A quick glance at the message boards on the Internet Movie Database shows people instinctively comparing it to From Dusk Till Dawn. The connection isn’t as crude as it sounds. While vampire movies have a damn prestigious linage, from Murnau to Dreyer to Bela Lugosi, both Near Dark and From Dusk Till Dawn announce themselves as exploitation pictures, as B-movies. And as B-movies, both filmmakers have decided that they are going to make them much better than they really need to be. They do it in utterly different ways of course.

From Dusk Till Dawn is brutal, but it’s over-the-top and played for laughs. While the filmmakers aren’t really condescending to their material, they are making a cartoon. Everything is taken to the nth degree; we are getting a roller coaster ride. Near Dark isn’t a cartoon. Oh, it’s not totally heavy and portentous, of course, but they aren’t interested in being witty. On the Reservoir Dogs Special Edition DVD, Quentin Tarantino quotes Pauline Kael’s review of Band of Outsiders from Kiss Kiss Bang Bang where she says something along the lines of, “It’s as if a bunch of crazy French men are in a café reading this banal American crime novel and are making a movie out of it. Not from the text, but from the poetry that they have read between the lines.” Tarantino says that that is his aesthetic, that is what he is all about. Well, that is actually a better explanation of Near Dark director Kathryn Bigelow’s aesthetic, at least as far as vampire pictures go. Tarantino never got to the soul of the horror film. There has never been anything really poetic or romantic about his work. (An icon is still an icon in his films, and works like an icon and is respected as an icon, but the icon is not the end point.) He doesn’t value violence for its philosophical qualities; to him, it’s all purely about effect. Tarantino’s films are overwrought comedies of gore, and because he combines humor with violence he has been accused of celebrating it and being immoral and nihilistic. I don’t sense this; I think he’s funny because he likes people and is essentially a humanist at heart. He really likes his characters.

Charges of immorality and nihilism are more apt in describing Near Dark, which is positioned as stark and dreamy. The picture is the product of a mindset that holds up the vampire movie as something truthful and honest, as the cornerstone of their religion, and thus truly does find the poetry between the lines. With respect to From Dusk Till Dawn, however, that film better fulfills the goal that Kathryn Bigelow set for herself. In 1987, while trying to come up with her first solo project, Bigelow initially wanted to make a Western. As Westerns were out of style at the time, but vampire movies were very much en vogue, she opted to make a “vampire Western." I guess by Western, she meant that it takes place in the West, and people wear black dusters and cowboy hats and carry guns.

From Dusk Till Dawn was a real horror-western. Both Tarantino and Rodriguez went on to do their own versions of the spaghetti Western (for Rodriguez, Once Upon a Time in Mexico (one of a series, I know) and Kill Bill: Vol. 2 for Tarantino), and neither were as good as From Dusk Till Dawn. From Dusk Till Dawn was a collaboration between Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, and they complemented each other's weaknesses with their strengths. Tarantino is a much better screenwriter than Rodriguez, taking care of the basics like character, structure and dialogue. Rodriguez actually is more enthusiastic about showing off, and he is a real Tex-Mex; he puts in all the stylistic elements, all the stuff that you can’t really put in words, into the spaghetti Western format. The Western and the vampire horror film are joined easily together as both are abstract, cinematic formats. The genres each invite success and support broad, over-the-top characterizations and storytelling. The George Clooney character of From Dusk Till Dawn, Seth Gecko, was another one of those hypermasculine icons. At the end of the picture he rejects the teenaged Juliette Lewis to go to El Ray himself. He can’t be tied down by the women, by domesticity. He’s a wanderer.

This… isn’t… really… how Near Dark plays out. I think that the picture is really more of a joining of film noir and vampire movies than anything else. (I can’t help but reflect that Bigelow was interviewed for the PBS documentary series American Cinema when they did their segment on film noir.) Much has been made about the fact that the word “vampire” is never uttered at any point during the film. Unusual for a vampire movie, says the IMDB’s trivia section. Even more unique, I think, is that the film is absent of any vampire slayers. This is significant in that it makes vampirism almost rather normal. The film’s sympathies are with the vampires. This is their movie, not the slayers. And by using the word vampire, previous vampire films were able to successfully label the vampire as “other." The thinking behind this could be argued to mean that we are to sympathize and identify with the vampires as fellow outsiders. It’s a rather obvious and broad reading, but it’s certainly significant enough to warrant mentioning. But the absence of slayers and titled vampires also gives the film’s characters a real moral ambiguity. When every major character is a vampire, you have some room for shading. If everybody in the movie is a monster, you have to liberalize your definition of the term.

Near Dark has a film noir plot. Here's a summary. The protagonist is the teenaged or recently teenaged Caleb Cotton (Adrian Pasdar), who while cruising the town looking for something to ease his boredom, spots himself a cutie licking an ice cream cone (Jenny Wright) and makes with the moves on her. Her name is Mae. Caleb takes her to his ranch and tries to get her to visit his horse, but the horse seems to be throwing a fit. She doesn't get along too well with horses, she explains. Suddenly, she realizes that it's close to dawn and she needs to get home. He agrees to drive her, but somewhere along the line he parks the car and tells her that he won't go any further until she gives him a kiss. She seems to hesitate before obliging, biting him on the neck. She runs out of the car, and Caleb chases after her. It’s dawn now, and he begins smoking (?!). A Winnebago speeds down the road and picks him up. It’s filled with what look like vampires: the crazy Severen (a well-typecast Bill Paxton), the “big guy in a little guy’s body” Homer (creepy Joshua John Miller), the grizzled ringleader Jesse (a well-typecast Lance Henrickson), and his butch lover Diamondback (a well-typecast Jenette Goldstein). They want to kill him, but Mae tells them that she bit him but didn’t bleed him. He’ll be changing any second. Not wanting to carry around dead weight, they decide that Caleb has to make a kill or they are going to “kill him without killing him." Caleb has to try and play along without killing anybody, and find a way to finally get home.

I’m actually not the expert on noir, I’m afraid. I went through the phase in high school, but I think my disappointment in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat killed it off for me (as it killed off my interest in Fritz Lang as well). To the best of my knowledge this exact plot, where an innocent is drawn into a gang by a sexy woman and has to play along before he can escape, hasn’t been used by the classics. Generally, the woman fools the man or manipulates him into doing evil. She’s doesn’t belong to a gang and want her lover to join her; she is more of a deceitful, antagonistic presence. But still, we have this idea of a woman being the wellspring of original sin, as being the doorman to Hell. Satan’s little pusher. The idea is that the man is weak and passive, and unable to deal with the kind of sexuality that the woman exudes. He finds it positively overwhelming. The fascinating thing about this femme fatale icon is that she isn’t defined as virgin, whore, mother or even crone (which I think would imply she is asexual). She isn’t defined by men at all; she wants what everybody else in the world wants: power, money, success, et cetera. She's in it for herself; she’s just as evil as everybody else. And that she is a woman gives her a distinct advantage over everybody else.

Caleb does manage to get home, but the gang of vampires follows him and threatens to kill off his family. This development is film noir convention also; it’s in the 1947 film Kiss of Death. In the film, Victor Mature is a jewel thief who rats on his peers in order to get an early parole as his depressed wife had just killed herself and he wants to take care of his kids. The giggly and sadistic Richard Widmark (arguably the inspiration for Bill Paxton here) comes after him. His guilt is coming for him and seeking attrition (not for stealing jewels but for killing his wife). Noir is about sin, and you can’t have sin without evil and guilt. The films are all about trying to come to terms with the fact that we are all monsters. Making a vampire noir is hardly a radical idea or one doomed to failure. The two genres fit together very nicely; noir proves to be just one good direction that Bigelow can go. By making it a vampire noir, the sex, the guilt, et cetera is just made even more abstract and cinematic.

There a weak element in the Near Dark that really kind of derails it. The script is frankly terrible. The score by Tangerine Dream is typical '80s era synthesizer-esque rumbling a la Vangelis, Wendy Carlos or Vivian Kubrick. It's a genre that I like, but it's not near the top of the heap as far as these things go. And I think it is rather overused, and ends up condescending to us a little too much. Yeah, but generally the key problem with Near Dark is the awful script. To say that that is my only problem with the film would be trivializing the situation. Bigelow sees her script as little more but a clothesline to hang her admittedly stunning set pieces and icy, pulpy visual style, as well as to worship the excellent work of her cast. It’s not that I’m against style over substance; the little substance in the mostly stylish From Dusk Till Dawn made it far better than it had any right to be. But it doesn’t work with film noir; at some level we need to be dealing with human beings. Film noir lives and dies by the strength of the script, namely well-drawn characters and a strong narrative. The genre is, by design, about morality and thus social interaction. If this really were a horror Western, I believe, Bigelow would be able to just gleam the surface.

I dislike the structure of the film. I dislike the Wizard of Oz morality, where Caleb realizes that his town isn’t boring after all and there is really no place like home. I dislike that no attempt was taken to subvert this. I dislike that the movie ends with an oil tanker exploding. It reminds me of that scene in Ed Wood where Ed Wood is trying to get financial backing for Bride of the Monster, and his only source is the meat baron Old Man McCoy who will give him the money only if the picture ends with “a big explosion. Sky full of smoke.” It feels like Bigelow is catering to her financers, who are catering to the exploitation crowd. It doesn’t fit the movie. I also dislike how the film solves the problem of Caleb’s vampirism. The answer is so infuriating, so fucking idiotic, that I wanted to throw my shoe at the screen. What’s more, if you blink, you may miss how the problem is solved. It goes so fast that it loses very much significance. Some people have missed it, but you cure vampirism by getting fresh blood through a blood transfusion, which Caleb’s father performs with him in their barn. Disregarding the plausibility of this, they made vampirism into a curable disease instead of a moral position or even something that has just lay dormant in him for years. Why do we have to have a vampire virus?! How does this lead to a better movie? The blood transfusion cements the film’s final act as a Wizard of Oz morality tale, with Dad’s blood replacing the blood that Caleb dirtied up with his sexual misadventures with Mae.

Speaking of which, I don’t like that Mae is portrayed as a soft innocent. That she falls in love with Caleb. In the scene where she turns him, Caleb is probably just being playful, but the scene is bordering a little bit on date rape and he starts off as being a bit of a cretin in our eyes. If Mae was cruel to him, we would still sympathize with him enough for the film to be fairly horrific. But he’s not sympathetic enough for Mae to fall in love with him, and for them to live happy ever after. It’s so blah; their relationship is totally inorganic. They seem to fall in love because the screenplay says so. I mean, I can understand that he is just horny and she’s attractive, but why does she like him? I think it’s obvious throughout the film that she is pretty enough and comfortable enough with herself to basically get any guy she wants. Caleb is not; he clearly has something to prove. Mae gets some really smelly dialogue about how it takes millions of years for the light of the stars to reach the earth, and she is still going to be here when it comes. She’s talking about it sucks being a teenager in a small town, but she’s also talking about how it sucks being a vampire! Soak in the subtext! Speaking of which, I hate that fucking scene where an undercover cop checks over the blood-starved Caleb because he thinks he’s a drug addict needing his fix. That scene did not need to be there; leave the drug stuff in subtext land. Oh, and I disliked how fast the sun comes up. I disliked the contrivances of the picture, like when young Homer spots a little girl at the soda machines at the hotel his gang is staying at and she just happens to be Caleb’s sister! Dad and sis are staying in that very hotel searching for Caleb. Imagine!

Not enough is done with Homer. You have to realize that Anne Rice was still hot shit back in 1987, and it’s more than plausible that the idea of the vampires in leather jackets and the conception of Homer were inspired by her Vampire Chronicles. Joshua John Miller was coming fresh off of the great River’s Edge (Bigelow also brought over editor Adam Greenberg). Apparently, he had pretty liberally-minded parents. The film exploits a few of the creepier elements of having a (what, 12-year-old?) boy prey on truck drivers, dance to the carnage of a hick bar massacre and have a sexual appetite. Before Mae picked up Caleb, there was a suggestion that Homer turned her in order to have a sexual partner. He’s jealous of Caleb then. When he sees Caleb’s sister, we see him set his sights on turning her. Creepy. Anything beyond that, you would think would be beyond the range of most child actors, as they would have to play well beyond their natural age range. And hopefully, they aren't seasoned veterans at this stage. Well, in the film version of Interview with a Vampire Kirsten Dunst was able to nail Homer's prototype. But Miller seems to be well over his head, unable to produce any kind of effect but one of pure novelty. The scenes where he is drooling over Caleb’s sister quickly become just hilariously tasteless. It’s a pretty good idea, but Miller can’t quite go in for the kill, so to speak. I don't want to blame him too much though; like I said, it's a damn hard part. I want to blame the screenwriters, who don't seem to have very much interest in this sort of part beyond that of pure novelty.

The other three gang members have far fewer soft spots, and so their superficiality doesn’t grate as much. Paxton’s Severen is the hardest. He’s a ball of energy, uninhibited by moral compass or doubt. He seems to be at the stage of his life as a vampire that he realizes he doesn’t need to answer to anybody and there are no consequences for his actions. Jesse and Diamondback are older and more weathered. There is a good scene where they are stopped by two bandits who order them to hand over their wallets. One of them starts rubbing the barrel of his gun between Diamondback’s breasts, telling Jesse how much he is going to enjoy raping her. Jesse just smiles, totally Zen cool, while Diamondback gyrates in pleasure, apparently to show that she will enjoy being raped, but probably because she is going to enjoy biting back. But these two are old; they’re past the stage of Severen and they seem to know how to behave as vampires. They’re not free vampires anymore, they’re responsible ones. When they capture Caleb, Severen almost wants to kill him for fun; Jesse wants to kill him for a reason. There is something here that hasn’t quite been through enough. The screenwriters aren’t working hard enough.

If the script is just a clothesline for the set pieces and visuals, I need to stress that those set pieces and visuals are terrific. There are three scenes in particular that justify the price of a rental. The first is a blood-letting scene between Mae and Caleb, where Mae cuts open her wrist and feeds Cale her blood. Mae gyrates and gasps, as the kneeling Caleb drinks her up, while a heart beats on the soundtrack. When he finishes, he rises up and kisses her. While I do have fond memories of that all-night hand-on-breast bloodsucking marathon near the end of Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht, this one certainly ranks as one of the sexiest bloodsucking scenes I’ve seen. The hick bar massacre is justifiably famous. Bigelow gets the rhythm down exactly right. The sequence has a bit of source music, but none of the Tangerine Dream score. And Bigelow suppresses the need to make it into a cinematic piece; there’s isn’t any showy technique. It may be misleading to call it a set piece, as that term may be seen as being synonymous with “aria." Bigelow sees the scene as a recitative, as plot exposition. She makes the violence chillingly matter-of-fact and divorces herself stylistically (and ideologically unfortunately) from the slam-bang excesses of films like From Dusk Till Dawn.

Remember that classic scene at the end of Blood Simple where M. Emmet Walsh is shooting at Frances McDormand through a wall and beams of light shoot out into the dark room? Bigelow borrows this idea, and stages a shootout between the vampires and the cops. It’s just plain clever from a mechanical standpoint, but it’s also a plain great image. You have these vampires clad in clothing and goggles, trying to dodge the invasion of light and protect their only sanctuary. It speaks to, and fails to condescend to, all those teenage nihilists in the audience. (A similar scene in From Dusk Till Dawn is more meaningless.)

I guessed that Bigelow set the film in the Southwest mostly because she liked the hats, guns and black dusters. All the same, the film aestheticizes dead-end small-town boredom in a way you don’t see nearly enough. The picture follows Blood Simple and predicts Boys Don’t Cry in a fashion; it sees the Southwestern town as an almost mythological wonderland. We start the film with the magic hour, and we never look back. It’s hard to predict whether I would have liked the film better if they had just given it another rewrite, and if Bigelow had more interest in this material other than to just make it look cool. (Again, if she wanted to just look cool she should have found different material.) But the picture is what it is. I liked the film a lot when I was watching it, but my opinion weakened with a partial spin around for a second time. They had a great premise, they have some great faces, and they produced some terrific scenes, but the storyline is so lazy and the third act (which piles one insult after another) somehow makes the picture entire a little difficult to remember. It’s more of a very pleasant surprise after a string of bad or mediocre movies than a picture that really takes care of business. Saying that it’s probably the best vampire movie of the 1980s says more about vampire movies from the 80s (Fright Night 1 and 2, The Lost Boys, Vamp) than the film itself.