Near Dark (1987)

It’s not that vampires weren’t cool to me when I was young. They were cool, but in a kind of stuffy, old-timey way. I watched old movies about Dracula and even ventured into his realm myself in Castlevania, and so vampires, to me, were synonymous with capes and fog and remote castles in the European countryside hundreds of years ago. (And yes, I saw The Lost Boys, but while it was “fun” in a cheesy sort of way, it was too glossy and mainstream to really get me excited about the idea of modern-day bloodsuckers.) Then I saw Kathryn Bigelow’s movie Near Dark and had my entire understanding of vampires turned upside down. These vampires were rock n’ roll! Like a leather-clad biker gang that also wanted to suck your blood, Near Dark’s band of modern-day nightcrawlers simultaneously horrified me and electrified me. I wanted to run away from them, and I wanted to be one of them. Who wouldn’t feel the charismatic pull of a group that includes both Bill Paxton—at his most sinister and unnerving here in a thrilling performance—and Lance Henriksen, whose gravitas serves as a counterbalance to Paxton’s mania?

The movie is as rock n’ roll as its subjects, an exhilarating American odyssey of open roads, small-town motels, and dimly lit bars, with real visual energy and poetry to it. Before she’d go on to make Point Break and the much-maligned but now widely reclaimed Strange Days, Near Dark announced the arrival of a major filmmaking talent in Kathryn Bigelow. It also changed the way I thought about vampires forever. — Carolyn Petit