Film Notes: Near Dark

So, you’ve discovered your love for “elevated horror” and devoured the decade’s bumper crop with which the term arose. You take to Letterboxd to explore the genre’s influences, only to find a dizzying sea of suggestions. Where to start and whomst to trust?

Never fear … the Hyperreal doctor is in to declare NEAR DARK on 35mm as your summer one with a bullet.

Kathryn Bigelow made her co-directorial debut in 1981 with THE LOVELESS, an exercise in style that doubled as Willem Defoe’s debut as a leading man (and leather daddy). What THE LOVELESS lacks in plot, it makes up for in meditation on the simmering pull of power and violence. It would be six years before her follow-up, during which Bigelow evidently studied up on genre story beats.

Bigelow wanted to make a western, and she found the money to do it by adding vampires in the form of future hubby James Cameron’s ALIEN hunks. (Draculas were a hot commodity in the mid ‘80s during the fantasy/horror boom.) Like many of our favorite cult classics, her solo directorial debut crash landed as the producer and distributor went bankrupt during its release. Yet for films ahead of their time, this sequence sometimes cements a legacy.

Though filmed in Arizona, NEAR DARK feels every bit a Lone Star movie as BLOOD SIMPLE or PARIS, TEXAS. Witness Bigelow’s next male muse Bill Paxton as human sex on fire, strutting down the bartop, our bloodsuckers turning the honky tonk to a neon slaughterhouse, George Strait’s “The Cowboy Rides Away” on the jukebox. If you’re at all intuned to what happens down the Avenue, you’ll watch it all reflected in this jaw dropping display. And yet, of all Bigelow’s films, this one perhaps best alludes to fascism without out and out reproducing it. By never actually uttering the word “vampire,” this defanged beauty has its cake and drinks it too.

Bigelow’s mastery of action often clocks her closer to Michael Bay in our collective consciousness than say, a contemporary of Paul Verhoeven. Wrong! NEAR DARK is the perfect entry point for someone looking to discover her auteurist poetry. The constructed visual language of this film is quite simply finger-licking good.