Tagline
“The night has its own family.”
The Review
Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark is the most underrated vampire film ever made — a dusty, neo-Western road movie about a young Oklahoma man who is bitten by a beautiful drifter and inducted into a nomadic vampire family that travels the American heartland in a blacked-out RV. Bill Paxton's Severen steals every scene with manic, terrifying energy, and Lance Henriksen's Jesse brings quiet gravitas as the Civil War-veteran patriarch. The bar massacre sequence is one of the great horror set pieces of the 1980s. Bigelow combines the vampire genre with the Western and the road movie to create something entirely original. The film never uses the word 'vampire' once.
Fun Fact
The film's cast — Henriksen, Paxton, and Jenette Goldstein — had just worked together on Aliens with Bigelow's then-partner James Cameron. Near Dark was released the same week as The Lost Boys and was overshadowed commercially, but has since been recognized as the superior film by many critics. The word 'vampire' never appears in the screenplay.
Score Breakdown
Total Score
20/30
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