not as brazenly entertaining as that movie) but it still brings something new to a tired subgenre. Indeed, even now, Near Dark feels like a very modern vampire movie. The True Knot from Doctor Sleep is the closest comparison in contemporary cinema. As with that movie, these vampires travel the back roads of America in a van with blacked-out windows looking to stalk their next victims. Unlike that movie, they don’t wear stupid hats.
While the whole cast are compelling, it is Paxton who steals every scene (as is so often the case), strutting around like a man who was born to play a hell-raising, undead monster. It’s hard not to become spellbound with his trademark grin and you would imagine that he’d make an excellent vampire in real life. I would invite him in in a heartbeat.
Near Dark is a stylish and captivating subversion of the vampire myth. It’s still potent almost 40 years later. The bar scene alone ensures that Bigalow’s foray into the world of vampirism must go down as a classic of the genre.
