this post was written for the final girl film club… read a lot more about near dark there.

corey’s thoughts…

released just weeks apart, near dark and the lost boys are my two favorite vampire films. 1987 was a fantastic year for bloodsuckers. it had never occurred to me until i began writing this post, but the films are remarkably similar. in terms of plot, they are nearly identical.

a naive young man is seduced by a beautiful woman and unwillingly turned into a vampire. the man struggles with what he is becoming versus what he was, as well as deciding between his new nocturnal family and his original one. ultimately, humanity wins out and our hero kills everyone in the girl’s family (except for her) and finds a way to cure vampirism, saving the day and winning the girl.

structurally they may be similar, but their tones are very different. near dark is far more serious and introspective than the goofy antics present in the lost boys. their treatment of vampire mythology also differs greatly, with near dark essentially writing its own rules as opposed to the highly traditional treatment of vampires in the lost boys.

some may prefer the light tone and mystical attributes of the antagonists in the lost boys, while others may be partial to the darker tone and more biologically based villains of near dark. personally, i’m not entirely sure which i prefer, as i love them both. luckily though, these are not the dark ages and, using the scientific method, we may be able to objectively determine which is the greater of the two. below i will compare/contrast near dark and the lost boys on several important aspects. at the end, we shall tally up the scores and determine which is truly deserving of the title “the greatest vampire film ever made.”

by my math, that means that near dark narrowly edges out the lost boys, 6-5. i had always suspected that near dark was slightly better, but had never put it through the rigors of an objective comparison before. thusly, it is with the certainty that only science can give us that i claim the following:

near dark is the greatest vampire film EVAR.

Jon’s Thoughts…

Long before Anne Rice turned vampires into foppish French aristocrats or moody, goth-glam crooners, 80s vampires were pure badass. Written and directed by Kathryn Bigelow, 1987’s Near Dark is as carefully cool as it is scary.

Near Dark was released the same year as The Lost Boys, which makes 1987 the best year ever for vampire films. Both films use the vampire myth to explore the allure of gangs, and all the sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll that presumably derive from that lifestyle. This was something of a national obsession in the just-say-no Reagan decade.

In Near Dark, Caleb Colton, a young and doe-eyed country bumpkin, meets Mae at his town’s local watering hole. Mae appears to be a cute, but down-on-her luck stranger. It’s the sort of combination that wholesome boys like Caleb find impossible to ignore. Of course, she’s not the naïf that she seems, and he soon finds out that he’s in over his head when he meets her rough-and-tumble family of violent outlaws, led by Jesse Hooker and his wife, Diamondback. And they’re all vampires, which makes them far more dangerous, and far more appealing. Young Caleb is soon on the road with them, much to the dismay of his straight-laced father, a ranch veterinarian, who, like any good cowboy, saddles up and gives chase.

It’s impossible to miss the morality tale implicit in the narrative of Near Dark. Can Caleb and his wholesome family rescue young Mae and save her from a violent, dysfunctional family? Of course they can, and with a little elbow grease, old-fashioned gumption, and a homemade blood transfusion machine, she’s as right as rain by the film’s end. The purity of the American heartland is a redemptive force. In fact, even though the subtext for Near Dark involves 80s drug and gang culture, the vampires in the film could be replaced with, say, Apaches and you’d have a Western nearly identical to John Ford’s The Searchers, in which a civil-war veteran spends years scouring the American southwest looking for his nieces after they’re kidnapped and eventually acculturated by Comanche Indians.

However, the strength of the American myth is not the real point of this film. The film’s heart belongs to the vampires, and no amount of 80s-style moralizing can drive a proverbial stake through it. For example, the film’s most memorable scene, by far, is Caleb’s barroom initiation into the vampire lifestyle. It’s the one scene that I most vividly remembered years after I saw Near Dark in 1987, and it’s the scene that still has the most resonance and appeal twenty years later. It’s a brilliant piece of filmmaking that is as subversive as it is just plain fun to watch.

Take, for instance, the vampires’ entrance into what Severen, the real badass of the family, calls “shit kicker heaven,” a roadhouse on the edge of town. Severen and his family are brazen and fearless, and there’s something thrilling about the way they storm into a bar so seedy the toilet seats are likely to give you hepatitis c and the patrons would ordinarily be the meanest sob’s in town. I suppose this is why young Caleb can’t seem to say no to their influence, and why audiences always find vampires so attractive as well. Sure, they symbolize a rock n’ roll fun, but more than that, they symbolize the kind of pure, unfettered libertine lifestyle that we all dream about from time to time. For instance, there’s just something irresistible about the “turn-the-tables-on-the-bar-thugs dynamic” at work in this scene. I find it hard not to enjoy the way Severen takes on the toughest looking dude in the bar by first spilling his drink, then spitting in his face.

If this weren’t enough, the bar scene is brilliantly punctuated by some really great rock-n-roll gems from the 80s. Severen and his family make their entrance to the tune of John Parr‘s power-chord anthem “Naughty, Naughty.” The song’s playful, albeit seedy, depiction of risqué and deviant sexual predation is perfect for this film. The song makes you want to dance, even if you just know you’re gonna feel really guilty about it later. The scene also includes the brilliant cover of Little Willie John’s “Fever” by The Cramps. With songs such as “I Was a Teenage Werewolf,” “The Creature From the Black Leather Lagoon,” and “The Surfing Dead,” the Cramps are no strangers to horror films. Their contribution to this scene gives it an appropriate mood of low-key, slithering cool that you know will soon turn downright ugly.

And it does turn ugly, which is partly what makes this scene to gripping and so subversive. In a grotesque parody of a sit-down family meal, Jessse, Razorback, Mae, and the man-child Homer, murder the waitress and then fill a beer mug with blood. Severen dances around the bar before brutally killing a patron and then the bartender with his sharpened spurs. Even little Homer does his part by shooting a victim in the back. When the killing spree ends, Mae slow dances with the last victim, an unfortunate yokel who’s been selected for Caleb’s first kill. This is perhaps the creepiest part of the entire scene. It’s part cheesy prom-night dance, part solemn ceremony for his impending human sacrifice. It’s an unexpected change of pace in a scene that consists of one unexpected reversal after another. The scene is deliberately cool, then barbarically violent, then somber.

At the end of this scene, Caleb fails his initiation. He simply can’t commit murder, and he eventually gives it all up to go back home to his wholesome family and farm. It’s the decent thing to do, and, of course, we all want him to do the decent thing. America’s heartland is saved from the vampires, just as every Western features the triumph of American civilization over savagery. In this one aspect, Near Dark departs from John Ford’s The Searchers. At its conclusion, John Wayne discovers to his horror and shame that his niece has no intention of being rescued. She’s not only a part of Comanche society, but also happily married, so he ultimately fails to bring her back home. It’s a thoroughly ambivalent conclusion that’s missing from Near Dark. Caleb escapes the savages. Still, I’ll wager that most of us who watch this film wish that Caleb could have stayed with Severen for at least a little while longer.