The night has its price: a retrospective on Near Dark

During the second half of that decade of extravagant excesses that was the 1980s, the vampire film genre was riding a high wave. Cult classic Fright Night, released in 1985, singlehandedly revived interest in all things featuring the creatures of the night. The Lost Boys would premiere in the summer of 87, also to great public acclaim. And a short few months later, a low-budget movie from a then unknown director appeared in theaters with very little fanfare and confusing marketing, but with a rather intriguing and apt title: Near Dark.

At its core, Near Dark is part western, part horror, part road movie. The film takes the viewer on a nightmarish and gritty journey alongside a bunch of vampires who move from one American backwater town to another in a rusty Winnebego, wreaking havoc wherever they go.

Near Dark features half the cast from Aliens, released only a year earlier. Here we have Jesse Hooker (Lance Henriksen, Bishop the android -or, as he'd rather be referred to, artificial person- in James Cameron's masterpiece), a haggard and weary alpha vampire who's been on Earth probably longer than he'd have wanted. Hooker's lover is Diamondback (Jenette Goldstein, Vasquez, the badass female Colonial Marine), and we also have psychopathic, loose cannon Severen (the late Bill Paxton, who played Hudson), a wise-cracking, spurs-wearing savage adept at toying with his victims before moving in for the inevitable kill. Completing this clan is Homer (Joshua John Miller). Turned as a child, he claims to be an adult forever trapped in the body of a 12-year-old.

And among these twisted beings, we have Mae, deliciously played by a young Jenny Wright. She, too, is a vampire, and she's lonely in her endless wandering. When she meets Caleb (Adrian Pasdar), a handsome, all-American boy sporting cowboy attire and a somewhat misguided innocence, Mae finds her desired companion. However, Mae's ruthless, streetwise, and bloodthirsty partners in crime are not so sure Caleb belongs among them.

Mae is a consummate, if reluctant, killer. She kills by necessity because she needs to feed, period. Yet, she can't get used to her eternal existence. Caleb simply does not have a killer streak in him, and largely depends on Mae to sustain him. This is not tolerated by Mae's brutal and scavenging family, whose members kill humans without a second thought, both for sustenance and pleasure.

A central point of the plot is the relationship between Mae and Caleb. She turns him after he sulkily refuses to take her home unless she kisses him. She does, in that very special way that vampires kiss. She lets him go, but come morning, she and her family are forced to rescue Caleb when his body begins to burn in the daylight. What follows is a descent into a dark and violent world, one that Caleb is utterly foreign to and cannot adapt to. The rest treat him as an outsider from the start, and only when Caleb proves himself worthy by saving his companions from certain death do the others begin to trust -but not quite accept- him.

Themes central to Near Dark are family and loyalty. Together, Jesse, Diamondback, Severen, Homer, and Mae form a motley group of misfits condemned to walk upon the earth for all eternity. They kill because they can -and must- and fiercely fight to survive. And they remain loyal to one another as a strange family unit because they have to. In a way, they are lost in a world to which they no longer belong, and are ultimately consumed by their own grim fate.

Near Dark, directed early in her career by the always interesting Kathryn Bigelow (Point Blank, The Hurt Locker, and Zero Dark Thirty are among her credits), flopped hard at the box office at the time of its release, not even making back its measly $5m production budget. The film chiefly failed due to a lacklustre and somewhat confusing marketing campaign -or lack thereof-, rather than failing on its own merits. However, a string of positive reviews, essays, word-of-mouth, and detailed studies about the lasting influence of its iconography rightly turned Near Dark into the well-deserved cult classic that it is today.