Near Dark (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987)
Cast: Adrian Pasdar, Jenny Wright, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, Jenette Goldstein, Tim Thomerson, Joshua John Miller, Marcie Leeds. Screenplay: Kathryn Bigelow, Eric Red. Cinematography: Adam Greenberg. Production design: Stephen Altman. Film editing: Howard E. Smith. Music: Tangerine Dream.
I didn't think I ever wanted to see another vampire movie. And after No Country for Old Men (Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, 2007) and Hell or High Water (David Mackenzie, 2016), I was feeling a little burned out on the neo-Western genre. So a film like Near Dark that combines both was a little out of my range of immediate interests. But Kathryn Bigelow's name drew me in, and it was also a chance to see a performance I had missed by one of my favorite actors, the late and very lamented Bill Paxton. I wasn't disappointed. Bigelow has a way of making even the most generic subjects interesting. She's a little like Hitchcock in her ability to keep you on edge and to create characters that make you root against your own interests. Her vampires are objectively a vicious, grungy lot, and yet you almost root for them when they're under siege, in danger of being forced into the lethal sunlight, just as you somehow sympathetically root for Hitchcock's villains like Norman Bates to get away with it. It's also a well-cast movie, with a young and very pretty Adrian Pasdar as the imperiled mortal, and Paxton doing his showboating best as the most flamboyant vampire. This was in a period when Bigelow was involved with James Cameron, so Paxton, Lance Henriksen, and Jenette Goldstein came over from the cast of his Aliens, released a year earlier and given a plug on a theater marquee in the background of one shot.