Near Dark 9781911239277, 9781911239307, 9781911239291

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BFI Film Classics The BFI Film Classics series introduces, interprets and celebrates landmarks of world cinema. Each volume offers an argument for the film’s ‘classic’ status, together with discussion of its production and reception history, its place within a genre or national cinema, an account of its technical and aesthetic importance, and in many cases, the author’s personal response to the film. For a full list of titles in the series, please visit https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/series/bfi-film-classics

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Near Dark Stacey Abbott

THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 by Bloomsbury on behalf of the British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street, London, W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk The BFI is the lead organisation for film in the UK and the distributor of Lottery funds for film. Our mission is to ensure that film is central to our cultural life, in particular by supporting and nurturing the next generation of film-makers and audiences. We serve a public role which covers the cultural, creative and economic aspects of film in the UK. Copyright © Stacey Abbott, 2020 Stacey Abbott has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. vii–viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover artwork: © Julia Soboleva Series cover design: Louise Dugdale Series text design: ketchup/SE14 Images from Near Dark (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987), Near Dark Joint Venture/F/M Entertainment All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: PB: ePDF: ePUB:

978-1-9112-3927-7 978-1-9112-3929-1 978-1-9112-3928-4

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Contents Acknowledgmentsvii 1 ‘Just a Couple More Minutes of Your Time, About the Same Duration as the Rest of Your Life’: Making a Cult Vampire Film

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2 ‘The Sun Is On the Rise’: A Gothic Aesthetic12 3 ‘Finger Lickin’ Good’: Genre Hybridity and the Action Vampire

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4 ‘No You’ve Never Met Another Girl Like Me’: The Sympathetic, Not-So-Reluctant Vampire

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5 ‘Fun Times’: Disrupting Narrative Resolution and Resisting the Status Quo

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Notes87 Credits91

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Acknowledgments

This book has been a long time coming and so there are a great many people who have helped me along the way. I would like to thank Oksana Dykyj from Concordia University who first introduced me to Near Dark in 1992. She showed me the roadhouse slaughter scene, telling me, ‘if you like vampires you’ll love this’. I was instantly hooked. I would also like to thank the department of Film Studies at Concordia who first taught me the love of textual analysis. Over the years, I’ve spoken to many people about this film and I am indebted to them for helping shape my thinking, including Lorna Jowett, Sorcha Ní Flaìnn, Roger Luckhurst, and the many students who have taken my Modern Vampire class at the University of Roehampton. I would like to thank the staff at the Margaret Herrick Library for all of their help; to Santander for funding my research trip to California; and to the Department of Media Culture and Language at the University of Roehampton for providing me the sabbatical to research and write the book. Thank you also to the outstanding staff at the BFI Reuben Library for all their help. Thank you to Jenna Steventon at Palgrave Macmillan who helped initiate the project and to the BFI for being so positive about the film’s inclusion in the series. I am particularly grateful to Rebecca Barden, Sophie Contento, and everyone at Bloomsbury for seeing the book through to its publication. On a personal note, I am, as always, thankful for my siblings – Glenn, Leslie, Jeff and Joanne – who have always encouraged my love of horror cinema. I could not have written this book without the love and support of my husband Simon Brown – my partner in crime. He has listened patiently to me talk about this film for years, rewatched countless 1980s vampire films and the collected works of

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Kathryn Bigelow, helped me work through issues with the analysis, and offered invaluable feedback on the book as it developed. I owe a special thanks to Max and Lily – my loyal Westies – who have been silent (or not-so-silent) companions throughout the writing of this book and an attentive audience when I read my work out loud. They know more about vampires and Kathryn Bigelow than your average Westie. In particularly I want to thank Max who has been by my side through the writing and editing of every article and book I have produced since we brought him home in 2003. He is a calming presence in a chaotic world, and it is for this reason that I am dedicating this book to Max.

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1 ‘Just a Couple More Minutes of Your Time, About the Same Duration as the Rest of Your Life’: Making a Cult Vampire Film

In 1988, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City singled out independent horror film Near Dark (1987), made by up-and-coming director Kathryn Bigelow, for special attention. Recognizing the film’s originality and artistry, MOMA honoured the film by presenting it as part of their Cineprobe programme. Launched in 1968, Cineprobe was designed as a forum ‘for independent and avant-garde filmmakers to present their work’. Films included in these seasons usually represented experimental and avant-garde cinema, ‘as well as narratives with new and unusual strategies’.1 Near Dark was screened on the 25 and 26 April 1988 – six months after the film’s theatrical release – accompanied by a mini-retrospective of Bigelow’s earlier films, notably her short, The Set Up (1978), and her first feature, The Loveless (1981), co-directed by Monty Montgomery.2 The inclusion of Near Dark in MOMA’s programme – as well as its acquisition into the MOMA collection – signals its position as a genre film that pushes boundaries and challenges conventions, while equally possessing a distinct narrative and aesthetic style. MOMA’s retrospective also marked early recognition of Bigelow as a significant film-maker and auteur. Moreover, as J. Hoberman in the Village Voice noted, Near Dark was ‘the first horror flick to be given a Museum of Modern Art Cineprobe since the epochal June 1970 screening of Night of the Living Dead helped crystallize that movie’s cult’.3 The association with Night of the Living Dead in this context draws attention to certain symmetries between the films. Both failed upon initial theatrical release only to find critical and curatorial acceptance

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within broader film culture and, eventually, an audience through alternative channels – the Midnight Movies of the 1970s for Night and video/laserdisc/DVD release for Near Dark. Both are also horror films that challenge expectation, signalling the value and artistic potential inherent to the genre. Near Dark is a vampire film set largely in the contemporary Midwest of the USA that rejects established genre conventions in favour of its own hybrid approach. It skilfully merges the Gothic with the conventions of the western, road movie and film noir at a narrative and aesthetic level, while also introducing elements of the outlaw romance genre of They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray, 1948) and Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967). Near Dark tells the story of Caleb, a half-vampire trying to decide whether to embrace his new nature or return to his human family. It is the family of vampires who lure him into their nocturnal existence that is of central importance to the film’s innovation. They are defined by a nomadic lifestyle, anarchic behaviour, a passion for violence, an ambition for eternity, intense family bonds, and a gritty visual appearance. They are morally ambiguous and undermine the class structures that have historically defined stories of the undead. These are not aristocrats but instead they capture the allure and horror of the disenfranchised and the underclass. The film is sumptuous in its aesthetic design, offering a nuanced and haunting presentation of its monstrous protagonists who stalk the backroads and desert landscape of the American Midwest. While it remains Bigelow’s only foray into horror to date, its innovation showcases the creativity and artistic richness of the genre without sacrificing its visceral qualities. The film’s reception by MOMA signals Bigelow’s standing as a director of significance at an early point in her career, not simply because of her visual art background, something that would be in keeping with many of the artists featured in the Cineprobe series, but because of the way in which she would from Near Dark onward re-envision traditionally mainstream genres of film-making.

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Production Before making Near Dark, Bigelow co-wrote and co-directed The Loveless with Monty Montgomery, a film that is equally preoccupied with outcasts and outlaws existing on the periphery of society. While there are clear connections to Near Dark, its aesthetic and narrative drive is drawn more from Bigelow’s experience as an artist than her growing fascination and interest in working in mainstream cinema. The Loveless is a low-budget motorcycle movie with art cinema leanings, made for $800,000 raised from private funders. It was shot over six weeks and premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 1981.4 Bringing together the styles and preoccupations of Douglas Sirk and Kenneth Anger, Bigelow and Montgomery conceived of the film as a ‘drive-in movie with psychological connotations’. Lindsay Mackie observed that the film uses its biker narrative to explore themes around ‘incest and the character of the South itself, its repressiveness, the dejected hatred of outsiders’.5 After The Loveless’ release, Bigelow entered an unsatisfying period of project development, writing scripts for Walter Hill and Touchstone Studios, among others, that were never realized, while also working as a film studies lecturer. Teaching a class on ‘B-movies’ at Cal Arts, Bigelow honed her interest in low-budget genre film-making.6 Near Dark therefore marked Bigelow’s first solo directorial outing and the gateway to what would become an illustrious career as a leading director working in Hollywood cinema. Near Dark was co-written with Eric Red, who also collaborated with Bigelow on Blue Steel (1990), as well as writing The Hitcher (Robert Harmon, 1986) and writing/directing Body Parts (1991) and Bad Moon (1996). Near Dark was their first collaboration and was part of an arrangement between Bigelow and Red designed to launch their careers as writer-directors. They agreed they would co-write two non-commissioned screenplays, which they would attempt to finance, with themselves attached as directors to help gain their foothold within the industry. They co-wrote Near Dark and Undertow with Bigelow attached to direct Near Dark and Red

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to direct Undertow (1996). Bigelow and Red sent the script for Near Dark to independent film producer Edward S. Feldman and his company F/M for financing. Feldman had recently had notable critical and box-office success with Witness (Peter Weir, 1985) and was, along with F/M partner Charles R. Meeker, the executive producer of The Hitcher. Feldman says that ‘at the time we were looking for low budget original scripts. There are a lot of low budget films but most of them don’t have any real pizzaz to them. This show had a lot of pizzaz to it’.7 Feldman and Meeker received the script on Thursday and a deal was agreed by Monday and Bigelow’s commercial directorial career began in earnest.8 Steven-Charles Jaffe – associate producer of Demon Seed (Donald Cammell, 1977) and Time After Time (Nicholas Meyer, 1979), producer and writer of Motel Hell (Kevin Connor, 1980), and director of Scarab (1983) – came on board as producer. Adam Greenberg (The Terminator [James Cameron, 1984]), described by Feldman as the ‘celebrity independent DP’ of the period, was director of photography;9 Howard Smith (River’s Edge [Tim Hunter, 1986]) was the editor; and Stephen Altman (Secret Honor [Robert Altman, 1984] and Fool For Love [Robert Altman, 1985]) was production designer. The film was made for a budget of $5 million. Near Dark’s indie credentials were in place with a production team emerging from American low-budget cinema tradition, all under the helm of Bigelow. Originally due to be shot in Oklahoma, the film had to be relocated at the last minute to Coolidge, Arizona, due to flooding. It had a very tight and difficult schedule, shot over forty-seven days of which forty were night shoots. In addition to co-writing the script, Bigelow produced precise, visually dynamic storyboards, and while Bigelow explains that they ‘didn’t nail [their] feet to the (story) boards’, the tight schedule meant that they did follow them closely rather than improvise on location.10 Feldman and Jaffe, as well as the cast, praised Bigelow for her professionalism and vision for the film. Unfortunately, the first major problem occurred during postproduction near the end of the summer 1987 when the production

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company F/M lost their distribution deal for the film. By September 1987, however, the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group (DEG) had acquired domestic, and limited international, distribution rights for the film but unfortunately DEG went bankrupt during the film’s release. These distribution problems impacted on how the film was marketed and subsequently on its box-office reception.11 Reception Near Dark premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and was released on 2 October 1987, marketed as a Halloween horror release. Posters were varied but generally featured horror elements such as the bloody and burnt image of Bill Paxton as the vampire Severen or the screaming face of a vampire shot through with beams of sunlight. The tagline ‘Blood is our life, Darkness, our

A Halloween horror release

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feeding ground; And sunlight, our eternal damnation’ also emphasized the film’s horror heritage. Near Dark played in US cinemas for approximately three weeks, bringing in a total domestic box-office gross of $3,369,307, a poor return given its $5 million budget.12 These box-office results are in some ways surprising, particularly considering the growing popularity of the vampire at this time. The 1980s marked a notable return to the vampire in American horror cinema, with a particular shift toward the Americanization of the genre through its relocation away from Europe – and its more conventionally Gothic roots – to modern day USA with films such as The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983), Fright Night (Tom Holland, 1985), Once Bitten (Howard Storm, 1985), Vamp (Richard Wenk, 1986), The Lost Boys (Joel Schumacher, 1987), The Monster Squad (Fred Dekker, 1987), Fright Night Part II (Tommy Lee Wallace, 1989) and Vampire’s Kiss (Robert Bierman, 1989). Most of these films were R-rated and updated the vampire genre by mixing horror with teen comedy. Once Bitten and The Monster Squad targeted a broader and younger audience (both PG 13) but took a similar approach to revisioning the genre, while The Hunger and Vampire’s Kiss bookend the period with New York-centric, reimaginings of the vampire with art-house leanings. This backdrop surrounding the popularity of the genre, enhanced by the success of Anne Rice’s novels Interview with the Vampire (1976) and The Vampire Lestat (1985), is perhaps what made Near Dark appealing to its producers and financers, seeming to tap into a popular trend but offering a unique twist.13 Bigelow has commented that ‘Near Dark started because we wanted to do a western. But as no one will finance a western we thought, okay, how can we subvert the genre? Let’s do a western but disguise it in such a way that it gets sold as something else. Then we thought, ha, a vampire western.’14 The degree to which the vampire films in this period were successful varies, with Fright Night (released August 1985) earning $24,922,237 at the domestic box office and Once Bitten (released November 1985) followed by Vamp (which was released in July

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1986), bringing in box-office results of $9,917,242, and $4,941,117 respectively. In contrast, The Lost Boys, released three months before Near Dark and with a production budget of $8.5 million, exceeded Fright Night by earning $32,222,567 at the domestic box office. While The Lost Boys and Near Dark have certain narrative similarities – each presented as a coming of age story about a young man who has to choose between the responsibilities of adulthood and the freedom of life as a vampire – the differences that impacted upon their box-office reception are notable. Near Dark was independently financed and distributed, while The Lost Boys was a studio product made by Warner Brothers. The Lost Boys, therefore, not only benefited from a bigger production budget but also a more extensive marketing campaign that made it significantly more visible. Bigelow was a comparatively unknown director, while director Joel Schumacher was a more established studio film-maker, whose previous film, St. Elmo’s Fire (1985), had earned over $37 million at the US box office and starred Brat Pack icons Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Rob Lowe, Demi Moore and Andrew McCarthy. Capitalizing on this formula, The Lost Boys starred Kiefer Sutherland, Jami Gertz, Corey Haim and Corey Feldman, similarly recognizable from teen movies and TV series such as Stand By Me (Sutherland and Feldman), Silver Bullet (Haim) and Square Pegs (Gertz). Near Dark starred Lance Henrikson, Jenette Goldstein and Bill Paxton in supporting roles, recognizable at the time from James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), as well as Joshua Miller familiar to some from the indie film River’s Edge, but the main stars, Adrian Pasdar and Jenny Wright, were comparative unknowns. Significantly, The Lost Boys opened on 1,025 screens while Near Dark opened on 262 screens in the United States, going up to 429 in its second week. At the time of Near Dark’s entry into the charts, The Lost Boys was in its eighth week in the US charts, still playing on over 400 screens. Similarly, Fright Night opened on 1,542 screens; Once Bitten on 1,095 screens, Vamp on 1,104 screens, and The Monster Squad on 1,280 screens. In comparison, the low

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number of screens for Near Dark is notable. Bigelow attributes the film’s lack of box-office success to its independent status, coming out in such close proximity to The Lost Boys. As she explains, The Lost Boys was a ‘vampire movie made by Warner Brothers that had a tremendous amount of muscle behind it – distribution and marketing muscle behind it. And so we were just this little […] whisper out there.’ Similarly, Jaffe attributes its box-office problems to the issues surrounding marketing an independent film at a time when ‘independent films weren’t chic the way they are today’. Goldstein and Pasdar each note that the choice to bring the film out at Halloween was a miscalculation, not recognizing the nuance and generic complexity of the film, with Pasdar arguing that ‘it takes a lot of finesse to market a film like this. It was certainly made with a lot of finesse. It should have been handled with the respect that Kathryn took in making it.’15 The last-minute changes to distributors and the financial problems faced by DEG impacted upon the film’s release as well but the company had long since recognized the financial value of home video to supplement income from a limited run in cinemas.16 The film came out on VHS in 1988 and it was on video and through word of mouth that it built a niche and loyal audience, with Phoebe Hoban noting in 1990 that ‘Near Dark became a cult classic when it hit video stores’.17 By 1989, the film was released on laserdisc by HBO – a media that was specifically aimed at the collector’s market. The VHS went out of print in the 1990s, making it a challenging film to find, which enhanced its cult credentials. As a result, in 2002 it was released on DVD (later on Blu-ray), by specialist horror distributor Anchor Bay, featuring director’s commentary, deleted scenes, storyboard extracts, script, posters, and documentary Living in Darkness. This renewed attention helped to reinvigorate its visibility and further fuel the film’s cult fandom. Critical reception While the box-office results were poor, Near Dark was generally well received by the critics, whose commentaries identified significant

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discourses that would surround Bigelow and the film as its cult standing developed. In particular, many critics saw its distinctive visual style and Bigelow’s generic hybridity as its primary strengths. Following Near Dark’s premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, Variety praised the film for achieving ‘a new look in vampire films. Highpowered but pared down, slick but spare, this is something akin to a “Badlands” of the supernatural, a tale that introduces the unearthly into the banality of rural American existence.’18 The association with Malick’s Badlands (1973) is further developed by David Edelstein of The Village Voice who, while recognizing the film’s kinship with films such as The Lost Boys, saw greater allegiance to a broader cinematic tradition, remarking: The terrain – and the messages about the sanctity of family – is not too distant from Lost Boys, but the approach is worlds apart. Near Dark borrows its form not from horror movies, but from classic sagas of outlaws on the lam.19

Pam Cook similarly recognized the kinship with outlaw films when she praised the film for how it imbues the vampire genre with a ‘mythic dimension, as society’s outcasts wander the land wreaking unholy vengeance’.20 John Powers of L.A. Weekly saw the film as a combination of ‘Ray’s fated romanticism with Peckinpah’s poetic violence’.21 The reviews repeatedly compare Bigelow to both classical and New Hollywood film-makers such as Nicholas Ray, Sam Peckinpah, Terrence Malick and Arthur Penn – film-makers known for working within genre while also transcending its perceived limitations. Not all of the reviews were positive and the film received criticism for its graphic violence, described by Victoria Mather of the Daily Telegraph as ‘repellent directorial debut by Kathryn Bigelow’, concluding with the disclaimer ‘I would like to think that we have got the worst film of 1988 out of the way in the first week.’22 Caryn James of the New York Times condemned the film for its seeming stylistic hybridity – a characteristic praised by many other critics –

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describing it as coming from the ‘scattershot school of filmmaking’ in which ‘the result of being pushed and pulled through the confusing styles of “Near Dark” […] is simple exhaustion’.23 Many critics took issue with the film’s extreme violence – the roadhouse slaughter being mentioned repeatedly – but for some, such as Henry Sheehan, this was a testament to the film’s power: This is a movie, that while not as dishearteningly bleak as Romero’s work or as stomach-churning as Cronenberg’s, projects a truly upsetting image of revulsion and horror, and its scenes of bloodletting […] are not merely gross, but genuinely disturbing.24

Sue Heal criticized the film for its overkill in terms of violence, noting that she ‘staggered out [of the film] praying for a Bambi revival’, but she also cautioned the reader not to dismiss Bigelow’s work, commenting that the film ‘may contain disturbing and often unnecessary pints of haemoglobin but Near Dark has a beautiful, ethereal quality’.25 Despite poor box office, the critics took note of this distinctive film and film-maker, with Bigelow’s direction and genre innovation as the stand-out stars. By associating Bigelow with recognized directors from Hollywood and independent horror circles, these critics framed her as an auteur and Near Dark as a revisionist horror film. These factors underpinned her inclusion in the Cineprobe season at MOMA and contributed to Near Dark’s cult status and Bigelow’s standing as a significant new American film-maker. In Near Dark Bigelow demonstrates the formation of aesthetic and thematic qualities that have become hallmarks of her career and which form the primary themes of the following chapters. I will focus on the film’s sophisticated and nuanced visual and sonic style; its aggressive fast-paced structure and playfulness with genre hybridity; its rich and complex characterizations that facilitate a renegotiation of traditional gender representations; and its disruption of conceptions of normality and the status quo. The end result is a transgressive reimagining of the vampire film. With Near Dark,

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Bigelow established herself as a significant director working in a male-dominated industry and her standing has subsequently been made even more important by being the first woman to win the Academy Award for Direction (The Hurt Locker). As a result, her place as a woman director has been a dominant discursive frame through which her work has been received critically and academically. While I am indebted to the work of Cook, Tasker, Jermyn and Redmond, as well as others, for their analyses of Bigelow in relation to gender, for the purposes of this book I am focusing on the film specifically in relation to genre and aesthetics.26 These aspects, I argue, are not only central to an understanding of the film but to Bigelow’s oeuvre. By revisiting Near Dark in the following pages, I hope to unpack many of the elements, visual, sonic, narrative and thematic that contributed to its reimagining and revitalization of the vampire genre. Bigelow’s distinctive approach has made this film stand out in the years that followed its lacklustre release and helped build its cult following among horror enthusiasts and cinephiles alike.

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2 ‘The Sun Is On the Rise’: A Gothic Aesthetic

Near Dark is a vampire film. While the characters never refer to themselves as such, they do still conform to specific fundamental characteristics of the genre: they need to drink blood to survive; they don’t age; and they cannot die, except by fire or sunlight – a cinematic tradition since F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). These vampires, however, are unlike many that came before them. They don’t have fangs; they don’t wear capes or dress in black; they don’t have Transylvanian accents; they don’t sleep in coffins; they have no fixed abode; and they don’t possess any titles or wealth. These were the traditional characteristics of the vampire on film from its earliest days in the cinema, drawn largely from nineteenth-century Gothic literature. Many of these trappings had begun to be deconstructed and modernized through a series of 1970s revisionist films such as Daughters of Darkness (Harry Kümel, 1971) as well as genre parodies such as Love at First Bite (Stan Dragoti, 1979). Significantly, George A. Romero’s Martin (1977) stripped the genre of its traditional conventions and visual style in order to reduce the vampire to a mentally unstable adolescent serial killer. While the film still refers to many of the standard tropes, it does so in order to deny them. In keeping with Romero’s approach, Bigelow claimed that it was her intention to ‘take away all the Gothic aspects – castles, bats, crosses, stakes in the heart. Ours are modern vampires, American vampires, on the road.’27 Her film actually goes further than Martin by not only stripping these elements away but removing any conception of vampirism from popular consciousness. No one within the diegesis recognizes the vampires for what they are or

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Romero’s Martin (1977): the vampire as teen serial killer

have become. As a result, Near Dark stands apart from films such as Fright Night, Vamp, The Lost Boys and Monster Squad, which self-consciously maintain and celebrate the genre’s conventions albeit updating them in their own way. The 1980s vampire film is very aware of itself as a genre and usually acknowledges within its diegesis this history of fiction and film. It embraces and, often, exaggerates its genre iconography and conventional tropes, including garlic, crosses, holy water and wooden stakes. This level of postmodern self-referentiality and intertextuality is in keeping with many horror films of the period, such as An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981), Gremlins (Joe Dante, 1984) and Evil Dead 2 (Sam Raimi, 1987), as discussed by Philip Brophy who explained that ‘the contemporary horror film knows you’ve seen it before; it knows that you know what is about to happen; and it knows that you know

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it knows you know’.28 In this tradition, the 1980s vampire films depend upon an intertextual exchange between modern and classic texts, whether in the form of comics in the Lost Boys or films in Fright Night. These pop culture references become guides used by the protagonists to fight the undead. They can even serve as a model for how to be a vampire as in Vampire’s Kiss (1989), a film about a man – Peter Lowe (Nicholas Cage) – who suffers a nervous breakdown that manifests in his belief that he is a revenant. Lowe’s psychosis is informed – not caused – by watching Nosferatu. As Lowe becomes progressively certain of his delusion, his movements and posture deliberately mirror Count Orlok as embodied in Max Schreck’s expressionist performance style. As Brophy notes, modern horror ‘is a genre which mimics itself mercilessly – because its statement is coded within its very mimicry’.29 Lowe’s mental condition and emotional breakdown is manifested through the language of vampire cinema. In contrast, Bigelow’s vampires are secularized through the abandonment of any religious iconography and they are demythologized by being uprooted and detached from the legacy that preceded them. In this manner, Near Dark is, perhaps, more

A rag-tag gang of vampires

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indebted to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead than Dracula. Night of the Living Dead similarly secularized and Americanized the Gothic by positioning the narrative within the American heartland and removing folkloric and religious explanations for the sudden revival of the dead. Like Romero’s zombies, Bigelow’s vampires offer a fresh and unsettling image of the undead. They are presented as a rag-tag gang of outlaws on the run from the sun. They are dirty, dishevelled and dangerous. Bigelow’s location design embraces the western and road movie, replete with tumbleweeds, empty landscapes, dusty roads, wet and reflective asphalt surfaces, motels and roadside bars. This generic and aesthetic hybridity serves to Americanize the vampire as these characters have not come from the Old World but have emerged from American history. The leader Jesse Hooker fought for the south in the Civil War while his protégé Severen came from the American Wild West. Matriarch Diamondback was from the 1930s depressionera Dust Bowl, while pseudo-son Homer was a 1950s rebel-child. Mae, the youngest of the bunch is from 1980s Texas. They do not possess fangs but rather adorn themselves with switchblades, razorsharp spurs, six-shooters, pistols and shotguns. These are American vampires, erupting in Gothic fashion from the past into the present. Chiaroscuro Bigelow’s claim that she has taken ‘away all the Gothic aspects’ suggests a rather restricted definition or understanding of the Gothic by focusing on a limited set of generic tropes. Her characters do not look like Stoker’s Count Dracula nor does the landscape of the American Midwest seem like the most likely of locations for the appearance of a vampire, given its rural backdrop and, often, blazing sunshine. As Catherine Spooner has noted, however, in ‘contemporary Western culture, the Gothic lurks in all sorts of unexpected corners’.30 Furthermore, the Midwest backdrop links Near Dark to a different Gothic legacy in the form of Grant Wood’s painting ‘American Gothic’, an icon of a puritan/ rural past. Also, as Sara Gwenllian Jones argues, Near Dark embodies an American form of Gothic in which the vampires ‘erupt not from the

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European past but from nature itself, from the unruly wilderness that lies just beneath the surface of the farmed and settled American Midwest’.31 Rather than remove the Gothic, Near Dark, therefore, fuses the Gothic associations of its landscape with a cinematic Gothic aesthetic that is defined by its use of chiaroscuro. Described by Lotte Eisner as a ‘collision […] between light and shadow’, chiaroscuro mobilizes and visualizes the Gothic oppositions of day and night; good and evil; civilized and barbaric; reason and nightmare.32 This aesthetic was a fundamental element of many of the classic examples of German Expressionist cinema discussed by Eisner as well as classic American horror cinema, constructed through costume, make-up, set design and lighting. From Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Weine, 1919) to The Tomb of Ligeia (Roger Corman, 1964), chiaroscuro offered a cinematic language for the Gothic landscapes of horror. In these earlier examples, however, this language usually goes hand-in-hand with a mise en scène that derives from classic Gothic novels: foreign or exotic locales (from Transylvania to the Bayou), decaying castles, churches or mansions, overgrown forests and labyrinthine urban landscapes. In Near Dark, however, this aesthetic is achieved largely through its richly nuanced lighting as Bigelow notes, this is ‘a film about light and the absence of light’.33 The importance of lighting to Bigelow’s vision is something that is often commented on with respect to her body of work. Jamie Lee Curtis, on the set of Blue Steel, described Bigelow as someone who ‘paints with light, rather than just lighting a set’, while Yvonne Tasker described her aesthetic style as ‘sculpting with light’.34 Bigelow has also noted that ‘if cinema is the artform of the twentieth century, lighting in some ways is your brush’.35 The choice of language in these passages evokes Bigelow’s background as a painter, something which she herself often alludes to in her discussion of her cinematic work. In conversation with James Cameron she explains that ‘having a background in visual arts […] is very freeing for me […] I don’t worry a shot to death. I know when it’s right.’36 She describes her paintings as ‘abstract expressionist […] reflect[ing] a sense of light, but they were dark and frenzied’.37

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Examination of the storyboards for Near Dark demonstrate this frenzied quality, possessing clear indications of dynamic camera movement often accompanied by unsettling compositions and visceral presentations of violence. There is also evidence of early consideration for the visual impact of light within her vampire tale, with repeated close-ups of the sun as Caleb begins his transformation into a vampire; the visualization of the glare of the sunlight when a motel room door is opened, letting the light in and causing the vampires to scatter for cover; as well as the power of sunlight to injure the vampires during a daytime shoot-out with the police.38 Similarly, the script by Bigelow and Red clearly attributes the night with a visual splendour, describing Caleb’s newly transformed point of view as he looks out at the night as follows: ‘A fine layer of lunar luminescence falls from the sky. The city is shimmering as never before. The very electrical pulse visible as it travels through thin air.’39 The choice of director of photography for Near Dark was instrumental in achieving this luminescence. While undoubtedly an accomplished cinematographer, it was Adam Greenberg’s skill with night shooting in The Terminator (1984) – described by Bigelow as ‘exquisite’ – that caught Bigelow and Feldman’s attention.40 Like Near Dark, The Terminator mostly takes place at night, and Greenberg notes that his vision for the film drew from expressionism and film noir, explaining that this ‘was exactly how I saw it when I first read the script […] I was aiming for a cool look, lots of dark shadows, strong back light … a very hard, strong, contrasty look.’41 His ability to create a noirish visual splendour alongside visceral action, all on a low-budget made him ideal for Near Dark, a film where high-contrast lighting underpins every aspect of the story. On the set of Near Dark, Bigelow describes a creative collaboration with Greenberg in which they shared a clear vision for the film and where she could easily communicate her intentions for a scene and ‘he would not only get it but would take the ball and run with it’.42 This collaboration is best illustrated in a single shot of the vampires standing together on a hill overlooking

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The tantalizing and ominous chiaroscuro of Adam Greenberg

a roadside bar. Bigelow’s storyboard composes the shot in extreme long shot with the vampires all standing in a row against a looming nocturnal sky. It is an imposing image of the vampires as they anticipate the roadhouse slaughter. In the film, the shot is translated into one of the most striking evocations of the film’s chiaroscuro with the group standing on the hill in silhouette, framed by a very bright back light that provides a glimmering halo effect and lends the misty sky a luminescent glow. The violence of the collision of light and dark in this image prepares the audience for the horrors to follow and is a crucial element of the film’s Gothic aesthetic. The integration of the vampire film with the aesthetic design of the western and road movie also enabled Bigelow to further enhance the visual opposition between day and night that underpins the vampire tale. The daytime desert landscape – the land of the living – stands in bright visual contrast to the shadows of the empty highways, truck stops, motels and roadside bars – the hunting ground of these modern vampires. This contrast presents sunlight as a tangible threat. For instance, in a pivotal scene the group find themselves trapped during the day in a small motel bungalow, surrounded by the police. Rather

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than give up, they decide to go out shooting like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969) and The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969), initiating a spectacular shoot-out in which the motel is bombarded by a barrage of bullets bursting through the walls and windows. In the script, Bigelow and Red describe the scene as follows: Bullet holes swiss cheese the walls and roof. Explosions of gunfire rip through the wallpaper. Needles and lances of bright sunlight cats cradle the room. The day comes through the holes and punctures in a maze of tiny funnels.43

In the film, each bullet is followed by a stream of sunlight that bursts into the room with physical force as it connects with the vampires. The light is as violently penetrating for them as the bullets are to the police. Eventually the room is filled with a mass of criss-crossing rays of sunlight penetrating the shadows and around which the vampires must manoeuvre, intensified by the fast cutting of the scene and the cacophony of gunfire. The hybrid integration of western and Gothic horror that characterizes the narrative is visualized in this violent and frenzied clash between light and shadow.

Hybrid horror: vampire meets western

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Magic hour

Magic hour

To create this iconic Gothic imagery, the cast and crew inhabited a strangely vampiric nocturnal world with their workday starting at sunset and ending at sunrise. Significantly, a third of the production was shot during magic hour – the first and last hours of sunlight when the sun is just below the horizon. This period is evoked by the film’s title and brings distinct aesthetic properties which feature prominently in the film – in particular, long shadows, diffused lighting and a reddish hue. The use of magic hour visually enhances the liminal transition between day and night, the home of the Gothic and a particularly tantalizing time for the undead. This liminality is evident from the opening of the film which serves as an entry point for Caleb and the audience into this twilight landscape. The film begins on an extreme close-up of a mosquito as it is swatted into a splatter of blood – a nod to the film’s vampire leanings – followed by a long shot of farm boy Caleb Colton, sprawled out James Dean-like in the back of his truck bathed in the dwindling light of a sunset. The indebtedness to the western is established by the surrounding setting, Caleb’s Stetson and his ostentatious cowboy boots. As the sun begins

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Hybrid horror: mini-vampire; a James Dean-like pose; a noir cityscape

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to set beyond the horizon, bathing the scene in the reddish/golden glow of magic hour, Caleb drives into town, framed in extreme long shot as his truck careens across the empty desert highway. The wideopen space of these establishing shots is then contrasted, once the sun goes down, with the more claustrophobic shots of Caleb in his truck, driving through the reflective night-time streets of his small town. Here the film evokes the landscape of film noir, presenting Caleb as trapped within this environment. The contrast between day and night, light and dark, is established. They do quite literally collide. This mise en scène is reinforced after Caleb has been bitten by Mae, thus initiating his transformation into a vampire. Caleb walks home as the sun has begun to rise, and the film once again frames him in extreme long shot against a dry, dusty farmland backdrop. The red-gold hue of the sunrise is reflected against the brown earth and trapped between the two is Caleb whose skin has begun to burn, leaving a trail of smoke in his wake. He is observed by his father Loy and sister Sarah. Then out of the distance appears a Winnebago. The sequence cuts to the dark interior of the van but facing out at Caleb through a narrow gap in the blackened windshield, a shot that embodies in one frame the clash between light and dark. As the van closes in on Caleb, the door opens and he is pulled inside. The van drives off into the distance, with Loy and Sarah running towards the quickly retreating camera as the screen becomes engulfed in dust. The sequence once again cuts to the dark interior of the van, presented from Caleb’s direct point of view as he looks up at Severen, who holds a flashlight in his eyes and tells him ‘I’m gonna separate your head from your shoulders. I hope you don’t mind none.’ The juxtaposition of light and dark, long shot and close-up is deliberately blinding and confusing in this moment, conveying Caleb’s perspective as he is confronted by these strangers. In the sequence that follows, Caleb meets Mae’s vampire family compressed together in the small camper van, presented through a series of claustrophobic close-ups and medium close-ups. The sequence is extremely dark, lit by Severen’s flashlight and the shafts of light coming through

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Burning in the sun; a collision between light and dark

the windscreen. The composition is cluttered and constricted. The bright open spaces of the western landscape is once again contrasted with the dark and claustrophobic interior of a vehicle, this time the Winnebago, marking Caleb’s transition from freedom to entrapment. Yet, this abduction also represents Caleb’s salvation. While the group’s initial intention is to kill Caleb, Mae’s revelation that ‘he’s been bit but he ain’t been bled’ and thus has begun to turn into one

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of them, reveals that the darkness of the camper van has saved him from death. Sunlight is revealed as the primary danger that faces the vampire, propelling the narrative as they drive across the landscape, racing against the sun. The film literalizes the collision between light and shadow that Eisner discussed by having their skin burn away at the tiniest exposure to the sun. As Hoberman notes, ‘you can tell this is a movie for aesthetes – these vampires are as sensitive as film stock’.44 Thus, the film uses the collision between light and dark to convey duality. The bright and open exteriors embody potential freedom and danger, while the dark interiors are claustrophobic but also secure. As Pam Cook observed, ‘Near Dark is an extreme film, not so much for its oft noted violence as for its rigorous insistence on the duality of good and evil, a dialectic reflected in striking chiaroscuro images and hard-edged, high contrast lighting’.45 The film’s Gothic aesthetic is, however, not simply constructed from a hard collision between light and shadow but also through the carefully constructed and nuanced sculpting of light, creating a rich and sensuous visual landscape. Greenberg explains that in constructing the look of Near Dark, he had, to find the right kind of night look […] These people live at night; they’re dangerous people, and it’s a dangerous life they lead. Yet we wanted to make it seductive. Night had to be this wonderfully magical, fantastic world, as opposed to muddy, cold and terrifying.46

The film uses chiaroscuro to construct a richly textured quality to the nocturnal landscape. The desolate locations in the film are presented through the juxtaposition of two parallel journeys, daytime and nocturnal. As Caleb and his crew of vampires criss-cross the Midwest, on the hunt for food, Caleb’s family – Loy and Sarah – similarly journey across the state looking for Caleb. Their journey is a mirror reflection of his as they stop at gas stations, cafés and motels, but during the day these spaces are often dingy, crowded and nondescript. The natural lighting renders them as anonymous

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locations, gateways to nowhere. But at night, Greenberg and Bigelow find the beauty in these seemingly mundane and transitory spaces by dousing them in pools of bright light carved out of the darkness, such as the shimmering glow of a spray of water, washing down trucks at a truck stop, or the reflection of street lights bouncing off the sleek black highways. Greenberg notes that when he shoots at night, he ‘likes to wet down the streets to increase the contrast […] I only want to see black and white. I want to make the night dark, so I wet down the pavement to eliminate the gray of the sidewalk.’47 This interplay between light and shadow also yields the highly sensuous backdrop for Caleb and Mae’s relationship, signalling the intensity of their attraction. When Mae turns Caleb she is bathed in the blue dusky light of the receding night just before the sun begins to rise. Later, as she feeds the novice vampire Caleb from her own wrist, they stand in the desert, their bodies locked together in a blood exchange. The eroticism of the scene is accentuated by the combination of the flashing of lightning and the rhythmic pumping of the oil rigs in the background. This use of chiaroscuro captures the fusion of violence, excitement, eroticism and wonder that define the vampires of Near Dark. The liminality of this visual aesthetic is enhanced by the film’s musical score which lends the film a mystical quality, written and performed by the German electronic rock band Tangerine Dream. Kathryn Bigelow described their score as possessing a ‘provocative, haunting, mercurial quality […] that gave [the film] a patina that transformed it’.48 Robin Stilwell describes the film’s soundscape as being ‘dominated by the timeless, textural and timbral synth score. There are no distinct melodies and the rhythms are often vague, creating a sense of suspension.’49 The choice to use a synthesized score is in keeping with other 1980s Gothic and fantasy films such as The Keep (Michael Mann, 1983), Firestarter (Mark L. Lester, 1984) and Legend (Ridley Scott, 1985), all scored by Tangerine Dream. Stilwell, however, also explains that this score is diegetically timeless. The synthesizers clash with the film’s western and noir imagery and possess no echoes of the vampires’ past. This is not a

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Painting with light

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score that alludes to who they were but how they are suspended in the present. Janet K. Halfyard argues that the synthesized music score is deliberately ‘understated and ambivalent’ and does not function to ‘lead the audience into specific interpretations of what it is seeing’ as is usually the case for most horror movie scores.50 Instead the score encourages a more ambivalent response in keeping with the chiaroscuro of the visual design that is harsh and violent while also seductively beautiful. The synthesized score is at times otherworldly and signals, from the film’s opening musical cues, that the audience has along with Caleb entered another world. Tangerine Dream’s music, what Paul Stump refers to as ‘digital gothic’, evokes the twilight atmosphere of magic hour.51 In keeping with the film’s high-contrast visual aesthetic, the ambient score oscillates between a driving rhythm that conveys the burning heat of the sun and a romantic and mystical score that captures the lyrical sensuality of the night. The music, like the visual aesthetics, speaks of danger and violence. At times it possesses a harshness and urgency while at others, it speaks of longing, thus creating the chiaroscuro between the haunting and mercurial nature of the score as described by Bigelow. When considered together, Bigelow’s visual and sonic aesthetic serves as a bridge between the mise en scène of classic horror and her contemporary reimagining of the vampire genre. The film’s sound and visuals steer the vampire film away from the past by offering a modern cinematic reconception of the Gothic, suitable to the film’s American backdrop and contemporary setting. This new Gothic aesthetic hangs over the film and facilitates Bigelow’s hybrid approach to genre as she positions the vampire at the centre of a complex matrix of generic influences.

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3 ‘Finger Lickin’ Good’: Genre Hybridity and the Action Vampire

Near Dark displays a promiscuous engagement with genre, weaving together generic elements from the western and road movie with a Gothic aesthetic as a means of reimagining and Americanizing the vampire. One can also see the film as a reimagining of the American frontier landscape by situating nomadic and violent vampires against its mythological backdrop. Genre hybridity provides an opportunity to challenge preconceptions. This engagement with genre is fundamental to Bigelow’s approach to film-making, as she often notes in discussion of her work, explaining, ‘It’s fun to kind of play with the genre, mutate it, refract it, challenge it.’52 She uses genre as a means of drawing audiences in via the familiar and then subverting expectation in order to ‘update it or re-appropriate it’.53 Bigelow’s commitment to genre as a method of storytelling is evidenced by the diverse range of genres within which she has worked, including biker, war and submarine movies, alongside horror, police thriller, science fiction and political-historical drama. While she regularly moves between genres, a key proponent of her hybrid approach is the incorporation of the action film within her generic matrix. From Near Dark to Detroit (2017), Bigelow has become renowned for a high-octane style of film-making. This aspect of her work is fundamental to the discourses that surround her standing as a Hollywood film-maker. The following list of article titles gives an indication of how she is often constructed in the media: • ‘Nerves of Steel: Filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow is Going Where No Woman Has Gone Before’

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• ‘Gut-Crunching, Blood-Pumping, Fast-Forward Action Woman’ • ‘Lights, Camera, Lots of Action’ • ‘Director as “Adrenaline Junkie”’ • ‘Action Figure’ • ‘Shoot Shoot, Bang Bang’54

She similarly discusses her work through the language of action cinema, describing it as ‘visceral, high impact, kinetic, cathartic’, noting how she loves ‘the stuff that gets in your face […] I’m drawn to material that has an edge’.55 She frames her attraction to the genre as a result of its inherently cinematic qualities, describing action films as ‘pure cinema, where the medium departs from theater’.56 She does not see action as running counter to good storytelling and strong characterization, but as a means of developing and conveying character and story in a highly cinematic manner. This aesthetic approach underpins her foray into the Gothic and horror in Near Dark, particularly in contrast to her first film The Loveless. While The Loveless possesses the narrative potential for action – with violent confrontations between the bikers and the local southern community – the style of the film deliberately restrains the action and focuses upon the internalization of violence. In contrast, when asked about the directors who influenced her work from Near Dark onward, Bigelow cites Don Siegel, Sam Peckinpah, Walter Hill, George Miller and James Cameron, all associated with a visceral and spectacular approach to action. Furthermore, Eric Red, who co-wrote the script with Bigelow, also wrote The Hitcher, a hybrid horror/action/road movie. Near Dark brings together Bigelow and Red’s engagement with the action film by embracing the genre’s kinetic energy and applying it to the vampire. It is not the first film to integrate action into the genre’s matrix. In fact, it sits as a pivot point between notable action vampire traditions. Hammer Studios reinvigorated the genre in the 1950s and 1960s by reimagining Doctor Van Helsing as a more youthful action hero, played by Peter Cushing, in pursuit of the agile and dexterous Count

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Dracula, embodied in the physically imposing figure of Christopher Lee. Their final confrontation in Horror of Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958) takes the form of an elaborate fight scene following an extended chase sequence. In the 1990s and into the 2000s, a series of vampire films from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Fran Rubel Kuzui, 1992) to Blade (Stephen Norrington, 1998) and Underworld (Len Wiseman, 2003), overtly reframed the vampire narrative by negotiating the confrontation of the living and the undead through the spectacle of intricate martial arts choreography.57 Offering a different approach, Near Dark takes the potential for violence that underpins the vampire figure itself and projects it outward in a series of explosive and visceral action set pieces that integrate with the film’s expressionist visual style and the iconography of the western, road movie and film noir. This hybridity shatters the more familiar and comfortable representations of the vampire often portrayed as anachronistic and old fashioned within the modern world by presenting them as dangerous, unpredictable and violent. These are not vampires who can be easily dispatched with a stake through the heart or who flinch at the sight of a cross, weaknesses that make traditional vampires vulnerable. Furthermore, Bigelow has abandoned the clean, debonair and beautiful images still common within 1980s vampire films such as The Hunger, Fright Night and The Lost Boys, but rather her vampires are often dirty, battered and bloody, in keeping with 1980s action heroes such as John McClane in Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988) or Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Arc (Steven Spielberg, 1981). They also possess personality traits that characterize villains such as the Terminators in Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991) and John Rider in The Hitcher, specifically their tireless, relentless and brutal pursuit and treatment of their prey. Bigelow and Red embed their vampire within 1980s action mise en scène while also using the vampire to transgress generic conventions and approaches. Bigelow situates her film in dialogue with the action films that influenced her as a means of pushing the genres, action and vampire, in new and morally complex directions.

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The most overt correlation between Near Dark and the 1980s action film is through James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) released the year before Near Dark. While the film eschews intertextual references to other vampire films, there is a deliberate reference to Aliens when Caleb walks past a cinema with the title on the marquee. The casting of Lance Henrikson, Jenette Goldstein and Bill Paxton as vampires Jesse, Diamondback and Severen reinforces this connection between the two films and puts them in dialogue. Bigelow actively pursued the actors to form the central core of her vampire family as they had a preexisting relationship that would underpin their connection in the film. Their casting presents them as an established unit, recognizable as such to viewers familiar with Aliens. Furthermore, each of these actors bring with them intertextual baggage from Aliens that contributes to their characterizations. In Aliens, Paxton and Goldstein play marines – Hudson and Vasquez – who repeatedly display arrogance, confidence and machismo. Described in the film as ‘tough hombres, packing state of the art firepower’, they embody the strength of the military machine and this feeds into their performance as vampires where they similarly appear focused, relentless

A nod to James Cameron’s classic

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and dangerous. Paxton brings elements of Hudson’s bravado and comic performativity to Severen, while Goldstein constructs her character as a curious mix of Vasquez’s hard action figure and Diamondback’s alluring, sexual and maternal qualities, thus offering a more nuanced engagement with gender stereotypes. In contrast, Lance Henrikson played the artificial person Bishop, a liminal figure that undermines clear lines between human and machine as evidenced when he cuts

Aliens: Special Edition (1986): ‘Tough hombres packing state of the art fire power’; the artificial person

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himself and reveals the milky, blood-like substance that runs through his ‘veins’. There is an ambiguity that surrounds Bishop for the majority of the film as it is unclear whose side he will take: alien or human. Although he is eventually proven to be committed to the preservation of human life, the type of liminality and ambiguity that Henrikson embodies throughout much of the film underpins Henrikson’s

The imposing figure of Lance Henrikson

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performance as Jesse in Near Dark. The extent of Jesse’s inhumanness in Near Dark is similarly conveyed through bodily secretions when he is shot by Caleb’s father and spits out the bloody bullet, or when he is stabbed in the mouth and pulls out the blade, as a long stream of blood pours out. Jesse, like Bishop, is presented as abject and other. While Severen is the violent wild card, Jesse embodies quiet power despite – or perhaps because of – his slight build. Henrikson deliberately lost weight for the role, going down to 140 pounds, and in so doing he undercuts the 1980s image of the hard body action figure as best represented by Arnold Schwarzenegger. This is of note as Henrikson was originally due to play the T800 in The Terminator, having worked with Cameron on Piranha Part Two: The Spawning (1981), before Schwarzenegger was attached to the project.58 In Jesse, there is a hint of how he would have played the cyborg, his physical liminality subverting expectations around strength and power further signalling how Bigelow transgressed traditional genre and gender conventions. Bigelow’s attachment to the action film also served to ground her vampires within a physical reality. As part of the preparation for Near Dark, Bigelow organized what she referred to as vampire bootcamp, where the vampire cast had to work as a team, blacking out a car, truck or motel room from the daylight in record time. She saw this rehearsal process as not only serving to bond the group, but as a means of physicalizing the characters in order to find an ‘emotional reality’.59 Their characterization, therefore, emerged from and became embedded within a highly physical and action-oriented performance, undermining the common perception that the action genre is purely about spectacle. In fact, as noted by Yvonne Tasker, Bigelow’s films question ‘the implicit distinction between narrative (finding out, cause and effect, moving forward) and visual pleasures’.60 In the case of Near Dark, it is through the action set pieces that Caleb’s journey into the Gothic is charted and through which his moral transformation takes place. The film is structured around a selection of action scenes – the abduction; the training; the roadhouse slaughter; the motel shoot-out; the escape; the showdown. Through these sequences

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Caleb’s confrontation with the vampires and his exploration of the darker side of his soul is explored. As Tasker explains, action scenes in Bigelow’s films ‘form only one element in a carefully stylised cinematic spectacle’.61 Running alongside these scenes as part of the film’s generic matrix are ones that focus upon his romantic relationship with Mae, which will be discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. But first I want to disentangle the elements of the action film to consider how these sequences serve to reimagine the vampire narrative and contribute to Bigelow’s morally ambiguous story about family and identity. Action as horror While Caleb’s journey begins, as discussed in the previous chapter, with his drive into town presented through the aesthetics of the western and film noir and his sensual encounter with Mae, elements of the action film are introduced by the appearance of what Bigelow describes as the ‘Winnebago from hell’ where his meeting with the vampires changes from seduction to abduction. The Winnebago appears on the horizon as Caleb slowly makes his way home, beginning to burn in the sun as his transformation into a vampire begins. In addition to the lighting discussed in the previous chapter, the style of the sequence skilfully shifts from static and slow panning shots of Caleb doubled over and struggling to walk, to tracking camera movements that follow his progress, to a series of quickly edited long and medium long shots of the trailer as it approaches. The music equally builds the pace, introducing an insistent rhythm beneath the more ethereal qualities of the score. Once he is pulled into the van and immersed into darkness, his encounter with the vampires is as violent as the collision between light and dark. The vampires threaten him with a razor-sharp spur, a pistol and a butterfly knife, displaying a savagery that goes beyond bloodlust and the tension of the scene is heightened by Caleb’s confusion. Mae’s intervention halts the action and they depart to find a resting place to escape the sun. This opening sets up a narrative and stylistic structure that underpins the film, shifting between forward momentum as the vampires hunt, explosions of violence, and stasis

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Certain death in the ‘Winnebago from hell’

as they sleep. This structure is punctuated by repeated shots of the vampires on the road driving away from the sunlight which serve as a bridge between day and night. These shots also set up the road as the primary locus of action and horror within the film. Films such as The Warriors (Walter Hill, 1979), Mad Max II (George Miller, 1981) and The Terminator – all made by film-makers that Bigelow cites as influences – represent significant forerunners to Near Dark as they each bring together action and road movie, with a hint of horror. The Hitcher, however, is the most directly related as it more fully introduces the language of horror both in terms of suspense and monstrous spectacle. The film follows the young Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) as he is stalked by a hitchhiker, John Rider (Rutger Hauer), revealed to be a monstrous and seemingly unstoppable serial killer. Rider preys upon the men, women and children who pick him up. The story takes the form of a relentless cat and mouse game, as Rider forces Halsey to be witness to a series of increasingly violent and monstrous murders. Like Near Dark’s Caleb, Halsey is taken on a transformative journey through blood and mayhem designed to turn him into a killer. In both cases the

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The Hitcher (1986) Rutger Hauer delivering a terrifying performance

road is presented as a hunting ground and each action set piece is part of the protagonist’s instruction. This is clearly illustrated in Near Dark in a sequence where Mae tries to teach Caleb how to kill, which is necessary for his survival. While he professes that he is not a killer, Mae teaches him that the first lesson is not to ‘think of it as killing’. Instead she tells him to follow his instincts, and these instructions are intercut with stylized sequences showing how each member of her family capitalize on the anonymity and isolation of the highway in order to identify and trap their prey. Homer, the adult vampire trapped in the body of a child, poses as an accident victim, unconscious on the road next to his bicycle, waiting for a conscientious passer-by to stop and help. Severen hitchhikes and is picked up by two women. Unlike Rider, who is clearly a threat from the moment he gets in Halsey’s car, Severen is charming and flirtatious, inviting the two women to join him ‘for a drink’. There is a disturbing playfulness to his method. In reverse, Jesse and Diamondback stop to pick up hitchhikers who turn out to be highway robbers. The couple turn the tables on the thieves by informing them that they ‘aren’t going to look too good, with your faces ripped off’ – a threat that is in keeping with Rider – and as Jesse leans in to turn up the radio, the loud burst of music followed by a sonic cut to the engine sound of a semi-truck passing signals the

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Stalking the backroads of the USA

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violence to come. These three vignettes present killing as quotidian actions on the part of the vampires – what they need to do night after night to survive – but also serve as dynamic teasers to the danger and violence that underpins the vampires’ calm demeanour. They signal the pleasure they take in their actions. Notably, each of these scenes withholds the display of violence. Homer is shown grabbing his would-be saviour, but the film cuts away to a close-up of his bicycle wheel spinning. The shot of Severen and the pick-up truck disappearing into the dark, as well as the blast of music coming from Jesse’s radio, serve as stand-ins for the violence. While these scenes are suggestive, like the first two murders in The Hitcher which feature abandoned vehicles and a few drops of blood, there is an implied escalation of violence from sequence to sequence. Homer attacks one lone victim, Severen drives off with two women, while Jesse outright threatens the men with graphic physical violence. These sequences offer a promise of violence that goes beyond blood drinking. This promise comes to fruition in the next major action scene, the roadhouse slaughter, a sequence that comes halfway through the film and lasts over ten minutes of running time. It is a significant pivot point in the film’s narrative structure, in Caleb’s transformation, and in the escalation of the film’s standing as an action film. Having been unable or unwilling to kill, Caleb is given an ultimatum: kill or be killed. The massacre therefore is staged as a training ground for Caleb. The Lost Boys similarly has a scene in which the protagonist Michael is schooled in being a vampire by the vampire gang and, like Caleb, Michael resists. Lasting just over two minutes, the scene is a graphic montage sequence of the vampires attacking a group of punk rockers partying on the beach, while Michael watches in horror. Presented as a flurry of violence and blood spatter, it signals violence without wallowing in it. The cutting is frenzied and suggestive. This ensures a balance between the film’s horror and comedy structure. In contrast in Near Dark, the scene is slow and the action is drawn out in order to build an unsettling and suspenseful confrontation with violence,

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The roadhouse slaughter, ‘It’s fun to be a vampire’, The Lost Boys (1987)

which includes a carefully constructed choreography of ‘watching’ – the patrons and staff watch the vampires, Caleb watches Severen, the vampires watch Caleb, Caleb watches Mae – and as such the vampires’ attack is self-consciously made a spectacle. This spectacle takes two forms, graphic violence and comic performance. Through both types the vampires are presented as monstrous. The massacre sequence begins on a close-up of a pool table with a sharp crack of a cue ball making the break – as if to announce the start of the scene – followed by the slam of the door against the

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wall as the family of vampires make their entrance. They pause at the door, as everyone stops to look at them, and Severen announces ‘I’ll be goddamned. Shit-kicker Heaven!’ This is a deliberately disruptive entrance and emphasizes the staging of these events for Caleb as well as the audience. The narrative stops here for them to perform, fully exposing the horror – or pleasure from their perspective – of being modern vampires. These are no would-be Draculas and this bar is not a location for seduction as occurs in The Hunger, Fright Night, Once

Making an entrance in ‘Shit-kicker Heaven’

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Bitten and Vampire’s Kiss. Severen’s description of the bar establishes that this locale is a rough and macho location on the outskirts of society in the tradition of the western saloon – where the bikers are armed with switchblades and the bartender keeps a shotgun behind the bar. Yet their entrance asserts that even in this environment they are a threat. The pacing and structure of the scene is set by the music. In contrast to the rest of the film, which features the ambient score by Tangerine Dream, this sequence features a diegetic jukebox soundtrack with each song setting the tone for the action. Their entrance is made to the opening riff of John Parr’s ‘Naughty Naughty’, and as Severen and Caleb ‘belly up to the bar’ the tone of the music captures the group’s energized and delinquent attitude. Their appearance, dishevelled, armed and arrogant, is enough to make those in the bar nervous. Severen mocks the bartender and truck driver, appearing both ridiculous and unpredictable as he attempts to pick a fight in order to help Caleb discover his vampiric strength. Caleb obliges and knocks the truck driver across the room. This is a macho and testosterone-filled confrontation and even the bartender postures and threatens, telling Severen that there are two ways to leave the bar ‘on your feet or on your back’. This machismo is undercut, however, when Diamondback murders the waitress, slitting her throat and pouring her blood into a glass, causing the biker to visibly shudder and the bartender to turn pale. The music switches at this point from ‘Naughty Naughty’ to Jools Holland’s ‘Morse Code’; it is clear that the patrons in the bar need help but none is coming. The vampires are no longer just disruptive but dangerous and unpredictable. As Jesse walks to the door to close it, the bartender asks what they want and, in sync with the rockabilly rhythm of ‘Morse Code’, Jesse informs them ‘just a couple more minutes of your time, about the same duration as the rest of your life’. What follows is a slaughter in which the vampires not only satiate their thirst but wallow in the nihilistic pleasures of mayhem and destruction. In contrast to the vampires in The Lost Boys who attack swiftly, if violently, this attack is drawn out and torturous. While the bar’s patrons look on in terror, the vampires smile

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and laugh, sharing a convivial comradery and working together as a family, rendering them even more frightening. At the centre of this slaughter is a tour de force performance from Bill Paxton as Severen, bringing together the spectacle of violence and comic performance, as he dances around the room, crowing like a rooster and taunting the patrons. Paxton seems to be knowingly channelling his performance of Hudson in Aliens, who as the marines prepare to land on LV426 struts around the drop ship, comically showing off his military weaponry and crowing about his prowess as a marine: ‘I am the ultimate badass. State of the badass art. You do not want to fuck with me’. In contrast to Hudson, however, whose bravado is deconstructed once he comes face to face with the aliens, Paxton as Severen presents rampant bloodlust and nihilistic pleasure in torture and destruction. He embodies what Bigelow refers to as the ‘quintessential vampire’ who has fully embraced his primal savagery.62 It is the unbridled nature of the vampires that comes to the foreground in this scene and presents them as truly monstrous. While the earlier roadside attacks described above are restrained and rely upon suggestion, this scene is an explosion of violence, putting the savagery of the vampire on display in graphic detail. Significantly, the scene places an overt emphasis upon the abject spilling, and drinking, of blood. Severen breaks the neck of the biker, before finally biting into his jugular, concluding with a loud belch as blood pours down his face. The bartender fights back by shooting Caleb in the stomach, causing the blood to come gushing out of his gut. Severen, in retribution, leaps on the bar and slits the bartender’s throat with his razor-sharp spur – the most graphic of killings – repeatedly swinging his leg back and forth as blood spatters along the walls. Finally, the truck driver attempts to escape but is corralled in place by Severen, Jesse and Diamondback as Homer shoots him in the back. The violence of the scene is reinforced by the sound effects – the repeated slit of the bartender’s throat, Severen’s bite into the biker’s neck, his belch after he has finished drinking, the shot of the gun. These sounds are realistic and precise while the blood is wet and

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Bill Paxton as ‘ultimate badass’ in Near Dark and Aliens: Special Edition

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oozing, emphasizing the physicality of the attack and reframing the action as horror as the threat changes from murder – the killing of the waitress – to cannibalism and abjection – the repeated drinking of blood. This tonal shift is reinforced when in mid-slaughter, the jukebox score changes to The Cramps’ ‘Fever’ over a low angle close-up of Jesse as the shadow of the ceiling fan flashes over his face, ominously appearing in synchronization with the music. The slow rhythm of ‘Fever’ presents Jesse as an imposing threat while it also builds suspense with each of the vampires turning to Caleb, in sync with the beat of the song, to urge him to follow their lead. This is a reminder that the point of this violent display is to facilitate Caleb’s transformation. In the final musical shift, the score changes to George Strait’s melodic ‘The Cowboy Rides Away’ as, in a final bid to push Caleb to kill, Mae gets up, walks across the room while gently wiping the blood from her lips, and asks the one remaining patron – the young cowboy – to dance. Here the deliberately gentle musical score, and Mae’s sweet humming of the tune and gentle caressing of the cowboy’s shoulders as they dance, renders the seduction more disturbing, particularly as he begins to cry. While Severen plays a cat and mouse game with his victims, Mae’s torture is crueller as she uses her victim as bait for Caleb. His jealousy roused, Caleb walks across the room, pauses before the couple as Mae turns and informs him ‘He’s for you.’ As he steps into an extreme close-up, Caleb’s resolve is clear. The choice of song – ‘The Cowboy Rides Away’ – captures the melancholy that surrounds Caleb as he approaches this turning point, manipulated by Mae into abandoning his humanity. In this scene the last vestiges of Caleb’s cowboy identity are lost, replaced by the steely stare of a killer as the title line of the song is uttered. Caleb’s humanity will resurface in the next scene, causing him to hesitate and let the cowboy go, but in this moment in the bar Caleb has become one of them. He is willing to kill and is, in fact, complicit in everything that has happened as he chose to watch rather than intervene in the vampire’s actions – a nod to the audience who similarly sit and watch. This complicity is reinforced

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Jesse and Diamondback have vampire ‘Fever’

by the slow build-up of suspense, alongside the explosion of violence, which encourages the audience to want Caleb to give in, a factor noted by Helen Oldfield in her review of the film: ‘Come the setpiece bloodletting sequence in a country roadhouse, you almost find yourself willing the boy to kill.’63 Perhaps it was not only the graphic display of violence but the moral implication of this scene that unsettled some of the other critics who described this film as ‘repellent’ and ‘revolting’,

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Mae, Caleb and amour-fou

with Alexander Walker in particular noting ‘to be in an audience that enjoys this would frighten me more than anything in the movie’.64 Comic spectacle To enhance the moral ambiguity and audience complicity, this extended scene also possesses a comic spectacle typical of the

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1980s action film in which comedy is privileged and prioritized as part of the genre’s aesthetic and approach to characterization. As Tasker observes, ‘Many recent action movies also seek to integrate comic routines and one-liners, such that comedy operates as an explicit part of the entertainment.’65 This has become associated with Schwarzenegger, with particular reference to memorable lines such as his deadpan delivery of ‘I’ll be Back’ in The Terminator, ‘Stick around’ spoken to a dead body pinned to a hut with a bowie knife in Predator, and ‘you’re fired’ told to a group of terrorists in a helicopter that he has just blown up with a missile in True Lies (James Cameron, 1994). These moments undercut the intensity of the action and humanize the heroes as they often commit extreme acts of violence. They serve to soften the edges of these characters. This is apparent in James Cameron’s humorous reimagining of Bigelow’s barroom scene at the beginning of Terminator 2. When the T-800 terminator travels through time and arrives in LA, he sets out to find clothes and transport by entering a roadside bar, the Corral. That this sequence is influenced by Near Dark is signalled by the fact that it begins on the loud snap of the break in a game of pool as the T-800 walks through the door. Like Near Dark, everyone stops to look at him but in contrast it is not because he signals trouble – although he does – but because he is naked and everyone stops to gawk and snicker. Repeated shots of women looking him up and down while smiling emphasize the humour of the situation. The scene plays out as a barroom brawl after the Terminator demands a biker’s clothes and bike. An echo of Near Dark is elicited when the biker – played by the same actor who played the truck driver (Robert Winley) – is thrown through the window of the kitchen and onto the grill mirroring Caleb’s knocking of him across the room and onto the pool table with one punch. The Terminator is, like the vampires, seemingly impervious to harm and the bartender pulls out his shotgun and tries to take control of the situation. The sequence is, however, softened and played for humour and not horror as the cyborg does not kill him – or anyone else for that matter – but instead takes away the

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bartender’s shotgun and steals his sunglasses, staged to the beats of George Thorogood’s ‘Bad to the Bone’. The synchronicity of the image and music in this sequence is played for humour as compared to the more sombre and unsettling associations in Near Dark. In Near Dark, our vampires similarly deliver comic lines and humorous performances in the heat of the most intense action scenes, particularly Severen. In the midst of the slaughter, Severen pauses just before he bites into the biker: ‘I hate it when they ain’t been shaved,’ and once he has finished, now invigorated by his meal, he turns to his fellow vampires, noting ‘finger lickin good’ as he literally, and enthusiastically, licks the dripping blood from his fingers. Later in the motel shoot-out with police, Severen, Jesse and Diamondback repeatedly deliver quips, comic encouragement and deadpan responses to their precarious situation. Severen initiates the shoot-out by declaring ‘check-out time’ before shooting a hole through the door and one of the police officers; Diamondback cheers ‘see you in hell’ as she fires out the window; and when Jesse asks Severen how he’s doing, his response is to note ‘I’m down to my last inch of skin.’ Finally, when Homer brings Caleb’s sister back to their motel room to watch TV, Severen remarks ‘Who ordered pizza?’

‘Finger Lickin’ Good’

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The delivery of comic dialogue by these characters as they engage with, or threaten to commit, truly monstrous acts, embeds the film within the action tradition and rather than soften the vampires’ edges – as is the case in Terminator 2 for the T-800 is being reframed as a hero – it serves as part of their construction as dangerous but alluring. Humour enhances audience complicity as we are repeatedly encouraged to oscillate between horror and attraction, revitalizing this recurrent theme within horror. Humour makes them likable despite the horrible things they do. These characters, like the Terminator, are capable of anything and as James Cameron once noted ‘There’s a little bit of the terminator in everybody. In our private fantasy world we’d all like to be able to walk in and shoot somebody we don’t like, or to kick a door in instead of unlocking it; to be immune, and just to have our own way every minute.’66 The vampires in Near Dark invite a similar fantasy. While they are repeatedly injured, beaten and torn apart, they keep coming back. Their resilience is their strength. Bigelow describes the roadhouse slaughter as ‘ultimately about turning a bar into an abattoir, but it’s turning that process into a state of art […] The real challenge in that film was that at a certain point you have to identify with the antagonists and want to take that ride.’67 This oscillation between horror and attraction is fundamental to Caleb’s journey. While he is horrified by the group’s behaviour in the bar and fails to make his own kill, the next action set piece – the motel shoot-out with the police – has him choose to save the vampires. While the group engages in a heated crossfire that causes the bungalow to become riddled with bullets and shafts of sunlight and leaves many police officers dead, Caleb undertakes a daring escape into the sunshine to commandeer their van and drive it into the motel to affect an escape. This sequence once again presents the vampires as outlaws on the run. The barrage of bullets into the motel, as well as targeted at Caleb as he runs for the van, is reminiscent of the climatic conclusion to Bonnie and Clyde. It is this act on Caleb’s part that wins favour with the vampire family, causing Severen to give Caleb one of

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his spurs, a gift received enthusiastically by Caleb despite having just witnessed Severen murder the bartender with it. This moment evokes the thematic chiaroscuro that underpins the film, the coexistence of light and shadow in one moment. Their acceptance of Caleb into the family is emotionally satisfying but fringed with horror as it means he is accepting that he will become a killer. Significantly, by reimagining the confrontation between the living and the undead through the integration of Gothic horror with the action film in a series of increasingly violent set pieces delivered by characters we are invited to see as family, the film exists somewhere in between notions of good and bad, and day and night. It exposes and exploits the dark potential of the 1980s action film in order to offer a morally complex and unsettling exploration of these vampires as outsiders. As a result, the film deliberately undermines their narrative presence as antagonists, prefiguring similar preoccupations in Bigelow’s Blue Steel and Point Break. This repositioning of the vampire from antagonist to protagonist is even more obvious through a consideration of the character Mae as an example of the sympathetic vampire, a trope that has become increasingly popular in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Gothic horror.

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4 ‘No You’ve Never Met Another Girl Like Me’: The Sympathetic, Not-So-Reluctant Vampire

At a glance the focus of Near Dark seems to be on Caleb, the halfvampire who must decide between day or night, between life or undeath. The film begins on a shot of him; it is his journey of selfdiscovery that is told through the road movie format; and he, having made his decision, is the western hero who rides in to save his sister Sarah and face her kidnappers at the film’s conclusion. As a halfvampire who resists his killer instincts, Caleb seems to conform to a specific tradition, in which, as Milly Williamson notes, the vampire ‘is no longer predominantly a figure of fear in Western popular culture, but a figure of sympathy […] speak[ing] to our undead desires’ rather than our nightmares.68 Specifically, it is Caleb’s refusal to kill that places him in the realm of the sympathetic vampire for as Williamson notes, these characters are often marked by a refusal to drink blood thus emphasizing their status as an innocent victim, turned into a monster against their will.69 Caleb tells Mae, when she explains that he needs to kill to survive, that he ‘ain’t no killer’. Alongside Caleb, however, is Mae – the vampire who turns him – who is similarly situated at the centre of the narrative. It is her appearance at the beginning of the film that initiates the story, while it is her decision to turn Caleb rather than kill him that propels the action; it is she who keeps Caleb alive; it is Mae who, in fact, saves Sarah; and it is upon a close-up of her that the film ends. Mae is the central enigma of the film. She embodies a series of conflicting representations of gender and vampire that undermine an easy reading of her as either monstrous or sympathetic – she is neither and both simultaneously. The film chronicles her negotiation of the

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complexities surrounding her existence and identity. Caleb’s choices suggest an opposition between day and night, good and evil, but Mae embodies the coexistence of light and dark that defines the film’s Gothic aesthetic. Confounding expectations From her introduction, the representation of Mae confounds expectations and gender stereotypes. First depicted emerging from the shadows, slowly and seductively eating an ice cream cone, Mae embodies both childhood innocence and a tantalizing form of seduction. This image of her is presented from Caleb’s point of view, a pleasurable disruption to the mundanity of his small-town life. Hanging out on a street corner drinking beer and picking fights with his friends, Caleb is seemingly dissatisfied. He expresses his desire for escape by evoking the nursery rhyme ‘Star Light, Star Bright’ when he states, ‘wish I may wish I might – wish I was a thousand miles from here tonight’. Seemingly in response to his wish one of his friends pauses and tells the others ‘Turn around and feast your eyes – I’m dreaming.’ Caleb turns, looks and in the next shot, Mae steps out of the shadows, her dreamy appearance reinforced by the introduction of a melodic musical passage, which is simultaneously romantic and melancholic. This shot of Mae, reaffirmed as coming from Caleb’s perspective by a cut back to him in close-up, conforms to the film noir trope of ‘obsession [captured] in a point-of-view shot that picks a woman’s face out of a crowd’.70 In the tradition of the noir hero, Caleb is enthralled by Mae at first sight. Bathed in neon and surrounded by the reflective surfaces of the black asphalt, this is a noir-inflected image of Mae, with her positioned as the femme fatale. This image is as alluring as Phyllis Dietrichson in the towel at the beginning of Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944). Mae’s seeming innocence entices Caleb to approach but, like many classic femme fatales such as Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) in The Maltese Falcon (John Houston, 1941) or Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth) in The Lady

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Innocence and seduction; lust at first sight, the femme fatale as seductress in Double Indemnity (1944); the hook is in

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from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1948), Mae is performing the image of the naïve or innocent woman to lure men in to her trap and, quite literally in this case, consume them. The ice cream cone is, after all just a prop – an image of innocence but also cunning seduction. The lure is reinforced by the physicality of Mae/Wright’s performance. As Caleb approaches, stares and slowly circles Mae, she repeatedly averts her eyes, coyly snatching glances at him then looking away, all of which gives him the impression that he is the predator. She is, in fact, the one drawing him in. Staring at her, Caleb asks if he could have a ‘bite’ of her ice cream, explaining ‘I’m just dying for a cone.’ These are a poor choice of words and she responds by simply repeating them: ‘bite?’, ‘dying?’ That these are the words that she picks up on serves as a warning to the audience, even if not Caleb, and asserts her predatory intentions. Caleb, in his arrogance and innocence, simply notes that she ‘ain’t from around here’. Mae’s repetition also treats his words as an implicit invitation to her, a contract. In the fashion of most vampire texts, as well as film noir, Caleb is implicated by the choices he makes. At the end of the scene, she turns to face him directly for the first time, looking into his eyes and states ‘I need a lift home’. The hook is in. Mae, however, also defies conventional representation of the femme fatale. With close cropped hair and wearing jeans, plaid cut-off shirt, rope belt and cowboy boots, she is the image of an androgynous waif. She offers a refreshing alternative to the traditional glamourous blond bombshell that propelled film noir classics such as The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946) and Double Indemnity, and which began to reemerge in 1980s neo-noirs such as Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981). Instead, she sits comfortably alongside, what Christina Lane describes as, Bigelow’s ‘tomboyish heroines’, including Telena in The Loveless¸ Megan in Blue Steel and Tyler in Point Break; women who undermine traditional gender expectations through androgyny.71 Mae also challenges familiar representations of the female vampire from the trance-like Brides in Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) to the hyper-sexualized buxom undead of Hammer

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Horror to the half-vampires of Fright Night and The Lost Boys. Star, the love interest to half-vampire Michael in The Lost Boys, conforms to traditional conceptions of gender and seduction with her dark, long flowing hair, beaded skirts and floral shawls (evoking stereotypes of the Gypsy), and elusive flirtation. She teases Michael and entices him into the vampire gang. Amy, the love interest in Fright Night, shares Mae’s short cropped hair and comparatively androgynous clothes, including jeans, T-shirts and sneakers. This appearance, however, is generally more in keeping with Amy’s adolescent identity, giggly and girlish in her behaviour and mannerisms – the childgirlfriend who needs to be saved from the vampire. Her eventual transformation into a vampire is, therefore, presented as her

The traditional female vampires in The Lost Boys (1987) and Fright Night (1985)

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transformation into womanhood, in which she conforms to a more traditional image of the sexualized woman, replete with long hair, flowing dress and voluptuous body. She needs to be rescued as much from this aggressive sexuality as she does from the vampire. In contrast, Mae maintains a gender ambiguity throughout the film that is part of her allure and her transgressive potential. She cannot be reduced to one stereotype but rather embodies a complex fusion of seemingly contradictory characteristics and identities. While she initially fosters a helpless waif-like image of herself, once in the truck with Caleb she abandons this performance and comes across as calm, confident and assertive. She no longer averts her gaze, instead she stares directly ahead answering his probing and mundane questions about boyfriends with confidence and a hint of mockery. While Caleb is trapped within the everyday, talking about his lack of a girlfriend and suggesting a possible date at the local theatre, Mae wants to talk about the sublime splendour of the night and the stars. There is something otherworldly about her, which is enhanced by the way in which she is photographed by Greenberg. The lighting emphasizes the paleness of her skin but also the brightness of her eyes, and she is

An untraditional vampire

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regularly backlit to provide her short, spiky blonde hair a shimmering glow. Initially bathed in neon, when Caleb drives her home, she is illuminated by the high-contrast flicker of light coming from the highway or by the headlights of the truck while standing on the road surrounded by impenetrable darkness. The richness of Greenberg’s cinematography conveys her multifaceted nature and reaffirms, as both Caleb and Mae note, he hasn’t ‘met any girls like’ her. There are other contradictions. Her pixie-like appearance is countered by her strength, her seeming innocence by moments of predatory determination. When Caleb tries to show off his cowboy credentials by introducing her to his horse, he lassoes Mae and tries to pull her into an embrace, thus signalling his masculine prowess. But Mae resists and playfully pulls him toward her, revealing her superior strength. Later when she becomes aware that dawn is approaching, she urges Caleb to drive her home, but Caleb dismisses her anxiety as fear of punishment. He scoffs at her distress and offers to tell her father that they ran out of gas thus usurping paternal authority. When that does not appease her concerns, he stops the car and conceals the keys in his shirt, promising to drive her home if she gives him a kiss. This is a key moment as it signals a dark side to Caleb – a call back to his display of high school bravado at the beginning of the film. Here he dismisses her concerns and asserts his position of power in order to get her to satisfy his sexual needs – saying ‘Just a little touch. I ain’t asking for much.’ This is important as it positions him as an aggressor. Her response, however, challenges any perception of Mae as a victim. Bathed in the unnatural blue light of the predawn period – neither day nor night – the moment seems suspended in time and she is at home in this twilight space. She no longer exhibits any anxiety about the rising sun but instead seems to have given in to her predatory instincts. Shot in a low angle close-up, Mae leans in to kiss Caleb and dominates the frame, looking more than human. The light, angle and slow-motion cinematography lend her movements an inhuman predatory quality as she approaches him, her preternaturalness accentuated by the minimalist

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Tangerine Dream score. Her positioning in the frame as she leans over Caleb is in keeping with various artistic representations of the female vampire. In Edvard Munch’s and Philip Burne-Jones’s paintings – both entitled Vampire (1895/1902 and 1897, respectively) – the female vampire is presented as sexually dominant by looming over their male victims as they feed. A similar stance and animalistic depiction of the sexually aggressive woman is evoked in Franz Flaum’s sculpture Vampire (1904).

The predatory vampire

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This moment between Mae and Caleb is, however, not simply an opportunity for her to satiate her ‘bestial blood lust’ as evoked in these earlier works of art.72 Nor is it a moment of retribution for Caleb’s behaviour – her chance to turn the tables on the sexually predatory male as the vampire Marie does to the gangster Sal Maccelli in Innocent Blood (John Landis, 1992) when she turns his attempted rape into a blood bath. There is instead a lyrical beauty to Bigelow’s composition and juxtaposition of intimate close-up shots of Caleb and Mae kissing taken from different angles that conveys sensuality and desire. In an extreme close-up, Mae caresses Caleb’s neck before biting him. The physicality of this bite is made clear by the diegetic sound of his skin being punctured which breaks through the ambient musical score, followed by a short, sharp synth guitar riff that punctuates the bite.73 Rather than tearing into his throat and drinking his blood, Mae immediately pulls away as she spits out a small amount of blood and then exits the car, all shot in slow motion. This scene is defined by her sensuality and restraint, running counter to previous renderings of the female vampire as bestial and voracious in their hungers. This is in fact her third opportunity to feed from him but in each case, she resists. It is only after he has been picked up by the Winnebago that it is revealed that Mae has turned Caleb. Unlike vampire convention, which usually involves an exchange of blood between vampire and victim, in Near Dark transformation is initiated by, as Mae puts it, being ‘bit’ but not ‘bled’, suggesting that turning someone is an act of restraint. Mae chooses to turn Caleb rather than simply feed on him, recognizing his aptitude for vampirism. In this sequence, therefore, Mae is an atypical predator and Caleb is not entirely a victim, thus confounding a superficial reading of Caleb as sympathetic. Instead, her choice to turn him rather than feed puts her on this path. The sympathetic vampire Mae is a conundrum, who continues to counter and confound expectations even regarding the sympathetic vampire. This is a

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tradition that emerged in literature but has continued in film and television and tends more often to be the terrain of male characters. Dating back to Augustus Darvell in Lord Byron’s ‘Fragment of a Novel’ (1819), Lord Ruthven in Dr John Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’ (1819) and Varney in James Malcolm Rhymer’s Varney the Vampire (1845–7), the sympathetic vampires of romantic literature were often associated with notoriety and infamy, and generated feelings of ambivalence. In more recent years, the figure is most commonly associated with Anne Rice’s Louis and Lestat in her Vampire Chronicles, as well as the romantic vampire of twentieth- and twenty-first-century television: Barnabus Collins in Dark Shadows (1966–71), Angel and Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and Angel (1999–2004), and Stefan and Damon Salvatore in The Vampire Diaries (2009–17). These are figures who are ‘presented as sympathetic and knowable “outsiders”’, with readers and audiences seeing the figure as a celebration of ‘otherness’ rather than its demonization.74 There have, of course, been examples of female sympathetic vampires prior to Near Dark, most notably Carmilla in Sheridan LeFanu’s novella (1872) as well as its many adaptations, including Blood and Roses (Roger Vadim, 1960) and The Vampire Lovers (Roy Ward Baker, 1970). Other examples include the Countess Zaleska in Dracula’s Daughter (Lambert Hillyer, 1936), Countess Bathory in Daughters of Darkness and Miriam Blaylock in The Hunger. Like their male counterparts, these women embody a celebration of otherness while also evoking feelings of ambivalence in response to their, at times, monstrous actions. What defines their ‘otherness’ is their sexuality, representing an alternative to heteronormativity and patriarchy. The sympathetic female vampire has become increasingly prevalent in the years after Near Dark in films such as Nadja (Michael Almereyda, 1994), The Addiction (Abel Ferrara, 1995), Byzantium (Neil Jordan, 2012), A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014) and the Canadian web series Carmilla (2014–16).75

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Mae represents a distinct moment in the trajectory of the female vampire. Rather than wallow in the pleasure of the kill like her family, Mae enjoys the sensual pleasures offered by the enhanced senses that vampirism offers her, enabling her to experience the world in a heightened fashion. While on the road with Caleb, she tells him to stop the car. Standing alone in the dark, Mae asks him to look at the night, explaining ‘it’s dark – it’s also bright. It’ll blind you.’ She then asks him to listen: ‘Listen hard. Do you hear it? […] the night. It’s deafening.’ The suggestion is that Mae sees and hears the night through a richer spectrum of senses than humans, becoming frustrated by Caleb’s limitations. This side of Mae fits very well with experiences described by Anne Rice’s vampires, novels that were hitting their peak at the time of the film’s release. After Louis is transformed, he delivers a lengthy description of what it means to see as a vampire. Explaining that while Lestat initially appeared white and luminous, Louis notes that through his vampire eyes Lestat suddenly appeared radiant; ‘it was as if I had only just been able to see colours and shapes for the first time […] Then Lestat began to laugh, and I heard his laughter as I had never heard anything before.’76 Like Louis, Mae extolls the beauty of the night, which is blinding, deafening and wondrous, evoking the sublime. The night is so beautiful that it is impossible to articulate or represent cinematically. We are left with the suggestion of wonders that transcend the limitations of human perspective. Similarly as they stand out on the highway, looking up at the stars – the same stars upon which Caleb wished to be ‘a thousand miles from here tonight’ – Mae explains how the light that leaves those stars will take a billion years to get down to earth and what makes her unlike any other girl is that she’ll ‘still be here when the light from that star gets down here in a billion years’. It is this appreciation of the world around her and the potential for immortality that distinguishes her from her family who live in the moment of the kill and the chaos. Mae has ambition for immortality, which is far more in keeping with the aestheticism of Louis who uses his immortality to appreciate art, books and culture and prefigures Eve from Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013) who sees immortality as the opportunity to live life to the fullest, not through violence but through

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reading, dancing, loving. Mae is sympathetic because her ambitions transcend the traditional limitations of the human and the vampire. She also offers an alternative path for the vampire in terms of sexuality. While her initial encounter with Caleb is coded as heterosexual, once she turns him, their relationship begins to blur traditional sexual lines and binaries. Initially she takes on the role

Sympathetic vampires with ambition for immortality, Mae and Eve in Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)

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of teacher, telling her family that as she turned him, she’ll teach him. Caleb resists and tries to go home – despite Mae’s warning that he ‘won’t get very far’. When the blood lust becomes overwhelming, presenting itself as extreme withdrawal symptoms, he comes back to Mae. Doubled over in pain and covered in vomit and drool, Caleb finds Mae in the empty warehouse where he left her. Sitting on the bumper of their car, she waits patiently until he crawls to her, grabbing hold of her waist. He is now ready to accept what it is she has to offer. Mussing his hair like a child, she bites into her wrist and feeds her blood to him. She is the image of the vampire mother, feeding her progeny. But as he begins to drink, the sound of her heartbeat takes over the soundtrack as it accelerates. The film cuts to a close-up of Mae as her breath starts to come faster; she smiles, closes her eyes and begins to move to the rhythm of her heartbeat. As Caleb’s drinking deepens, they begin to move in unison as she tells him ‘I asked you once to listen to the night, now listen to me.’ The sexual pleasure of their union is clear and as she pulls her arm away to stop him drinking, their embrace climaxes in a passionate kiss as her blood mixes on their lips. Their reactions are orgasmic

Mae as mother and lover

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and euphoric. Like their first kiss in the truck, Mae dominates the composition but in an inversion of traditional representations of the female vampire. Rather than feed her thirst, she stands over Caleb as he drinks from her, suggestive of Mina drinking the Count’s blood in Dracula but inverting the power dynamics. This vampiric blood exchange is highly sexual, satisfying Caleb’s hunger and rousing both of their sexual desire, but it subtly undermines notions of heteronormativity as Mae is both mother and lover. There is little normative about this scene. Significantly, the scene concludes as Mae takes Caleb out into the night to see it with his vampire eyes, telling him ‘Look – the night. It is so bright, it’ll blind you’ as they hold hands like excited children. This romantic and sexual encounter awakens Caleb’s vampire senses. In the script, Bigelow and Red describe Caleb as being ‘in love with the newness of the night. He shuts his eyes. Opens his ears. A symphony of night sounds sweeps in on him.’77 The original script and storyboard include sequences of the two as Caleb experiences his new vampire vision. They run and frolic together, surrounded by other nocturnal animals. Bigelow shot this scene in black-and-white infrared. As they laugh and dance, Caleb looks around in wonder, and Mae watches him experience his power for the first time.78 Unfortunately the black-and-white photography looks too mundane to capture the sublime wonder that the film is trying to convey and which is far more effectively expressed through Greenberg’s high-contrast cinematography. Thus, Bigelow ends the scene on a close-up of Caleb as they run out into the night. Their vision withheld, the moment renders the vampire experience more enticing. By sharing her vision and experience of immortality with Caleb, Mae is looking for someone with whom she can share the sublime experience of immortality and thus she stands apart from the vampires who precede her. The not-so-reluctant vampire In keeping with the film’s narrative richness, as much as Mae represents an important entry in the lineage of the sympathetic

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vampire, she does not completely conform to this category either. In contrast to other iconic sympathetic vampires, such as Louis in Interview with the Vampire and Angel from Buffy and Angel, Mae does not demonstrate self-loathing or guilt. While Louis and Angel both resist the hunger for human blood, choosing to consume rats’ and pigs’ blood, striving to hold onto some aspect of their humanity, Mae is at best ambivalent about her need to kill. She explains to Caleb that ‘it is just something you do night after night. It is only ever a question of how […] The night has its price.’ Caleb struggles against the physical need to kill that is beginning to overwhelm him but Mae accepts it. She tells Caleb not to think of it as killing, ‘not to think at all’. She takes great pleasure in schooling him in the wonder of the night as well as teaching him how to kill. It is a practical necessity. While Louis and Angel are bound by notions of good and evil, brooding about the immorality of their natures, Mae hones her instincts and kills to survive. Furthermore, in comparison to her family Mae does not demonstrate a nihilistic blood lust but there is evidence that she does take pleasure in the kill. She is, after all, an active participant in the roadhouse slaughter and while Caleb looks uncomfortable and, at times, horrified by their actions, Mae seems to enjoy the experience. As the family enter the bar, Severen stands centre stage focalizing viewer attention but a glance to the right shows Mae stepping forward and leaning casually on one of the booths, as she looks around the bar and smiles. Her posture and smile demonstrate that she is relaxed and having fun. She is also repeatedly glimpsed smiling at Caleb’s innocent comments as he discovers his newfound powers and, after they kill the waitress and decant her blood into a beer stein, she is the first to reach for the glass. She is willing and enthusiastic even if her broader motivations are different from the others. Through Mae, therefore, the film further complicates conceptions of good and bad as she is not bound by such simplistic concepts. After Caleb has been accepted into the group, he asks Mae what that makes him? She responds in the following exchange:

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caleb

So what does that make me?

mae

I ain’t exactly sure.

caleb

But its good though, right?

mae

I guess so, yeah.

Caleb attempts to make sense of his new existence by describing it as good, but Mae’s response is more equivocal. The film repeatedly blurs lines of good and evil as when Mae tries to teach Caleb how to hunt. Out on the highway, they get a lift in a semi-truck, and while Mae silently urges Caleb to kill the driver, Caleb is torn between hunger and, seemingly, his conscience. The scene lasts for an uncomfortable two and a half minutes as the driver chats amiably while Caleb struggles against his thirst, sweating, shaking and looking nauseous. Eventually he gives up and jumps out of the truck, followed by the concerned driver. Mae takes it onto herself to complete the job, emerging slowly from the truck and approaching the driver from behind. Steeling a meaningful glance at Caleb, she grabs the driver and bites into his neck as a loud musical sting emphasizes the violence of the moment. It is significant that this is the first killing that is shown on-screen. As discussed previously, Homer, Severen, Jesse and Diamondback’s first murders are withheld so it is Mae who is presented as the vampire in its purest form, thus complicating her position as sympathetic. The driver is after all innocent, congenial and generally supportive, believing them to be runaways escaping a bad domestic situation. Significantly, while Caleb appears as the reluctant vampire, resisting his growing drives and hungers, his place as potentially sympathetic is undermined in the next scene when Mae feeds Caleb once again. This is another sexually charged sequence reinforced by the image of an oil drill pumping in the background. This sexual and maternal moment is rendered more disturbing than their first encounter because it is apparent that the blood he is drinking is not Mae’s but rather her victim’s. Thus, Caleb is rendered as complicit in the truck driver’s death. His complicity is enhanced by the fact that

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The not-so-reluctant vampire

as she approached the driver from behind, Caleb not only watched her without giving warning but feigned stomach pains in order to draw the driver’s attention away from Mae. Finally, as Caleb drinks voraciously from her wrist, Mae is shown with a pained look. She tears her arm out of his grip and pushes him away, falling to the ground in the process as he looks on with delight. She tells him that

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The not-so-innocent victim

he could kill her if he drinks too much and the reverse shot of Caleb, still smiling as lightning flashes, is chilling. In this image, richly composed with an interplay of light and shadow on this face, we are reminded of the malcontent Caleb from the beginning of the film and the sexual opportunist, using Mae’s distress in order to force her to comply with his sexual advances. The film reveals that while Caleb may be reluctant to kill, he is hardly innocent and definitely not sympathetic. His reluctance is a sign of weakness rather than conscience. In contrast, Mae is extremely sympathetic but unlike many of her male precursors, she is not domesticated as a vampire but rather empowered. She is a transgressive figure, which is the root of her attraction and her sympathetic nature.

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5 ‘Fun Times’: Disrupting Narrative Resolution and Resisting the Status Quo

In this final chapter, I want to turn my attention to one of the more contested aspects of the film – even more than the violent barroom scene – which is the film’s ending. Despite its critical acceptance and cult following, there are many who have criticized Near Dark for seemingly undermining the vampire’s transgressive potential by evoking conservative values. These criticisms are largely focused on Caleb’s eventual choice to return to his father and sister, the cure of Caleb’s vampirism, and his final confrontation with the vampires that concludes with the demise of Severen, Homer, Jesse and Diamondback and the rescue and ‘cure’ of Mae. For instance, Aspasia Stephanou argues that the film ‘celebrates the complete triumph of science over the supernatural through the use of blood transfusions that cure vampirism’ and in so doing reasserts paternal authority as it is Loy’s blood that saves Caleb. As such, the film ‘reaffirms the traditional family values of 1980s America’.79 The cure also brings problematic connotations in the late 1980s in terms of reading vampirism through the lens of the growing AIDS crisis. Nicola Nixon argues that while the film might present vampirism as tempting in its allure, fundamentally the film is a morality tale that warns against ‘transgressive’ behaviour and uses the cure to restore the heterosexual couple to their ‘rightful’ place in the nuclear family.80 Christopher Sharrett critiques the return to the classic Western trope of the ‘“captivity” narrative wherein the white hero rescues the white (in this case blonde) woman from the savage horde’.81 These criticisms have some merit. The inclusion of a cure does hark back to Bram Stoker and Van Helsing’s repeated attempts to

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save Lucy by transfusing the blood of her fiancé and other suitors into her system. In many ways her body becomes the battleground for paternal control as their blood fights against the blood and influence of Dracula. In Stoker’s novel, Dracula wins and Lucy becomes a vampire, who then must be ‘saved’ with a stake through the heart. For Lucy, patriarchal authority wins either way. In Near Dark, human paternal authority, first in the form of Loy and then Caleb, who transfuses his blood into Mae, does seem to win the day. Furthermore, the film’s concluding action scenes mark the reassertion of Western iconography over horror as Caleb must face the vampires in a dramatic showdown in order to save his sister who has been kidnapped by Homer. Finally, the film concludes with the death of the ‘bad’ family and the restoration of the ‘good’ family. These readings are, however, largely focused on the plot and ignore the many character moments, stylistic flourishes and generic interplay that subtly disrupt these aspects of the film. To invoke Laura Mulvey on the transgressive potential of Douglas Sirk and the Hollywood melodrama, an understanding of the film ‘lies in the amount of dust that the story raises along the road, a cloud of over-determined irreconcilables which put up a resistance to being neatly settled in the last five minutes’.82 It is around a selection of these disruptions that I would like to focus my attention to offer a reappraisal of the film and the transgressive potential of its ending. Families After the action-oriented sequence in the roadhouse slaughter followed by the motel shoot-out, the narrative pauses as the group settle in yet another motel, ironically named Godspeed. It is at this moment that Caleb is accepted as a member of the vampire clan and reconciles himself to this new reality when he willingly takes Severen’s spur. It is also here that his human and vampire families finally cross paths. This offers a unique opportunity to compare the representations of these two units. When Mae and Caleb decide to go look at the night, the others stay in and play a game of five-card Russian

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roulette – family fun for the undead. Framed in a medium long shot, they sit casually around the table, sharing cigarettes, playing cards and laughing. Their body language is relaxed and at ease with each other, even when Severen is caught cheating and they jokingly threaten to shoot each other. They are being playful and seem united. The scene offers a pleasurable respite from the action. In contrast, the humans seem at times to be estranged. While Loy and Sarah are distressed

Vampire vs human families

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by Caleb’s disappearance and Sarah and Caleb display affection for each other, there is a suggestion that home life was perhaps not ideal. Before his abduction, Caleb exhibited dissatisfaction; when Caleb struggles home in mid-transformation, Loy simply complains ‘it’s about time he got home’; and finally when Homer finds Sarah at the motel vending machine at 5.00 am, she tells him ‘I do what I want to do when I want to do it.’ There is a hint of rebellion and disfunction in Caleb and Sarah’s behaviour. It is interesting that when Sarah enters the vampires’ motel room, she notes that they ‘sure stay up late’, but her surprise could be as much about their unity as a family, all hanging out together, as the hours they keep. Upon Caleb’s return to his human family, there is a mirrored scene of the Colton’s gathered around the dinner table. Initially the dinner is presented as convivial, with the family similarly framed in a medium long shot as Sarah and Caleb joke around, but Loy asserts his authority, telling them to ‘knock it off’. The conversation seems less relaxed as they make small talk, discussing the turn in the weather. It becomes tense when Loy notes that the days are getting shorter and Caleb responds, with a hint of regret, that the nights are getting longer, signalling a deeper division and his longing for his alternative life. After Sarah leaves the table, the two men seem awkward with each other, unable to make conversation and Caleb excuses himself from the table, despite his father’s protests, claiming he wants to get some air. While the vampire family embodies unity and comradery, the humans seem awkward and disjointed. It is noteworthy that Loy subsequently sleeps through Sarah’s abduction. These scenes suggest potential ambivalence toward the institution of family. They critique the non-traditional as it is the single parent family that seems dysfunctional and produces these unruly children, but the nuclear family is also presented as monstrous. It is the vampire family that is ‘complete’, with clearly identified paternal and maternal figures and three ‘children’. In the vampires, the monstrous is rendered ‘normal’ but also ‘normality’ is equally presented as monstrous. Significantly, the seeming normalization

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of the vampires is misleading as their lineage unsettles traditional familial relationships, queering the image of the complete nuclear family. If turning someone is a sexual act, as established at the start of the film with Caleb and Mae, then Jesse is both father and lover to Diamondback, Diamondback is mother and lover to Homer, and Homer is father, little brother and unrequited lover to Mae. Notably, while the film downplays the homoeroticism of other vampire films such as The Hunger and The Lost Boys in favour of more obvious heterosexual couplings, the bond between Jesse and Severen is inherently disruptive. In familial terms, they are father and son but Severen’s turning by Jesse is the only example of homosocial vampire transformation and the queerness of their relationship is subsumed by their hyper-masculine interplay. It is not denied but it finds expression in their bonding over eruptions of brutality and violence. As Jesse explains, he ‘taught Severen everything he knew’. Finally, there is Homer – the adult vampire in the body of a child. This trope had been used by Anne Rice in the form of Claudia in Interview with the Vampire. Claudia destabilizes traditional expectations of gender, age and sexuality through her sexualized relationship with her vampire-father Louis and confronts the reader with her identity dysmorphia as she struggles to reconcile her adult desires with her child body. In contrast, in Near Dark Homer’s condition initially seems played for laughs, as he repeatedly complains about his situation while the others, particularly Severen, grumble about having to hear about this night after night. But when Homer sees Sarah at the motel and threatens to turn her, the liminality of his condition becomes more apparent and unsettling. When he initially threatens Sarah, explaining ‘I turned Mae and she went off and turned you. Now I’m turning your little sister – and that makes us even-steven’ – it appears at first glance that this is his revenge on Caleb. His childlike declaration suggests an exchange of sisters/lovers. Upon further scrutiny, however, Homer’s attraction to Sarah is intense before he knows her connection to Caleb. When he finds her at the vending machine, he seems awestruck by her and

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‘That makes us even-steven’

willing to say anything to lure her back to his room. Similarly, when he introduces her to his family, his demeanour suggests genuine affection, holding her hand and sighing as he says her name, as well as a displaying a desire to please her. While on the surface, they look ‘normal’, two children side by side watching TV, this is an illusion as Homer is an adult who appears as a child, blurring clear identity categorization. Homer’s attraction is therefore unsettling because of their ages, as Sarah is a child who has become the object of Homer’s desires. The suggestion of Homer turning Sarah raises the spectre of paedophilia, still a taboo subject within contemporary media but one that often silently underpins many vampire teen romance narratives such as Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008) and Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008). Near Dark is a significant precursor that signals the imbalanced power relations often inherent to these supernatural relationships. The other suggestion is that Homer is trapped in perpetual childhood, a reading supported by his use of phrases such as ‘even-steven’. By this reading, his desire to turn Sarah is to make her just like him and their potential vampiric embrace is suggestive of child sexuality. Either way, Homer is disruptive.

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As such, rather than having these notions of family domesticate the vampire, the vampire’s liminality repeatedly disrupts traditional representations of family. The cure The search for a cure is not unique to Near Dark and often features in tales of reluctant vampires such as Dracula in House of Dracula (Erle C. Kenton, 1945) and Countess Zaleska in Dracula’s Daughter, both of whom turn to modern medicine to cure their addiction. Similarly, Barnabus Collins in Dark Shadows also turns to science while Blacula looks to voodoo in Scream Blacula Scream (Bob Kelljan, 1973) as a means of removing their vampiric curses, but in each case the cure fails. Near Dark includes a successful cure but I would, however, question whether this can be seen as a celebration of science, which is more clearly in evidence in later vampire films such as Blade, Underworld and Daybreakers (Peter and Michael Spierig, 2009), where the scientific and the technological inflects the film’s overall aesthetic and narrative. In Near Dark Loy simply flushes Caleb’s system through a blood transfusion rather than finding an antidote, suggesting a more pragmatic view of vampirism. Loy is a veterinarian and the mise en scène of the transfusion scene, taking place in a barn, suggests a form of home remedy as opposed to biomedicine; an act of desperation rather than regulation and control. The lyrical montage of images of Loy tending to Caleb which concludes with him holding his son and weeping reinforces the family melodrama of the scene over a celebration of science. Significantly, Caleb doesn’t necessarily want to leave his new family and return to humanity, but it is forced upon him by circumstance. When they all meet at the Godspeed Motel, he tells his farther that he is ‘with them now’ and is going to stay. He is forced to flee with his human family only when Homer snatches Sarah. This causes Sarah to make a break for the door and unknowingly let in the sunshine, forcing the vampires to run for cover. Caleb grabs his father and sister and escapes in the family truck. Unable to articulate

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what has happened to him and why a hospital is not a solution, he sticks his hand into the sunlight to show how it burns, causing Sarah to avert her eyes. In this scene, Caleb is othered, no longer human but no longer a part of the vampire unit. Later, when Mae turns up at the farm and the couple embrace, Mae pulls away when she realizes he is warm again. He continues to be othered as he no longer really fits in either world. It is debatable if he ever will. Collison of genres The image of Caleb riding into town on the back of a horse as tumble weeds blow by and sporting his Stetson locates the climax firmly within the western, as does his intention to rescue Sarah. As noted by Sharrett this is in keeping with the ‘captivity’ narrative of films such as The Searchers. Greenberg’s lighting of Caleb’s arrival, however, places the western tradition in tension with the Gothic through the extreme chiaroscuro through which he appears as a shadow emerging from a mist that shimmers and glows. The civilizing structures and mise en scène of the western are unable to contain the aesthetic excesses of horror. Even as Caleb comes out of the shadows and into the light, we have returned to the noirish nocturnal streets of the film’s opening. The collision of genre iconography disrupts traditional expectations of good and evil and draws out many of the dark uncertainties that underpin films like The Searchers as well as revisionist westerns such as Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964) and High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood, 1973). Near Dark positions this narrative once again within a murky Gothic landscape. The generic matrix becomes further complicated as the western comes into conflict with the horror action film through the arrival of Severen, whose appearances causes the horse to throw Caleb to the ground. Caleb looks up into an imposing close-up of Severen towering over him, engulfed in shadow. Caleb’s position as a saviour and hero is as a result called into question. Severen helps Caleb up but then throws him down the road, threatening to ‘knock [his] tonsils out [his] asshole’. The scene that follows is a showdown but

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Collision of genres as exquisite noir western meets vampire horror

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one more in keeping with The Terminator than High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952). Unable to match the vampire’s strength, Caleb runs away and forces an approaching semi-truck to stop and pick him up. After Severen shoots the driver – yet another truck driver who dies because of Caleb – Caleb takes over the truck and runs over the vampire. In Terminator fashion, however, Severen does not die but is instead relentless, climbing up from beneath the truck and onto the hood, his face ripped apart and bloody. Determined to kill Caleb, he smashes through the hood and rips out bits of the engine, continuing to deliver comic quips such as ‘fasten your fuckin seatbelt’ as Caleb looks on in horror. With no other option, Caleb stalls the truck, causing it to jack-knife as he jumps out before it explodes. While this results in Severen’s death, the last image of Severen, riding the engine like a broncobuster atop a stallion while laughing and cheering is an image of power and not defeat. Severen goes out as he lived his undead life, an unbridled expression of libidinous energy. This sequence is highly reminiscent of The Terminator and Terminator 2 in terms of humour and violent, visceral spectacle – it is difficult not to expect Severen to immerge from the flames like the T-1000. Like the Terminators, Severen is unrelenting in his pursuit of Caleb. He is also difficult to kill, requiring not a stake through the heart but a massive explosion to destroy this vampire. While the lines between good and evil, living and cyborg are clear in the Terminator films, in Near Dark these lines are repeatedly blurred. Caleb’s confrontation with Severen, in the tradition of the western, codes him as the hero riding in to save his sister, but in the language of the action film, Severen’s comic monstrosity and resilience renders him sympathetic. Caleb has, after all, betrayed his trust and bond not only as a vampire but an outlaw. Caleb’s confrontation with Jesse equally undermines western traditions. Visually the scene is presented as a traditional western showdown as the two men face each other head on, with Caleb sporting his Stetson and Jesse in a Leone-style cowboy duster to reinforce the western allusion. It is the women – Diamondback, Mae

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Vampire showdown

and Sarah – who unsettle the masculine confrontation and destabilize Caleb’s position as hero. Diamondback sneaks up behind Caleb in order to stab him in the back; Sarah escapes from Homer’s grip in time to warn Caleb who ducks and narrowly misses being struck with Diamondback’s knife, which instead lands squarely in Jesse’s mouth; Diamondback encourages Caleb to make a run for it in order to intensify the hunt; and as Caleb escapes with Sarah and Jesse takes aim, Mae hits Jesse’s arm, causing him to miss. Caleb’s escape has no bearing on him as a hero but is the result of their intervention, intentional or otherwise. Furthermore, after they escape Caleb is unable to keep carrying Sarah so he tells her to run ahead of him as he falls to the ground, leaving her unprotected when the vampires approach her and abduct her once more. In the end it is Mae who saves her when she grabs the girl and leaps out of the car window into the burning sunlight, choosing Caleb over her vampire family. While the aesthetic of the showdown reconfigures the confrontation between the human hero and the vampires in the style of the western, the way in which these scenes play out undermines the western influence. Allegedly the hero, Caleb doesn’t in fact stop any

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of the vampires. Instead, they go out on their terms. Severen dies in a spectacular explosion in keeping with his larger than life personality; Homer jumps out of the car and into the sunlight in pursuit of Sarah, his chosen partner for eternity and his last word is her name, which he calls before he combusts; and Jesse and Diamondback burn up in the sun, smiling and holding hands as they look back on a century of ‘fun times’. From Caleb’s escape with Sarah, the music has maintained an

Going out on their own terms

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intense driving rhythm in keeping with the pacing of the action film, but as Homer explodes and the scene moves to a series of extreme close-ups of Jesse and Diamondback driving forward into the sun, their skin burning into ash as they are consumed by the flames, the music slows down and into a melancholic melody. Sarah watches in horror and Caleb stares at the burning car, coldly cursing the pair to ‘roast’, but the music evokes sympathy and sadness at their demise rather than triumph.83 Their devotion to each other, as well as Homer’s to Sarah and even Mae’s to Caleb, provides hints of emotional depths that go beyond the human. The ‘good’ may triumph but we mourn the ‘bad’. Mae This brings us to the film’s final moments. After the core members of the vampire family have been destroyed and Sarah rescued, the film comes back to Caleb and Mae. It concludes with Mae waking up on a gurney in the Colton barn as Caleb opens the door, letting in the sunshine. Sitting up suddenly in response to well-honed instincts for self-preservation, she looks fearful and confused by the fact that her skin is not burning. As Caleb walks toward her, the mise en scène confirms that she has been transfused, and the bandage on his arm suggests with his blood. A half-smile briefly appears on her face before fading as she asks Caleb what’s happening and stares at her skin as if not recognizing her own body. He informs her that he has brought her home as he envelopes her in his arms. She tells him, she’s afraid but he says not to be, ‘it’s just the sun’. As he holds her, she continues to look at her hands, confused and disoriented. The film ends on a freeze frame of this embrace as the camera zooms into a close-up of Mae no longer in the shadows, before fading to black when the film’s driving theme music kicks in. This is the film’s ostensible happy ending. The bad vampires have been destroyed and Mae and Caleb have been saved, with Mae brought home to join Caleb’s family. As Pam Cook noted at the time of the film’s release, this is a somewhat ‘disappointing ending, when Caleb chooses the return to normal life with his family, Mae

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Is this a happy ending?

is brought back to the land of the living with a blood transfusion, and daylight prevails’. But as Cook concludes, ‘as the frame freezes on the couple’s embrace, a nagging doubt persists: isn’t Caleb still wearing Severen’s spur?’84 While Cook is speaking figuratively, Caleb’s attachment to the spur, which he is clearly still wearing when he rides in to rescue Sarah, suggests his continued connection to his nocturnal life. More importantly, however, the tone of this final scene leaves doubt as to what this ending means for Mae. The focus of this last shot is entirely on her, with Caleb’s face in shadows and while she is exposed to the sun she is not bathed in warm light but a cold one instead. Her skin and hair are dirty, mundane, having lost the luminescence that surrounded her in Greenberg’s exquisite night-time cinematography. Rather than appear ethereal and otherworldly, she seems savagely bound to the corporeal world. Her body language, crouched on the gurney, enveloped by Caleb’s arms is constricted and claustrophobic. Is the image of Mae a happy one? She looks trapped. The ambiguity of this conclusion is even more apparent when one compares it to the ending in the script. In contrast to the weak and

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diffused light that enters the barn in this shot, in the script the final scene is an exterior, set in ‘a wall of sunlight in the pastoral fields at high noon’. The pastoral quality is reinforced by the description of the presence of animals in their pens, dogs ‘scampering’, the smell of the fresh air and Caleb and Mae’s ‘loving embrace. Long and warm.’ Mae is described as happy and giggly as she looks around and experiences the daytime once more, a description that is completely at odds with the final image of Mae in the film. In the script, Mae is clearly happy, enveloped in the warm sunshine, but Bigelow and Red conclude the story with the appearance of Sarah at the door to the farmhouse looking out at Caleb and Mae before running out into the field to join them. As soon as the sunlight touches her, however, she yells and jumps back indoors: ‘Recoiling into the cooling darkness of the farmhouse. Looking at the wisp of smoke rising from the skin of her arm.’ Sarah has been bitten but not bled by Homer before her escape. She’s turned. This conclusion restores the chiaroscuro that underpins the film as Caleb and Mae are surrounded by sunshine while Sarah is confined to the shadows, thus undercutting the happy ending. It is unknown if Bigelow shot this final scene. In the sequence when Homer is holding Sarah hostage in the car, as Caleb approaches the showdown with Jesse, there is a very brief shot of Homer leaning in toward Sarah’s throat before the scene cuts back to Caleb. This could easily be the moment that would begin her transformation. There are also a series of production stills of actors Joshua Miller and Marcie Leeds, as Homer and Sarah, posing together as an outlaw couple. In these shots, Sarah clearly has a bloody bite mark on her throat. These elements show that there was an intention to conclude the film on this dark note. This narrative thread, however, never made it into the film and, while it is not clear why they deviated from the script, the change did in fact yield a subtly darker conclusion. Sarah’s transformation into a vampire would have been in keeping with horror epilogues such as the hand emerging from the grave in Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976) or Nancy and her friends being trapped in

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their car as her mother is grabbed by Freddy Krueger in Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984). These are jump scares designed to give the audience one last scare, gently undermining narrative resolution. This approach in Near Dark would, however, have been superficial. While a child’s transformation into a vampire can often be a disturbing presence in horror, implying the corruption of innocence such as with the Glick brothers in Salem’s Lot (Tobe Hooper, 1978) and Claudia in Interview with the Vampire (Neil Jordan, 1994), the introduction of a cure in Near Dark undermined this effect, for there is no real threat to normality. Innocence would not be corrupted as Sarah can easily be cured. Instead the film opts for a more insidious ending in which Mae has been cured. This gives the illusion of being a happy ending but the way the scene is filmed leaves questions as to whether this is happy at all. In a film that Bigelow described as about ‘light and the absence of light’, the diffused grey lighting that surrounds Mae – where she appears to be trapped somewhere in between the shadows and the sunshine – evokes doubt and uncertainty. After all, Mae’s lack of understanding at this moment suggests she was not conscious at the time of her transfusion and therefore not given a choice as to this huge change to her being, a reversal of her transformation of Caleb. The conclusion raises questions around consent, choice and power. Importantly, for Mae this cure means that she has not just lost her bloodlust but also lost immortality and her awakened senses, something so vital to her existence. Can the woman who longed to still be around in a billion years and who was, perhaps, looking for someone with whom to share eternity, be satisfied with returning to the daytime nuclear family; daughter to Loy, mother to Sarah, wife to Caleb? Finally, while physically cured Mae has murdered countless people and drunk their blood. Can she be so easily reconciled into ‘normality’ or is she destined to live out her life as neither one thing nor another? The film’s final freeze frame leaves the moment suspended in time, questions unanswered, and invites the viewer to visit and revisit the expression on Mae’s face as she is held in place

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by Caleb, and stares at her skin which is suddenly alien to her. It is a haunting image of lost opportunity and is suggestive of the false happy endings that often characterize Hollywood melodramas, particularly the work of Douglas Sirk, a director Bigelow repeatedly credits as one of her early influences. In 1982, Bigelow interviewed Sirk who argued for the value of form to ‘shape content’.85 In Near Dark’s final image, it is the freeze frame that shapes how this conclusion can be read. The shot offers a subtle critique of ‘heteronormativity’ and traditional family values rather than their valorization. The choice to end on a frame of Mae, frozen in time, positions Near Dark alongside such horror films as Night of the Living Dead, Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972) and The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977), as it denies narrative resolution and resists the restoration of the status quo. Near Dark is part of a legacy of horror cinema that is visceral and thought provoking, disturbing and humorous, frightening and exhilarating. Its fresh approach to genre and its stunning visual design, as well as a haunting musical score, have captured the attention of cinephiles and horror fans alike. Slowly – and deservedly – it built a cult audience. As Bigelow’s reputation as a significant Hollywood film-maker grew, so too did the status of this cult vampire classic. The film represents a key illustration of Bigelow’s skill as a genre innovator, disrupting traditional notions of morality, family and gender through a seamless integration of spectacle and narrative. Blurring lines between day and night, good and evil – celebrating chiaroscuro aesthetically and thematically – the film transgressed and reshaped generic, aesthetic and cultural boundaries, offering a new approach to the vampire and influencing a legacy of film and television: from John Carpenter’s Vampires (1998) to A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014), from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) to Preacher (2016–19). It may have failed in its initial theatrical release but in true vampire fashion it refused to die.

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Notes 1 Museum of Modern Art Department of Film, ‘Cineprobe Opens Eighteenth Season at MOMA October 21’, Press Release October 1985, available online:

(accessed 20 July 2019). 2 Museum of Modern Art Department of Film, ‘Cineprobe Continues at MOMA with Donna Cameron February 8 and Philip Hartman March 1’, Press Release January 1988, available online: (accessed 20 July 2019). 3 J. Hoberman, ‘Near Dark’, Village Voice 26 April 1988, p. 59. 4 Todd McCarthy, ‘Atlantic’s “The Loveless” Grew Out of History, Myth’, Variety 25 September 1984. 5 Lindsay Mackie, ‘First Feature Film Takes Off in the Right Direction’, Glasgow Herald 1 September 1982, p. 34. 6 Amy Taubin, ‘Genre Bender’, Village Voice, 22 October 1988, p. 68. 7 Edward S. Feldman, quoted in ‘Living in Darkness’, Near Dark, DVD, Anchor Bay, 2002. 8 Jan Miner, ‘Bigelow’s “Near Dark” Triumphs Through Acting and Cinematography’, Back Stage 23 October 1987, p. 16. 9 Feldman quoted in ‘Living in Darkness’. 10 Kathryn Bigelow, quoted in Miner, ‘Bigelow’s “Near Dark”’, p. 34. 11 Ana Maria Bahiana, ‘Kathryn Bigelow’, in Peter Keough (ed.), Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews (Jackson, MI:

University of Mississippi Press, 2013), p. 67; Anon., ‘DEG to Distribute F/M’s “Near Dark”’, Hollywood Reporter 11 September 1987. 12 Please note that box-office figures are drawn from Screen International, BoxofficeMojo.com and The Numbers (available online: [accessed 26 September 2019]). 13 It is of note that Anne Rice’s novel The Vampire Lestat sold 75,000 hard copies upon its initial publication in 1985 and was on the New York Times Best Seller’s List, while the sequel The Queen of the Damned (1988) sold 405,000 hard copies and joined the New York Times Best Seller’s List at no. 1, remaining on the list for seventeen weeks. 14 Bigelow, quoted in Bahiana, ‘Kathryn Bigelow’, p. 69. 15 Bigelow, Jaffe, Goldstein and Pasdar, quoted in ‘Living in Darkness’. 16 Simon Brown, Screening Stephen King: Adaptation and the Horror Genre in Film and Television (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2018), pp. 125–6. 17 Phoebe Hoban, ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’, in Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews, p. 29. 18 Cart, ‘Near Dark’, Variety 23 September 1987, p. 13. 19 David Edelstein, ‘Near Dark’, Village Voice 13 October 1987, p. 64. 20 Pam Cook, ‘Near Dark’, Monthly Film Bulletin vol. 55 no. 648, January 1988, p. 3. 21 John Powers, ‘Old Acquaintances’, L.A. Weekly 23 October 1987, p. 38. 22 Victoria Mather, ‘Near Dark’, Daily Telegraph 7 January 1988, p. 8. 23 Caryn James, ‘“Near Dark,” a Tale of Vampires on the Road’, New York Times 4 October 1987, p. 67.

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24 Henry Sheehan, ‘Wild Ride Through a Dark Night – Near Dark is a Masterful, Neurotic Work’, Reader 9 October 1987, p. 13. 25 Sue Heal, ‘Near Dark’, Today 8 January 1988, p. 25. 26 Pam Cook, Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema (London: Routledge, 2005); Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993); Deborah Jermyn and Sean Redmond (eds), The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor (London: Wallflower Press, 2003). 27 Kathryn Bigelow, quoted in Ana Maria Bahiana, ‘Kathryn Bigelow’, in Peter Keough (ed.), Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2013), p. 70. 28 Philip Brophy, ‘Horrality – The Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films’, Screen vol. 27 no. 1, January/ February 1986, p. 5. 29 Ibid., p. 3. 30 Catherine Spooner, Contemporary Gothic (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 8. 31 Sara Gwenllian Jones, ‘Vampires, Indians and the Queer Fantastic: Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark’, in Deborah Jermyn and Sean Redmond (eds), The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), p. 66. 32 Lotte Eisner, The Haunted Screen (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977), p. 47. 33 Bigelow, quoted in Victoria Humburg, ‘Dark by Design’, in Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews, p. 31. 34 Jamie Lee Curtis, quoted in Clarke Taylor, ‘Black Leather Director in a

Business World’, in Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews, p. 22; Yvonne Tasker, ‘Bigger Than Life’, Sight and Sound May 1999, p. 14. 35 Bigelow, quoted in Gavin Smith, ‘“Momentum and Design”: Interview with Kathryn Bigelow’, in Hollywood Transgressor, p. 27. 36 Bigelow, quoted in Tom Johnson, ‘James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow’, in Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews, p. 55. 37 Bigelow, quoted by Nancy Mills, ‘Blue Steel: Kathryn Bigelow in Action’, in Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews, p. 40. 38 Near Dark Storyboards, StevenCharles Jaffe Papers, Margaret Herrick Library. Samples of the storyboards can also be found on the Near Dark DVD. 39 Eric Red and Kathryn Bigelow, ‘Near Dark’ unpublished script. Available at the Margaret Herrick Library, p. 34. 40 Bigelow, quoted in Jan Miner, ‘Bigelow’s “Near Dark” Triumphs Through Acting and Cinematographer’, Back Stage 23 October 1987, p. 34. 41 Adam Greenberg, quoted in Thomas McKelvey Cleaver, ‘Adam Greenberg on The Terminator’, American Cinematographer vol. 66 no. 4, April 1985, p. 50. 42 Bigelow, quoted in ‘Living in Darkness’, Near Dark, DVD, Anchor Bay, 2002. 43 Red and Bigelow, ‘Near Dark’, p. 64. 44 James Hoberman, ‘Near Dark’, Village Voice 26 April 1988, p. 59. 45 Pam Cook, ‘Near Dark’, Monthly Film Bulletin vol. 55 no. 648, January 1988, p. 4. 46 Adam Greenberg, quoted in Miner, ‘Bigelow’s “Near Dark” Triumphs Through Acting and Cinematography’, Back Stage 23 October 1987, p. 34.

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47 Adam Greenberg, quoted in Ron Magid, ‘Terminator 2: He Said He’d Be Back’, American Cinematographer vol. 72 no. 7, July 1991, p. 47. 48 Kathryn Bigelow, audio commentary, Near Dark, DVD. 49 Robynn J. Stillwell, ‘Breaking Sound Barriers Bigelow's Soundscapes from The Loveless to Blue Steel’, in Hollywood Transgressor, p. 45. 50 Janet K. Halfyard, ‘Music of the Night: Scoring the Vampire in Contemporary Film’, in Philip Hayward (ed.), Terror Tracks: Music, Sound and Horror Cinema (London: Equinox, 2009), pp. 174–5. 51 Paul Stump, Digital Gothic: A Critical Discography of Tangerine Dream (Wembley: SAF Publishing, 1997). 52 Kathryn Bigelow, quoted in Hoban, ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’, in Peter Keough (ed.), Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2013), p. 28. 53 Bigelow, quoted in James Shelley, ‘LA is Burning. Happy New Year’, Guardian, 23 December 1995, p.15. 54 David Dubos, ‘Nerves of Steel: Filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow is Going Where No Woman Has Gone Before’, Village View 23–9 March 1990, pp. 9, 17; Neil Norman, ‘Gut-Crunching, Blood-Pumping, Fast-Forward Action Woman’, Evening Standard Magazine November 1991, pp. 128–9; Sarah Gristwood, ‘Lights, Camera, Lots of Action’, Independent on Sunday 25 February 1996, p. 22; Colleen Keane, ‘Director as “Adrenaline Junkie”’, Metro Magazine vol. 109, 1997, pp. 22–7; Joanna Schnellner ‘Action Figure’, Premiere (USA) vol. 15 no. 12, August 2002, pp. 62–5, 88; Paul Hond, ‘Shoot Shoot, Bang Bang’, Columbia Magazine Winter

2009–10. Available online: (accessed 26 July 2019). 55 Bigelow, quoted in Gristwood, ‘Lights, Camera, Lots of Action’, p. 22; Bigelow, quoted in Dubos, ‘Nerves of Steel’, p. 9. 56 Bigelow, quoted in Kenneth Turan, ‘Genre Bender’, QG October 1989, p. 162. 57 The novel Dracula also evokes the action film as the climax involves the dramatic pursuit of Dracula from London to Transylvania, across land and sea, while the presence of the American suitor and adventurer Quincy Morris is suggestive of the western. 58 Gavin Smith, ‘Don’t Let That Go – That’s Valuable: Lance Henrikson’, Film Comment vol. 29 no. 5, September 1993, p. 56. 59 She organized a similar bootcamp for the cast of K19: The Widowmaker to build her crew of the Russian submarine. 60 Yvonne Tasker, ‘Bigger Than Life’, Sight and Sound May 1999, p. 13. 61 Ibid. 62 Bigelow, Audio Commentary, Near Dark, DVD. 63 Helen Oldfield, ‘Howling Down the Highways’, The Guardian 8 January 1988, p. 41. 64 Alexander Walker, ‘Near Dark’, London Evening Standard 7 January 1988, p. 33. 65 Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 58. 66 James Cameron, quoted in Sean French, The Terminator (London: BFI Publishing, 1996), p. 39. 67 Bigelow, quoted by Gavin Smith, ‘Momentum and Design: Interview with

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Kathryn Bigelow’, in Deborah Jermyn and Sean Redmond (eds), The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), p. 25. 68 Milly Williamson, The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), p. 29. 69 Ibid., p. 43. 70 Alain Silver, Elizabeth Ward, James Ursini and Robert Porfirio, ‘Introduction: The Classic Period’, in Alain Silver, Elizabeth Ward, James Ursini and Robert Porfirio (eds), Film Noir: The Encyclopedia (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2010), p. 21. 71 Christine Lane, Feminist Hollywood: From Born in Flames to Point Break (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2000), p. 111. 72 Bram Dykstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 334. 73 Thank you to Janet K. Halfyard for helping me describe this musical phrase. 74 Williamson, The Lure of the Vampire, p. 40. 75 For further discussion of the sympathetic vampire see Stacey Abbott, ‘Taking Back the Night: Dracula’s Daughter in New York’, in Leon Hunt, Sharon Lockyer and Milly Williamson (eds), Screening the Undead: Vampires and Zombies in Film and Television (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), pp. 38–53; Stacey Abbott, Undead Apocalypse: Vampires and Zombies in the 21st Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016); Milly Williamson, ‘Let Them All In: The Evolution of the “Sympathetic” Vampire’, in Screening the Undead, pp. 71–92.

76 Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire (London: Futura, [1976] 1992), pp. 24–5. 77 Eric Red and Katherine Bigelow, ‘Near Dark’, unpublished script, p. 34. 78 Special Feature, Near Dark, DVD. 79 Aspasia Stephanou, Reading Vampire Gothic Through Blood: Bloodlines (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 35. 80 Nicola Nixon, ‘When Hollywood Sucks, or, Hungry Girls, Lost Boys, and Vampirism in the Age of Reagan’, in Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger (eds), Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 125–6. 81 Christopher Sharrett, ‘The Horror Film in Neoconservative Culture’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1996), p. 261. 82 Laura Mulvey, ‘Notes on Sirk and Melodrama’, in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home is Where the Heart is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: BFI Publishing, 1987), p. 76. 83 Janet K. Halfyard, ‘Music of the Night: Scoring the Vampire in Contemporary Film’, in Philip Hayward (ed.), Terror Tracks: Music, Sound and Horror Cinema (London: Equinox, 2009), p. 175. 84 Pam Cook, ‘Near Dark’, Monthly Film Bulletin vol. 55, no. 648, January 1988, p. 4. 85 Douglas Sirk, quoted in Kathryn Bigelow, Matthias Brunner, and Monty Montgomery, ‘A Visit with the Master of Melodrama: Douglas Sirk’, in Peter Keough (ed.), Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews (Jackson, MI: University of Mississippi Press, 2013), p. 14.

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Credits Near Dark USA/1987 Directed by Kathryn Bigelow Produced by Steven-Charles Jaffe Executive Producers Edward S. Feldman Charles R. Meeker Co-Producer Eric Red Written by Eric Red Kathryn Bigelow Director of Photography Adam Greenberg Film Editor Howard Smith Music by Tangerine Dream © 1987 The Near Dark Joint Venture F/M Entertainment Presents a Feldman/ Meeker Production Associate Producer Diane Nabatoff Associate Producer/ Production Manager Mark Allan Special Effects Makeup Gordon Smith Casting Karen Rea, C.S.A. Costume Designer Joseph Porro

Production Designer Stephen Altman Stunts Mickey Alzola Everett Creach Bob Ivy Mike Johnson Steven Leeds Mike McGaughy Stevie Myers Lee Poppie Mike Raden Kristen Suzanne Jim Wilkey Jerry Wills William L. Yarbrough, Jr. Stunt Coordinator Everett Creach First Assistant Director Guy Louthan Second Assistant Director John J.C. Scherer Third Assistant Director Chuck Williams Art Director Dian Perryman First Assistant Camera Vance Piper Second Assistant Camera Alicia Craft Sound Mixer Donald Summer Boom Operator Steve Sollars Script Supervisor Connie Papineau Property Master Gregory Wolf

Assistant Property Master Jeffrey Zeitlin Makeup Artist Davida Simon Special Effects Makeup Assistant Derek Howard Hairstylist Daniel Marc Hairdresser Linda Nottestad Wardrobe Supervisor Leslie Weir Wardrobe Assistant Michael P. Tereschuk Lighting Gaffer Jono Kouzouyan Best Boy Electrician Jack Yanekian Electricians John Peirce Ben Feldman George Palmer Key Grip Bob Gray Best Boy Grip Scott Howell Grips Hugh McCallum Richard Crompton Khan Griffith Set Dressers John Bucklin James Monroe Findlay Bunting Brett Palmer Jennifer Pray Scenic Artists Eileen Winterkorn Jay Burkhart

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Scenic Designer Tom Wilkins Storyboard Artist Alan Munro Transportation Coordinator Fred Robbins Transportation Captain Jeri Kelley Special Effects Coordinators Steve Galich Dale Martin Special Effects Assistants Ray Beetz Al Broussard Joseph Sasgen Production Coordinator Karen Altman Morgenstern Production Accountants Zeiderman, Oberman & Associates, Inc. Auditor Kim Deen Assistant Auditor Lisa Etherington Production Secretary Sarah Irving Assistant to the Producer/Second Unit Assistant Director Ian McVey Second Unit Director of Photography/Operator Chuck Colwell First Assistant Camera Derek Scott Arizona Unit Unit Manager Joe Dishner Production Secretary Laura McGillicuddy

Locations Assistant Blake Hocevar Electrician/Grip David S. Mayne Grip Andrew Dunham Continuity Constance Hoy Post Production Supervisor Brent Sellstrom Music Editor Jim Weidman First Assistant Editor Grace Valenti Second Assistant Editor Mary Ann Skweres Sound Re-Recording Ryder Sound Services, Inc. Sound Director Leo Chaloukian Re-Recording Mixers John ‘Doc’ Wilkinson Richard Rogers Grover Helsley Sound Designer David Lewis Yewdall, M.P.S.E. Supervising Sound Editor R. J. Palmer Sound FX/Foley F. Hudson Miller Kelly Tartan Ted Goodspeed Holly Davis Dialog/ADR Steve Rice Assistants Karla Knorr Patrick M. Bietz Apprentice Bob Behr

Foley Artists Joan Rowe Jerry Trent Sound Engineer Jonathan D. Evans Location Managers George Herthel Wallace Uchida Still Photographers Gary Farr Ron Phillips Publicist Carol Janson Researcher Jenny Mead Casting Associate Glenn F. Haines Extra Casting Complete Casting Service, Inc. Location Casting Bobby Ball Talent Center Construction Cinnabar Tom Fields Steve Doolittle Horse Wrangler Steve Myers Dog Wrangler Gary Gero Production Assistants Thomas Schellenberg Mark Silver Scott Williams Darrell Mirkin Craft Service Julie Overskei First Aid Henry Humphreys Arriflex® Camera and Lenses Otto Nemenz International

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Grip and Electrical Hollywood Rental Company, Inc. Titles and Opticals Pacific Title Fire Opticals Fantasy II Body Smoking Effect Image Engineering Time Lapse Footage MacGillivray – Freeman Films Energy Productions Film Processing C.F.I. Negative Cutting Vivian Hengstelar Sally Dodge Color Timer Art Tostado Release Prints by Technicolor ® Songs ‘Naughty, Naughty’ Performed and written by John Parr Courtesy of Atlantic Recording Corp. By arrangement with Warner Special Products Polygram International Music B.V. ‘Morse Code’ Performed by Jools Holland Written by D. Woody and P. Simmons Courtesy of I.R.S. Records ‘Fever’ Performed by The Cramps Written by John Davenport and Eddie Cooley Courtesy of I.R.S. Records ‘The Cowboy Rides Away’

Performed by George Strait Written by Sonny Throckmorten and Casey Kelly Courtesy of MCA Records Special Thanks Bill Kirkpatrick – Arizona Film Commission City of Coolidge, Arizona Ford Motor Company Mary Knell Clark – Oklahoma Film Commission Mike England Knives CAST Adrian Pasdar Caleb Colton Jenny Wright Mae Lance Henrikson Jesse Hooker Bill Paxton Severen Jenette Goldstein Diamondback Tim Thomerson Loy Colton Joshua Miller Homer Marcie Leeds Sarah Colton Kenny Call Deputy Sheriff Ed Corbett Ticket Seller Troy Evans Plainclothes Officer Bill Cross Sheriff Eakers Roger Aaron Brown Cajun Truck Driver Thomas Wagner Bartender

Robert Winley Patron in Bar James LeGros Teenage Cowboy Jan King Waitress Danny Kopel Biker in Bar Billy Beck Motel Manager S. A. Griffin Police Officer at Motel Bob Terhune State Trooper William T. Lane State Trooper Garry Littlejohn State Trooper Paul Michael Lane State Trooper Eddie Mulder State Trooper Don Pugsley Second Truck Driver Neith Hunter Lady in truck Theresa Randle Lady in truck Tony Pierce Highway Youth Gordon Haight Highway Youth Leo Geter Caleb’s friend Gary Wayne Cunningham Caleb’s friend Release details: US theatrical release on 2 October 1987. MPAA Rating R. UK theatrical release on 8 January 1988. BBFC Certificate 18 (no cuts). Running time: 94 minutes

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Image Credits Near Dark (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987), Near Dark Joint Venture/F/M Entertainment Martin (George A. Romero, 1977), Braddock Associates/Laurel Entertainment Aliens (James Cameron, 1986), © Twentieth Century Fox Productions Ltd. The Hitcher (Robert Harmon, 1986), HBO Pictures/Silver Screen Partners/TriStar Pictures The Lost Boys (Joel Schumacher, 1987), Warner Bros. Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), © Paramount Pictures Inc. Fright Night (Tom Holland, 1985), Vistar Films/Columbia Pictures Corporation/Delphi IV Productions Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013), © Wrongway Inc./ Recorded Picture Company Ltd/Pandora Film/Le Pacte/ Sanderfin Ltd.

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