Near Dark (1987)
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
A farm boy reluctantly becomes a member of the undead when a girl he meets turns out to be part of a band of vampires who roam the highways in stolen cars.
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What critics compared Near Dark to
Determined to track down her long-absent mother and learn how she came to be this way, Maren buys a Greyhound bus ticket and heads across the country, discovering in uncanny, nocturnal sequences reminiscent of both Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark and Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys that she’s far from alone in her appetites.
That’s what we get with the Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s equal parts elegant and grotesque road-trip saga “Bones and All,” which has a “Badlands” meets “Near Dark” vibe and contains a couple of genuinely effective shock moments, but ultimately comes across as a gratuitously violent and at times overwrought Young Adult drama dressed up with art-house accessories.
Meanwhile, Maren and Lee’s dynamic most closely recalls that of the two moody yet visceral vamps in Near Dark (1987), both in their moral questions about killing to survive and the strange spell their romantic chemistry casts on the viewer.
In a bus-station sequence that reminded me of Caleb's attempts to get home after being bitten by a vampire in Near Dark , Marin starts in the direction of an address on an old, folded birth certificate her father's left her.
Choose your plan ArrowRight With its aestheticized gore; moody teenage angst; and knowing references to such classics as “Badlands,” “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Near Dark,” Luca Guadagnino’s visualization of Camille DeAngelis’s young-adult novel plunges audiences into a gross but occasionally engrossing slough of cognitive dissonance.
Or Kathryn Bigelow’s vampire-outsider western Near Dark?
Flanagan has mentioned being inspired by the likes of Near Dark , taking Ferguson and her brood down the path of being like a malevolent group of immortal carnies.
Rose the Hat is a fascinating, layered villain as she commands a group of immortality-seeking psychic vampires, who aesthetically owe a debt to Kathryn Bigelow’s criminally underrated Near Dark (1987).
These "vampires" are new: nomadic, like the bloodsuckers from Near Dark , but interested only in "eating" fear and pain in the form of "steam" that sublimates from their victim's lips at the moment of their death.
Led by the seductively malevolent Rose The Hat (Rebecca Ferguson, enjoyably flamboyant in her big-bad role), these nomadic Near Dark predators treat their pint-sized prey like living vape pens; triggering their pain and fear, they suck the shining straight out of them in puffs of vapor, slowing their own aging process.
A group of sinister Near Dark ish nomads encircle a little girl with the intent to abduct and, we soon learn, consume her.
Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987) and my favorite Neil Jordan film from 2012, Byzantium (thanks, Ruth!). Both take off-road paths to the vampire story.
Near Dark…
It's near to Near Dark in places, to Doctor Sleep.
That influence is certainly felt in Mandy: The demonic bike gang summoned to kidnap her recalls that film as well as Weird Science and Hellraiser, and Jeremiah’s “children” call to mind the vampiric family of Near Dark.
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This is the only work I've seen from Adam Greenberg that can stand with his sinister, night-blooming photography in the vampire thriller "Near Dark" (1987).
It's not a great genre movie in the sense that Murnau's Nosferatu was a great movie, and it's not even that original of a film, such as Kathryn Bigelow's redneck vampire opus Near Dark.
But as the ageless fighters, including Ajak (Salma Hayek), Sersi (Gemma Chan), Ikaris (Richard Madden), Thena (Angelina Jolie), Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani), Sprite (Lia McHugh, whose character is ripped straight from “Near Dark”), Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry), Gilgamesh (Don Lee), Makkari (Lauren Ridloff), and Druig (Barry Keoghan) carry out their assignment, they soon become enamored with the burgeoning peoples they strive to protect.
The dramatic centre of the climax, this Claudia from Interview with the Vampire or Homer from Near Dark is also the alleged comic relief.
I miss the greater care she once took with character, even in stylized genre exercises like The Loveless, Near Dark, and Strange Days…
Even with genre films Near Dark and Point Break under her belt, her Zero Dark Thirty might be my favorite of her movies…
Genre pictures like Near Dark and Strange Days mark the first half of her career.
The fire that propels her more earnestly thrilling work, from Near Dark to Point Break to Strange Days, is merely the flick of a lighter here.
From the late 1980s to the turn of the millennium, Kathryn Bigelow was making exhilarating, borderline-trashy cult genre flicks like Near Dark, Blue Steel, Strange Days and Point Break.
From her early, disreputable genre pictures like “Near Dark” and “Point Break” to more prestigious later offerings like “The Hurt Locker” and “Detroit,” Bigelow’s signature is her ability to put the screws to us like nobody’s business.
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Spring has about it an air of Near Dark.
I’m talking about the “movie X meets movie Y” style of cinematic analysis, and it’s how I plan to open my review of Michael and Peter Spierig’s Daybreakers: “It’s Gattaca meets Near Dark … sorta.”