NEAR DARK 

Watching Near Dark again after a decade long absence made me think of two other movies, very different from each other.

The first was The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which also involves a family of killers in a Deep Red State (shit, is that another pun?) who let an innocent bystander into their nest. 

The other was Twilight, the rightfully maligned pre-teen fantasy of non-threatening vampires who only want to snuggle above the sheets with the right virtuous girl.

I couldn’t help thinking Near Dark should have come out after Twilight. It reminded me of Woody Guthrie (bear with me now) and how he was completely unimpressed by Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America”. “This Land is Your Land” was Guthrie’s dig at Berlin’s forced patriotism. And so it feels NEAR DARK is a stinging retort to Twilight’s anemic bloodsuckers, their mythology, and its (now-faded) popularity.

The villains of Near Dark — like those in Chain Saw Massacre — are filthy degenerates. They’re one step above animals (or below, depending on how kind you are to animals). They murder with a blunt pleasure, roaming from town-to-town in a never-ending nomadic journey to nowhere. There are no ultra-modern manors, no human pals to wax philosophy with, no assets of any kind — save for a trunk full of tin-foil and duct tape to keep the sunlight out. Like Robert DeNiro’s character in Heat, whatever you can’t throw into a stolen car in two-minutes is unneeded excess. 

Other than Homer (the old man stuck forever in a 11-year old’s body), they have no time for self-reflection. Imminent survival is always six-inches in front of their faces.

In this, Kathryn Bigelow paints us a nasty, nihilistic view of the Undead. Sure, immortality has its romantic notions: Mae often pontificates starlight and the beauty of the night but Mae’s also young in comparison to the others. The toll on her surrogate family seems to be a life of apathy, sadism, and disparate loneliness (it’s telling that Lance Henrickson’s character, the father, keeps converting others to ride with him; they, in turn, bite more so they have their own soulmate to connect to).

At any rate, if I had to choose what the sun would do to me, I’d have to paraphrase Neil Young: I’d rather go up in an explosive fireball than sparkle like a Tolkien Faery Queen. Even I have some dignity