Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.
Last time, Bernhardt reviewed the 2011 Craig Gillespie movie Fright Night. Today, he looks at the 1987 Kathryn Bigelow movie, Near Dark. This article will contain spoilers.
This is a real influential one, in retrospect; also kind of an uneven one, if we’re being honest. But the highs are very high.
Near Dark seems to be remembered these days mainly for Bill Paxton’s role as the manic, speed demon “eldest son” of the movie’s vampiric found family, Severen, and that’s probably correct as far as it goes — certainly no one else jumps off the screen like him, though Lance Henriksen as the patriarch Jesse has his moments of murderous glee. The real stars of the movie in 2025 are probably the rusting, sun-baked, dirty and desolate stretches of Arizona industry and railyard (with occasional help from Huntington Beach, California for scenes that take place in town) that define the movie’s look, which is a credit to director Kathryn Bigelow. Allegedly much of our action is taking place in Oklahoma, and we do get one or two scenes to evoke that, like Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) drinking from Mae’s wrist in front of two great oil rigs pumping away at the earth. The movie has a grimy underbelly feel to it; both the nomadic vampire family and everyone unfortunate enough to run into them feels like they’re just on the wrong side of making it.
The good parts of the movie, that is; there’s an entire subplot with Caleb’s father and little sister following the carnage looking for him, eventually finding him, and then at the end of the film reversing not only his vampiric transformation but that of his vampire girlfriend Mae (Jenny Wright). Not to put the cart before the horse here, but scientific answers to vampirism are a real bummer outside of a firmly science-fiction story where it’s clear that’s going to be a theme going into it, and they’re a double bummer as a setup for a happy ending (in fairness, the film undercuts this somewhat — Mae was turned back human without her consent and we hit credits before grappling with whether maybe someone should have asked her first).
A whole lot of even the film’s great middle is romance, and our two leads look the part but are inconsistent in feeling it; Wright is competent but her Mae is something of a one-note character the whole film, which is great during the initial seduction but then kind of wears on through to the ending. Pasdar, meanwhile, does see his character change, and his Caleb is far more interesting and engaging as the cocky cowboy shitkicker who doesn’t care how out of his depth he is both in the front and end of the film than as the tremulous lovestruck boy who is fighting for his humanity and turning into a vampire. (In a mirror of how this film came out into The Lost Boys‘ wake and bombed at the box office, Near Dark almost got a remake in the aughts, but it got nixed because it was too close to Twilight’s release window for the studio’s budget tolerance. A pity we didn’t get to see that one, because Walton Goggins, who would have been fantastic in an update of Bill Paxton’s role, has probably aged out of it. He’s nicely aged into Lance Henriksen’s, though.)
Plot’s pretty simple, since this is fundamentally a Western and we’re in and out in 95 minutes: Caleb drives up to drink with his buddies at the watering hole in town, and sees Mae, beautiful and single. He aggressively approaches and hits on her, as you do in the mid-eighties, and since she’s a vampire looking for a mark, she is receptive. But over the course of their “date” back on his farm, she starts actually falling for him, and when she bites him (after demanding he drive her home, and him pulling another acceptable-in-the-eighties move of refusing to unless she kisses him) she turns him instead of tearing out his throat and killing him. He tries to stumble home but is snapped up by this malevolent roaming band of vampire nomads in a busted RV, and the stakes are set: Caleb’s got one week to learn what being a vampire’s like and shape up to their specifications, or they’re gonna kill him slowly. This is the compromise position; if not for Mae, Severen would have skipped straight to killing him slowly. This leads to the middle of the film, where there’s not much interesting plot discussion to be had as character beats get hashed out — for example, the hundred-year-old vampire trapped in the twelve-year-old boy’s body has unsurprisingly developed at least one complex about that — but they sure kill a lot of people.
I’ve heard a possibly-apocryphal story that the Sabbat, the antagonist vampire faction in the White Wolf TTRPG Vampire: The Masquerade, which will come out in a few short years, take a lot of their inspiration from this group of lunatics, at least on the dirty murderhobo side of things (there’s also, for instance, weird “fleshcrafter” vampire wizards who come from a different horror tradition; no grab bag tabletop setting is ever gonna be a monolith). Even if that’s not strictly speaking how it went down, it’s easy to look at Severen’s antics and see why people would think that. When I’ve heard Near Dark described before, sometimes it was in the context of it being a “mean” movie, which I’m not sure is true; there’s a lot of moral fable right and wrong and triumph of good over evil happening here. But it’s certainly true of the cadre of vampires it depicts, down multiple vectors — they’re nasty, sure, but they’re also mean of spirit and mean of status; dirty, shabby, and unkempt, stealing used clothes, stealing used cars, possessed of nothing in the world that they didn’t take off someone else the previous night. They’d be pitiable if they weren’t the kind of people they’d allowed themselves to become; once you see how they “live,” they’re mostly contemptible.
The movie intimates multiple times that this vampire family has been together for centuries; that the patriarch fought for the South in the Civil War, for instance, or that during one wild night in Chicago, they started that city’s famous Great Fire. None of that really jibes with the complete mania with which they conduct themselves; once they run into Caleb, their unreasoning appetite for murder and spectacle dooms them in pretty short order, and not just from his protagonism — they get so sloppy after the famous bar murder sequence that the state police corner them in the motel where they went to sleep it off, and things would have ended there if not for the young man from Oklahoma getting them a van to escape in. (This showdown has one of the best visual jokes of the film, where Severen blasts the state trooper knocking on the motel room door through the chest with a shotgun, and then immediately gets blasted in the chest himself by the sun pouring through the hole he just blew in the door.)
Eventually, things end with Caleb returning to human and rescuing both his sister and his vampire girlfriend from the clutches of the evil murder nomads; it’s a fun finale with a lot more explosions than you’d think from a vampire film. Bigelow pretty much entirely eschews stakes or crosses in this film and goes for sunlight as her weapon of choice against the bloodsuckers, which is a good idea for a film called “Near Dark” with a bunch of lighting tricks set in the badlands and deserts of the American Southwest. The film certainly uses all those bits of the toolkit better than John Carpenter’s Vampires did.
I have to consult with Rob and our patrons for what we have planned for next week; there might be one more eighties film, or we might be on to voting for our next slate of films, something our backers get to do every so often over on our Patreon; in addition to the many other benefits of being a paying member at Goonhammer, you also get to be my vampiric assignment editor.
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