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.