Women's Pictures: Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark
Thursday, October 1, 2015 at 2:30PM 
Welcome, guys and ghouls, to our special October edition of Anne Marie's "Women's Pictures!"
This month, rather than focusing on 5 films by 1 female director, we will be watching 5 films by 5 female directors with 1 thing in common: horror. Because what's the one thing scarier than working in a boy's club industry? I reached out on social media to ask the internet what it wanted to see, and got an overwhelming response for these five films. Going chronologically, the first film on our list is a vampire flick by beloved Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow.
In true 80s Bigelow fashion, Near Dark is a grim action thriller; part Western, part gang movie, part family drama, with enough explosions and gruesome special effects that you might miss the moralistic AIDS allegory underneath. Whenever the mainstream heaps praise on Kathryn Bigelow, their focus is usually on the fact that Bigelow does not work in "women's genres," which is to say films with "feminine" themes or plot lines. However, beneath the edgy synth soundtrack, the sex, violence, and hair gel, Near Dark is a surprisingly conservative film about the redemptive power of family. More...
After a one night stand with a mysterious blonde, carefree farmboy Caleb Colton (Adrian Pasdar) gets a love bite that bleeds. He quickly turns wan and starts to sweat, and as the sun rises, he starts to burn as well. Caleb is within sight of his family farm when he's abducted by a blacked out RV.
As it turns out, the RV is driven by a group of light-averse, hemoglobin-deficient murderers who feed on blood - Severen (Bill Paxton), Jesse (Lance Hendriksen), Diamondback (Jenette Goldstein), Homer (Joshua Miller), and the blonde mystery girl, Mae (Jenny Wright). (Three of those actors previously starred in Bigelow's then-husband's action-horror film Aliens.) Caleb is begrudgingly accepted into their gang if only to preserve their secret. And though he learns how to cope with the infection Mae passed to him, Caleb cannot cross the moral line that the others gleefully run over: he cannot kill. Instead, Caleb feeds from his girlfriend in a number of suggestive scenes that underline the whole "vampirism as metaphor for sex" concept for those who may have missed it previously.
This is Caleb's Type O face.
Despite how it looks, Near Dark is more action movie than horror. Though Caleb's new family finds some creative ways to murder - highlights include taking over a biker bar to kill the patrons one by one, and a Western-style midday shootout with the cops - Bigelow choreographs these scenes with the blunt, clear-eyed camera of her other action films. Rather than building suspense, she builds tempo, as each gruesome set piece one-ups the scene before it. Bigelow takes advantage of her villains' immortality to unleash a series of ever-mounting gruesome injuries upon them - they spit out bullets, take shotgun blasts to the chest, get blown up, run over, and burned up to spectacular effect. The third act is a pre dawn showdown, Western-style, with Caleb on horseback causing the explosion of a vampire, a gas tanker, and a car-full of villains. Bigelow isn't interested in scaring her audience so much as overwhelming them.
By the way, if any of these plot points sounds familiar, they should. The 80s saw an explosion of vampire flicks between Near Dark, Fright Night, a Nosferatu remake, and The Lost Boys, which came out the same year as Near Dark. But whereas The Lost Boys portrays vampirism as a world of hedonism and violent glamour, the "infected" (nobody says "vampire") in Near Dark are anything but glamorous. Dressed in ratty clothes, hot wiring cars and hopping on trains, the infected are unclean both physically and metaphorically, pushed to the edges of society because they are ill. Their infection would also look familiar to an 80s audience: sexually transmitted (or transmitted through blood), causing physical transformations including emaciation and paleness, nausea and isolation. A scientifically baffling deus ex machina allows Caleb's father to cure Caleb through a simple blood transfusion. It's wishful thinking from an AIDS allegory standpoint, but the movie's moral is clear: do not stray into unfamiliar territory. Family, not fleeting fun, is the root of health.
This month on Women's Pictures: Celebrate Halloween with 5 Women Directors!
10/8 Ravenous (1999) - Director Antonia Bird worked in many different genres and mediums before directing this period piece thriller about cannibalism during the Mexican-American War. (Amazon) (Netflix)
10/15 American Psycho (2000) - Is it satire? Is it fantasy? Is it horror? Mary Harron's film about a psychopathic investment banker has been called many things, including a new classic. (Amazon) (Netflix)
10/22 A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014) - For those who think vampires are passe, Ana Lily Amirpour's stylish film moves the vampire myth to Iran to become "The First Iranian Vampire Western." (Amazon) (Netflix)
10/29 The Babadook (2014) - If it's in a word, or in a look, you can't escape from first-time feature director Jennifer Kent's The Babadook. (Amazon) (Netflix)
Reader Comments (5)
Bill Paxton is the coolest thing in that film.
oh my god "TYPE O FACE" YOU NEED TO STOPPPPPPP
I have never bothered to watch this before, but I think I may have to give this a watch.
Thanks Anne Marie!
Now if I'd seen the AIDS allegory before, it probably wouldn't have taken me 12 years to understand what Homer meant with: "And I'm Homer. That's H-o-m-e-r. Mispronounce it and I wouldn't wanna be you."
I also wonder how much of Kathryn Bigelow's career relies on the iconic bar scene from this film. A lot, I suppose.
A sexy scary vampire thriller