Bad Old Boys – Near Dark

Near Dark is a damned-near perfect vampire movie.

By this I don’t mean that the vampires in it are perfect in the sense of utterly flawless superhuman bloodsuckers: far from it, as these monsters are full of faults both as predators and as characters. Human audiences might not care much if the undead villains are cruel and disrespectful to each other, but if they are merely cartoon ubermenschen chomping down on the hapless mortals that they meet, then the tension when normal, civilized life is menaced will be blunted.

Kathryn Bigelow’s direction does not allow any blunting. She has found the holy grail of fantasy filmmaking - believability. The human beings who are threatened and killed by the monsters are ordinary-looking; unheroic and fallible. An audience can identify them as its fellow men and wince as they walk or drive themselves into danger or offer to help stricken ‘children’ and thus set themselves in the path of oncoming death. Blade might be inconvenienced and insulted and drained from time to time and Buffy may have her heart broken again and again, but they just aren’t going to die.

Caleb Colton is an irresponsible looking young man from Oklahoma who puts himself and ultimately his family into danger as he draws closer and closer to the gamine but deadly Mae. What can he be thinking of? Well, alright then; ‘with’?

And that’s it. That’s how he enters the world of vampires, by picking up a pretty stranger one night in an anonymous street in some nowhere-seeming American town. Mae is pretty and mysterious and boasts of being immortal and she seems to like him enough to get into a car at night with an unknown man of about twice her weight, and Caleb’s blood-starved brain never lets him ask why she does this. They drive around and flirt for a while, and when Caleb takes her home to show off a beautiful horse in his veterinarian father’s corral he never questions why it rears and panics when she draws near. She’s strong, too, and pulls a strangely tottering yet muscular Caleb into her arms with his own lasso. When she notices the hour she insists he drives her home to her ‘friends’’ trailer park, and along the way Caleb demands a kiss as the price of the rest of the journey home. He’s no moral paragon, either, but he suffers for his insistence as she bites and bleeds him, and soon he is infected and staggering home across the vast flat fields of the South Central USA.

As the sun comes up he begins to smoulder, but just as he nears his father’s house a mobile home with taped-up windows appears from the dusty highway and he is dragged into the gloom and ‘safety’ of a nest of vampires.

What a shabby crowd they are: the emaciated Confederate Jesse Hooker and the grinning, jingling-spurred killer redneck Severen sleep the daylight hours away alongside Diamondback, a trailer-trash vamp with the dye job from Hell. A child-shaped evil old man called Homer finishes off this brood, and at once they’re on Caleb’s case, with Severen in particular wanting to kill the infected but not completely turned human being. Caleb’s first kill will turn him - if he can survive. Here’s the curious thing; Mae seems genuinely to love him. Bigelow constantly reminds us of the ‘humanity’ of the vampires. Jesse and Diamondback sleep together and hold hands as they walk, and they are upset to have forgotten the date when they met. Homer resents having been turned whilst still a small child and bemoans it to the irritation of bad old, good old Severen, who treats their non-life as big barroom brawl about to happen. Mae can’t keep her hands off Caleb and protects him with maternal determination against her own distrustful and vengeful family. And a family is exactly what they are; squabbling and close, and by turns co-operative and quarrelsome. They protect one another and steal vehicles for the group and sometimes they compete for the patriarch Jesse’s attention. They are a family which happens to consist of utterly ruthless mass-murderers. They hunt singly or in pairs and, in the famous bar scene, as a pack.

They also make mistakes and take foolish risks from the viewpoint of survival. They burn the witnessed Winnebago which might draw official attention instead of parking it to be vandalized and stripped down as would happen in any rough neighbourhood. They steal cars in plain view of the passing nightlife, and they so lose track of time after the pleasure of a massacre and recreational arson that they barely make it to the shade of a hastily rented motel bungalow in time. None of the vampires seems to carry a watch, which is deeply stupid given the deadly importance of daybreak; but then this is the land of the buckshot-scarred road sign and the ditch-braked pickup truck.

Poor Caleb isn’t much brighter, either. He really doesn’t want to murder anyone, and so keeps on trying to get back to a human home where he is fast becoming an outsider, to the ever-increasing annoyance of the other vampires in whose killing sprees he has not yet joined. He wanders off, changing and staggering and starving and drooling to try to get home, and is noticed and providentially helped onto the bus by a suspicious but charitable plainclothes policeman.

Meanwhile his father and little sister have been both pressing the police to look for the ‘kidnapped’ Caleb, and searching up and down America’s great Southern road network, questioning motorists at gas stations. This other family parallels and contrasts with the vampires’, so that we are never allowed to forget what is at stake here

Mae feeds Caleb with blood she herself has stolen from the human victims who Caleb has refused to murder, but the others lose patience and he is ordered to kill before the night is out, or else. They tire of him acting like a fussy child who will not eat what is offered to him, and they doubt his willingness to enter into their bloody team spirit. Pausing only to pose theatrically against rock-video backlighting from a railway (a gloriously cheesy shot I still treasure after years of watching the film), the gang descends on a bar and proceeds to antagonize, injure, kill and drain the customers one by one. Bigelow racks up the tension beautifully in this sequence as the humans begin to realize that their new tormentors are something way worse than redneck yahoos out to spoil their evening. Shit kicker heaven indeed. At this point, Caleb turns his stupidity level up from Stun to Kill - at least from a vampire perspective - and the pack only just escapes the bar in that nick of the time.

America is a big country, and Bigelow makes much of the huge distances between towns with camera shots of enormous ploughed fields and straight, dust-covered roads disappearing into the distance. At night it is the same; young Caleb drives into an endless-seeming darkness and we have no sense of time during the first night when he meets Mae. The watchless girl is alerted only by some mysterious sense of the approaching dawn, and she hurries him away so she can find shade. She has already pointed out the billion light-year distances in space. Distance; there is a huge distance between the dark and brutal world of the vampires and the mostly-decent world of the living. Distance; and emptiness. Surely in the two centuries since the American Civil War, Jesse must have found the time and patience to learn to enjoy something other than poker? Granted, one can only watch The Thirteenth Warrior or The Prophecy a few dozen times before insanity kicks in, but still…Poker? They keep writing more books and music and making more films, guys. Get a grip. But no, the vampires’ life is empty of pretty much everything but the kill and the tenuous, tense relationships between the pack members. It just doesn’t look all that much fun to be an immortal sometimes.

Thus the determination of the Coltons to find Caleb seems all the more warm-blooded and virtuous and real to us. The middle-aged vet and his little girl hunt relentlessly at day and by night for the youth, and his rescue and redemption seemed to me more real and right because it was unspectacular and domestic in scale. Caleb goes straight back to home-cooking and bedtime stories readily and with every sign of wanting to keep it that way for life.

But this film is also a western, and the bad guys are still out there and they want revenge. Once he sees his human family threatened, Caleb ceases in part to be the feckless and selfish boy who blackmailed Mae for a kiss, and he seeks out and confronts the vampires in the old-fashioned OK Corral style. It’s a great final sequence as vampires and humans fight it out to discover who will survive and own the night. If the great and eerie distances of the American croplands weren’t sufficiently atmospheric; if the rising tension and bloodiness of the barroom fight and slaughter didn’t raise the heart rate high enough, then the final showdown in the dying Oklahoma night should do the trick.

Near dark and high noon are both, after all, times of day.

Now I’m really scared. 30 Days of Night.

It’s a skill, scaring people. There have now been decades of having film vampires creeping out of the darkness at people unexpectedly on the one hand, and spraying the screen with gallons of blood on the other. So, how to scare the hardened audience?

What a vampire movie can do is to keep our interest enough and involve us in the action long enough to learn to care about the characters so that it really matters if they are killed. If we care, then we can be scared. Otherwise, it’s settle down to a shoot ‘em up gorefest with lots of CGI and precious little emotional concern for the characters at all, like Starship Troopers (but not the novel) or Blade 2. Who worries about the Dhampir himself being killed? He won’t be; he’s Wesley Snipes as a good guy and this is Hollywood, and (possibly apart from Whistler), who gives a clot for the rest? Even the free humans are merely scenery against which Blade slugs it out with the vampires, the Reapers, and legions of armoured renfields.

30 Days of Night scared me because the characters are made to seem like real people. In the Alaskan far north, as the month of total darkness approaches, a small American town prepares for shutdown. A large part of the population leaves for the more comfortable south and the hero, Sheriff Eben Oleson, watches them going as he investigates a number of mysterious incidents of vandalism. On the way, we see his friends worrying about his failing marriage to Stella, a fire marshall. Oleson sympathises with the local helicopter pilot whose aircraft has been sabotaged, and the couple whose huskies have been slaughtered. He argues with Beau Brower an eccentric snow-plough driver, and tickets him to remind him he’s a part of the human race.

The broken marriage being repaired in the face of danger is a Hollywood convention, and the director David Slade is not above using such things to play on the imagination. How will facing vampires bring this embittered couple closer together? Will they both survive? Eben’s grandmother grows cannabis to treat the pain of her cancer and the Sherriff’s younger brother is a suitably demanding teenager. No-one here is glamourous in the way the vampire covens are in Underworld, or the vampires of the Lestat films, or the cute-ish nightstalkers in Blade Trinity. Most of the adult men have beards apart from the asthmatic Dudley Do-Right sherriff, and the women are girl-next door wholesome if young, and practical pioneers if older. We don’t get the workout-every-day physiques and perfect complexions of the Dream Factory. This is a generator-warmed, short-on-women, shotgun-against-polar-bears frontier town. There’s a church (of which ostentatiously we never see the inside) and a general store and a poster-papered jail-cum emergency services Sherriff’s office. Plus a marvellous garbage crusher with rotating blades that, again, Slade wants us to remember and anticipate being used. But against whom? Against what?

This is the real town which is about to be destroyed by vampires. Real people are going to die. It is going to matter to us when they do.

Credibility is a neat trick to pull with such implausibilities as vampires. Leather-clad supervamps are fine for the Marvel adaptations and the gloss of the big-budget SFX, and the rotting-face horrors of the stumbling revenants film are conventions in their own right, but vampires, winning, on Main Street USA? Come on. Puh-lease! Those Alaskans are literally loaded for bear with shotguns and bear-traps and with the internet and mobile phones they’ll all be in touch with each other and organize when the vampires attack. Won’t they? And they can call in the mighty US military; bound to be plenty of them around, being so close to Russia, and all. A couple of companies of Marines with automatic weapons and body armour and night-sights and ground-attack helicopters could blow any walking dead into mincemeat toot-sweet, right?

Wrong. Credibility Technique Number One; the mobiles and the phones and the internet are disabled before the vampires emerge. So, no coordinated resistance, no massed-fire shotgun fusillades, and no USMC in Apaches and sno-cats. Guess it’s down to us plain folks, huh?

Only the plain folks are just that. They aren’t Special Forces troops. They take too long to come to terms with the disaster. None rush to barricade themselves in when Eben and Stella return from their first encounter with the vampires on the edge of town. Even after the first victim is taken at breathtaking speed in front of their eyes, the surviving pair of an Alaskan ménage-a-trois return home and react foolishly. That is, normally. Would we really dig in deep at that stage, arm up to the teeth and get a posse together, or would we hope for normality, make dinner, and hope that the bad things will go away? Plain folks. About to die, most of them.

Credibility Technique Number Two.

When the vampires arrive in town they are shocking in their speed and aggression. It’s not that shotguns don’t work, but you’ve got to aim for the head, and these things run like hell. Dark blurs cross the screen and human beings are dragged away like small animals in the mouths of cheetahs. The scene where the town falls to the vampire horde is a truly thrilling one; tense and exciting and yet it avoids being a splatter-movie massacre. It is still compelling, like the sequences in Mississippi Burning where the Feds turn the heat up on the Klan by arresting local members or when the Bureau goes after Buffalo Bill and Clarice Starling goes on her own way in Silence of the Lambs. In a few minutes the darting, scarcely-seen vampires have reduced the town’s population to a handful of scattered survivors cowering in the snow or crouched in unlit and rapidly-cooling buildings. I won’t write much about the plot here, see for yourself when you watch it (please!), but the struggle for survival over the next twenty-nine days provides a structure for some really gruesome and tense vampire movie scenes.

These vampires are truly horrible. The makeup and acting are first-class because they make these bloodsuckers seem to be what is rarely achieved at the cinema. These are dead people infested with an alien and remorseless and voracious will to drink blood. They are neither sexy giants like Vampires’ Jan Valek nor sardonic killers like Jesse Hooker the Confederate soldier of Near Dark: nor are they rotting corpses from a treadmill ‘Something Of The Dead’ movie. They are pale dead flesh. Empty-eyed and crooked-fanged, and they exist to kill and bleed their victims. They sprint jerkily like lizards and in the still moments before they kill they examine their prey with the incurious concentration of snakes or spiders. The actors and FX people have produced something which, I think, novelists usually do so much better than film-makers: they have created utterly soulless, human-shaped, but entirely inhuman predators. They are messy eaters, too, and their gore-stained fox-faces seem to drive out any hope to those who see them. One victim calls out to God and the blood-streaked leader looks briefly up at the sky, blank-eyed and unrepentant, as if inviting thunderbolts. Rescue, however, does not appear from on high at this point, and the bleak choice between capture and death on the one hand and freezing and starvation on the other confronts the remaining humans. They also have to make some morally and emotionally agonizing decisions. Hope seems to be impossible.

The middle section of the film sees the vampires searching for the survivors, but we see nothing at all of them when they are not hunting or feeding. They seem to do nothing that is separate from their hunger. Only their leader speaks; in a clicking and croaking language which subtitles shows us to be his terse orders to the hunting pack, or expressions of his loathing for human beings. They stand in light summer clothing unmoved by the arctic cold, and the fiendish shrieking of the pack occasionally sounds across the ruined town along with the dying wails of their latest captive. Sometimes, it is hard to tell the sounds apart. The vampires are invisible for much of the time, keeping our tension high as to when they might appear again and who they might do things to…

Credibility Technique Number Three. There is little actual darkness in this film. The ice is so highly reflective that even when the mains electricity goes off there is still plenty of light from starlight, battery-power and unsabotaged generators. Much of the violence (and there is a lot of it compared with most films, except for sci-fi slaughterhouses such as the Terminator and Predator series) is committed against the ghastly background of starlight on the snow. There are many red-black patches on the ice and bloody trails across floors and a goodly few severings of body parts as the film progresses. Much of the nastiest business takes place just a little off-camera, or in the rare patches of darkness, but with the terribly suggestive sound-effects; tearing, dripping and guzzling. This is how in the UK the film earns its 15-years certification. There are crimson splatters aplenty, and some nasty biting, but we’re allowed to imagine the worst. And imagine it we do.

Against this background the human beings put a succession of plans into action about where to hide and when to move on and how to draw the vampires’ attention away from this relocation or that foraging party for stores. We are always aware, no matter what they do, that the survivors can be whisked away into the shadows at any moment, or flung to the snow and drained in seconds. We are also shown, midway in the film, how rapidly the rare escapee from attacks has transformed and then turns on their former neighbours. Oleson though has faith: faith in his fellow Alaskans’ resilience and knowledge of their harsh environment; faith that the elements can be turned against the monsters; faith in his duty and his will to do it. Watch how far he goes for his fellow men. If there’s moral uplift in this film it is that when you believe that your neighbours deserve to live then no matter what duty requires and no matter how implacable, heartless and savage the enemy might be, and no matter at all how remote the possibility of winning might seem, then you should and can do what that duty dictates. Perhaps you can win. This is 2007. This is an American film.

I watched it for the vampires, and these are the worst - that is the best - vampires I have seen in the modern cinema. After all the soppy victimhood of Louis and Angel and the hapless Caleb, Slade has recreated something of the fear of inhuman predators that the readership of Dracula must have felt and enjoyed and left the lamps on overnight for.

This is a great vampire movie; an instant favourite. The DVD on release please, Lucy.

AB-

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Overwhelmed at Underworld.

Sometimes a film just looks right.

If angels were to become flesh and fought over God’s plan here once more on Earth, then they would, I’m sure, look much like those in The Prophecy. If a defeated supercomputer sent a cyborg into the past to kill its nemesis’ mother, then The Terminator is how it would appear.

Underworld looks right.

From the opening moments as the vampire warrior Selene perches in her bell-tower eyrie above a nameless, rain-swept Eastern European city, you know that the atmosphere’s going to fit. The team of vampire assassins which she leads stalks a pair of lycans: the enemy werewolves which Selene and the Death Dealers have made nearly extinct in a centuries-long war. The team’s photo reconnaissance specialist leaps down to ground level first, to move as unseen by the human crowds as the human-shaped lycans themselves do. He merely tumbles off-screen, but when Selene does it, the camera shows the first of many elegant stunts in this thrilling and extremely stylish film.

The vampires track the preoccupied lycans into an underground station with its milling humans whose commute is shattered when the lycans notice their hunters and the first gunfight of the film begins. The film’s fight scenes are fast, exciting, varied and gripping. Because neither the vampire nor the werewolf sides are truly ‘good’, you don’t know how each one will end. The post-Matrix slow-motion, stunts and visible bullets are well done (Underworld’s weapons technology is excellent and convincing), and look as if they hurt. No-one dies easily in this war, and as a young doctor (the fleeing lycans’ intended prey) seeks to save the life of a bystander, werewolves scatter into the tunnels to escape. Selene after a wounded lycan, and soon encounters an underground den where, by the sounds echoing from it, her enemies are far more numerous than she had thought.

Back at the iron-gated vampire mansion, Selene tries to convince the leadership that the lycan threat is very much alive and thriving, but the coven’s master vampires are absent: each sleeping to await his own turn of a century’s rule. Soon, a delegation of the other great coven will arrive and its ancient Master, Amelia, will revive her contemporary Marcus to replace the administrator Kraven of his stewardship of the continent’s vampire nation. The cautious Kraven does not believe that the lycans pose a threat, and won’t let Selene lead a Death Dealer team into the tunnels.

[Stylistically, the mansion and its inhabitants are goth heaven. Trust me. If you were going to attend the Vampire’s Ball, this is what you’d strive for. If dressing up to look all svelte and undead is part of the fun of the whole vampire thing for humans, then Len Wiseman and his design people have piled the style on beautifully here.]

Unaware of the glories around her and unmoved by Kraven’s advances, Selene examines the reconnaissance photos and soon makes the connection between her enemies and the doctor she had briefly seen tending to the shooting victim. She just won’t let it go and, against orders, seeks out the doctor; Michael Corvin.

Poor man. He embodies the hopes of the lycan conspirators; carrying as he does a treasure in his blood which the lycans hope will turn the war in their favour and perhaps even end it. An ancient enemy of the vampire coven arrives to take Corvin (or at least a sample) back to the underworld, but in the second fight of the film Selene manages to escape from the wolfman-shaped attackers with a bewildered and bitten Michael.

It’s a fabulous fight, like all the others in the film. Werewolves become briefly immune to gravity once they get their speed up and Selene just never seems to choose the stairs to get to ground level. The film’s worth the ticket or the price of the DVD just to see her getting to the lobby.

Corvin saves her from drowning (running water?) in the city’s harbour, and she takes the increasingly feverish and hallucination Michael back to the mansion.

The secret is out now in that the outgoing vampire administration soon knows that Corvin has been wolf-bitten and will soon turn. As Kraven pursues his power games, Selene decides to break with precedent to awake her erstwhile mentor and sire, Viktor.

I don’t like spoilers in film reviews. Suffice to say that there are enough secret agendas and plots here to keep Selene and the gradually metamorphosing Michael on the run and unbalanced enough to avoid joining forces effectively against their various antagonists. The Selene turns it around and takes back the initiative. She brings evidence to the vampire rulers that their nations are gravely imperilled and so the grand finale arrives; a no-holds barred gunfight and gore fest between vampires and lycans, during which a network of conspiracies; ancient and modern, tests the sympathies, loyalties and allegiances of the heroes to the limit.

This has got to be in the top three vampire films of the modern cinema. It’s non-stop action and drama storytelling set against a rich, convincing, and beautiful world of slinky undead vampire seductresses and muscle-bound lycan supermen. The characters are larger-than-life in just such a way as those in Blade are, but they show more complexity and deeper emotions than the comic-book dhampir and his megalomaniac adversaries. I finished the film wishing Michael Corvin and the survivors well - if only so that they could duke it out in the inevitable sequels…

But my; the film looks great. Just great. It’s just the way it should be.

And there is nothing - but nothing in the whole wide world - to complain about about the sight of Kate Beckinsale in knee-length patent combat boots, rubber catsuit and leather corset blasting away at the lycan hordes.

Drink deep, my brothers and sisters. AB-

The Wiki entry contains massive spoiler information. But if you absolutely insist on having the surprise ruined, here it is.

John Carpenter's " Vampires."

This has got to be one of the top three vampire movies of all time for having a realistic feel. From the panoramic opening shots of dawn in New Mexico, the oppressive dryness of the day and the emptiness of the desert come alive. We don't know it yet, but we are witnessing the start a long, hot day of vampire slaying. Crisp, rumbly Western guitar electrical music introduces the swaggering approach of James Wood's Vatican-backed Jack Crow and his redneck crew of slayers. Crow's first words are profane, irreverent, and identify him as a cynical and experienced vampire hunter. The team arm themselves with a variety of high-tech anti-vampire weaponry, bundles of guns and don body armour. They appear to be tough and utterly ruthless as the score prepares us for a frontal assault... that never comes.
These men are scared. Jack leads them quietly into the abandoned ranch house; he is ultra-cautious, and takes the advance guard as they break into the ranch. This and the obvious nervousness of the slayers humanises them for me, and I worried about them from the outset. It is very quiet. When the violence comes, it is nasty enough, and the vampires are nasty enough (to human eyes), that I continued to fear for the lives of the team as they clear and slay their way through the house. As the day lengthens and turns to dusk I felt relieved that the expected bloodbath has not occurred - and I anticipated it more eagerly for all that. There is no master vampire in the emptied nest. This is unexpected and ominous to Crow.
So far, so atmospheric. The world of this film is gritty, tawdry, and the vampires are foul enough to be real without the grossness of some splatter-films I could name.
All is not well indeed; the team is compromised and Jack and his comrade Anthony Montoya (Daniel Baldwin) soon find themselves without their slayer weaponry and on the run from a terrible enemy. They have one thing going for them at this point; a recently-bitten prostitute Katrina (Sheryl Lee). She has not turned yet, and Crow plans to use her growing psychic link to a master vampire to find and kill him.
The men separate - Montoya to lie low and guard Katrina - whilst Crow returns to headquarters in Monterey to explain that he has been betrayed and to re-arm.
His boss, Cardinal Alba, briefs him that all the other Vatican-supported slayer teams worldwide have been slaughtered, and so Crow is on his own. We also learn something about their particular adversary ( Jan Valek; a former priest, religious reformer and rebel) and, equally interestingly to me, how and why Crow became the ruthless slayer he is today. Hard-bitten isn't in it.
Accompanied by the bookish and naive Father Guiteau who has been foisted on him by the Cardinal as chaplain for the team, Crow sets off to recover Montoya and the ever-more sickly Katrina. He intends to use her to read the Master's thoughts and track him . We discover that the vampires have been searching for the Cross for centuries and it is a long and bloody race to find it before this particular Master does.
The denouement when it comes is the set-piece shoot-out I had anticipated in the opening scenes of the film. It is tightly-paced and works brilliantly to build up and then to sustain the tension until the very last moments of the film. We discover the cause of the mission's betrayal, the origins of the vampire species and also Valek's plans for the world. Valek is an ambitious boy.

The film works as an adventure and as a horror movie because there is plenty of action interspersed by brief and clear scenes which move the plot along. Soundtrack and scenery put us in places we can identify and think we recognise from the very beginning. The characters are imperfect people and have motives of their own which are not always wise and professional, and thus we have the human-interest sub-plot concerning Katrina's struggle with the vampire infection contrasting with Crow and Montoya's different plans for her. At 108 clear-cut and enthralling minutes, John Carpenter's Vampires is small masterpiece of exciting storytelling and engaging characters. I don't watch vampire films for the gore and the violence alone; well done and plentiful though they are. Carpenter has made his world and his monsters convincing, his heroes sympathetic enough to worry about their hurts, and weak enough to want to kick them sometimes.
A gem. See it.

Vampire film blog

Good evening.

I am Blackburn, and I bid you welcome.

The purpose of my main page is to provide a place where vampires, aspiring vampires, vampire writers, fiction fans, renfields, and - yes - even slayers, may rant and discuss their personal problems and the great issues of the night.Answer posts in the Comments page and include links to your sites ( linking back, if you will). Or email me with ideas for threads and new rants, and include your links if you wish.

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Adonais Blackburn