The best vampire movies are usually the ones which get rid of the ground rules. e.g. no garlic, no crucifixes, a stake in the heart can kill. In Near Dark, writer/director Kathryn Bigelow throws out the rule book and creates a truly unique horror movie, which mixes the Gothic tones of vampire mythology with the vast landscapes and mannerisms of the western genre.
Near Dark is what a fast, violent vampire flick is all about. The vampires here are gritty, dirty, violent, and pissed off creatures who don’t have any plans of world domination or enslaving humanity. They just live to survive.
The story begins with Caleb meeting and falling for Mae. Bigelow does a great job tricking us into believing we are watching a touching love story as we follow these two on a date. But Mae is actually a vampire and even though she genuinely likes Caleb and doesn’t wanna hurt him, she is also hungry. In a very tense scene Bigelow builds an amazing amount of tension as we feel Mae’s conflict as she contemplates kissing or killing Caleb. Right when you think she’s going in for the kill, she pulls back at the last minute and gives him a little nip on the neck. It’s a great scene and Mae hits all the right notes: she’s cute and innocent but also has a raw animalistic side that she struggles to keep below the surface. It’s a great performance.
Mae’s nip was enough to turn Caleb into a vampire, but he doesn’t understand what’s happening to himself; he’s hungry but can’t stomach any kind of food and he’s becoming very sensitive to sunlight. As Caleb stumbles home after his encounter with Mae, just as the sun is rising, he looks as though he is gonna burst into flames. Just as he’s about to get to his house, an R.V. comes outta nowhere and swoops him up–right in full view of Caleb’s dad.
All this takes place in like the first 15-20 minutes. It’s a great beginning that really sets the tone for the rest of the flick. Inside the R.V. are Mae and her “family”: Jesse, Severin, Diamondback and Homer. Everyone in the R.V. are vampires. They’ve all been changed at different times. The “family” isn’t happy that Mae turned Caleb and they are ready to just kill him to get rid of him. But Mae convinces them to give him a chance and to let him make his first kill thereby becoming a full vampire after his first feeding. So they take him to a honky-tonk bar in the middle of nowhere to see if he has what it takes to survive as a vampire.
This is probably the most famous part of the movie. It’s both humorous and absolutely horrifying. The “family” walks into the bar as normal customers and slowly begin to terrorize the few drunk locals. Bill Paxton, as Severin, shines as one violent bastard. What they end up doing to the guys in the bar is hard to watch. You know it’s not gonna end well for the customers.
The rest of the movie has Caleb’s dad tracking him down to save him from the “kidnappers.” And just wait until the final battle between Caleb and his dad and the “family” of vampires. Awesome stuff here. This was Bigelow’s first solo directing job and she was warned by producer Edward Feldman that if she couldn’t handle the job as director she’d be replaced after the first five days of filming.
Bigelow is now an Academy Award winner for The Hurt Locker. The action sequences are beautifully shot making it feel as though you’re actually in the movie, and the horror scenes are absolutely terrifying. The scene in the bar could be used in a film school as the perfect example of how to set up a shot and build the tension to an explosive and violent ending. The cinematography by Adam Greenberg is excellent, his haunting image of the night as seen through the eyes of a vampire both stunningly beautiful and eerie, and the score by German band Tangerine Dream is great. Some of the dialog comes across as clunky and cheesy, and the at times wooden acting by Adrian Pasdar (Caleb) and Jenny Wright (Mae) can drag the movie down. But overall, Near Dark can be recommended it for its creativity alone, much less for the fact that it’s a fantastic film.