Following in something of the grainy exploitation footsteps of James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984)—his 1986 film Aliens even gets a name-check here, though he was after all Kathryn Bigelow’s then-soon-to-be- and now-ex-husband—Near Dark takes instead the vampire mythos and reconfigures it into a dusty, grungy road movie with Western overtones. The word “vampire” is never uttered, so what we are presented with is a motley band of leather-clad ne’er-do-wells blazing a path across the mid-West, killing random locals and draining their blood for sustenance. One such is naïve farm boy Caleb (Adrian Pasdar), who is smitten with drifter Mae (Jenny Wright). She for her part takes pity on him and just bites him rather than draining his blood, meaning he survives but is turned into one of her kind. At this point, the entire crew is introduced, led by Lance Henriksen’s Jesse, although it’s Bill Paxton as the loud-mouthed and dangerous Severen who makes the most impact in the film (and so is given prominence on the posters). Even 30 years on, the film still looks excellent, with a score by German electronic group Tangerine Dream which is at once both an archetypal example of scoring from this strain of 1980s genre cinema and also somehow avoids seeming really dated, like a lot of the era’s soundtracks now tend to. Undoubtedly the film is playing with contemporary fears around AIDS and other epidemics—isn’t that what they always say about vampire films?—but it works as an enjoyable genre piece, if a rather nihilistic one.
CREDITS
Director Kathryn Bigelow; Writers Eric Red and Bigelow; Cinematographer Adam Greenberg; Starring Adrian Pasdar, Jenny Wright, Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen; Length 95 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), London, Sunday 31 January 2016. 
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