Near Dark seems to be a straight out serial killer—vampire allegory inflected by the Western. Bill Paxton, luxuriating in his role as Severin, the most outré member of the film’s not blood-related yet blood-related “family,” performs the serial artistry of murder-for-murder’s sake. His razor-sharp spurs, delight in getting shot, and caricature of the smooth Cowboy prowling for girls, provides the enjoyment of sexualised violence required by (vampire) flicks. When Caleb Colton (Adrian Pasdar, that jerk who can fly in Heroes) is seduced into the brood by Mae (Jenny Wright), he fights the urge to give into his infected instincts to kill and feed on humans: Stockholm Syndrome as auto-immune disease. However, he is happy to suck wrist with Mae, whose use here, as well as her muted speech, sandy hair, and vehicular drift delimited by men, recalls Barbara Loden’s amazing 1971 wander through Pennsylvania, Wanda. Like Loden’s lead, Mae doesn’t say much – she’s too busy “listening to the night.” And instead of the synthscape of Tangerine Dream's score, the night apparently sounds like a murmurous cinema crowd. (And it wasn’t the real crowd, who were rather reverential and clapped at the end of the film. Note: a sample size of two indicates applause will occur 100% of the time during the Sydney Film Festival.)
The film is superficially notable for reteaming Aliens cast Paxton, Lance Henrikson, and Jenette Goldstein. Near Dark was the next film for all three. Bishop now leads the team, Vasquez has gotten a sweet white bouffant, and Hudson is still a dickhead. Their stalking enemy is no longer the evolutionary perfection that is Alien, but the eternal return of the same, that goddamn Dawn. In a cute reversal of a fire blanket’s usual function, the vampires wrap themselves in bedding to block out the sun if they find themselves out in the day, which they do a lot (mainly the new guy’s fault). But, after exposure, their bodies soon begin smoking, catch fire, and explode. The Cancer Council should use this footage in a campaign against sunbeds.
But Near Dark’s major reason for rescreening, and probably why it was the first film shown in the Sydney Film Festival’s Vampire retrospective, is that it was directed by Kathryn Bigelow, she of the Oscar-winning divorcee melodrama The Hurt Locker. Her male lead in this event was James Cameron, from whom she borrows the Aliens cast and thanks with a “A L I E N S Now Playing” ad in the background of one shot.
Anything doing in Bigelow’s first solo feature? Well, there’s the hillbilly western element. While American vampires tend to spend most of their time drawing on and adding to the Southern Gothic archive, these vampires roam through Oklahoma; Waco is verbally marked as the furthest point in “the wrong direction.” Shot mainly in Arizona, the film would seem to traverse the Texan and Oklahoman panhandles. Are the vampires a band of outsiders, wreaking their unholy family on the conservative future wind-farmers? Jesse said he fought for the South. “We lost,” he elaborates. OK, so are they endemic, a disease of the blood in a closed population? That a blood transfusion provided by Caleb’s veterinarian father cures him of his “sickness,” indicates that we might lean toward the latter.
Might there be something interesting in the image? No doubt, there are beautiful, striking shots: the camera tracks the shadow of a stricken Caleb, tracing his Golem - doppelganger as mise-en-scene; telephoto gazes on moon and sun rapidly passing behind clouds provide diegetic wipes that signal the strict diurnal structure of their life; and, many a mauve and peach sky meets a faraway horizon, driving a pyramid of depth into the image. We can say there’s Bigelow’s obvious gifts for arranging space and shooting action with a strong, geometrical logic, u.s.w. - especially the shootout in the motel room, where bullet holes are more deadly than bullets, beams of light piercing the dark interior - but we needn’t, because, unlike the unfortunate Ms Loden who directed but a single, astounding film, Ms Bigelow could get better over her next seven.
Screen memories: montage of pounding, insistent oil drill as Caleb feeds on Mae’s wrist; close-up of charred hands on fire gripping a steering wheel; Caleb’s smoking body wending through a ploughed field.
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