The Hip Pocket #49: NEAR DARK

There is no single canon.

We all have movies we love.

Some of them are great movies. Some of them are terrible movies. Love does not care. Love is unreasonable. Love is blind. We love what we love, and the louder you love it, the better.

One of my favorite things is sharing a film I love with someone. Even if they don't love it the same way I do, that experience imparts something about you to that person. When you share something you love, you are sharing a part of yourself, and there is nothing more vulnerable or personal than that.

I don't think of these movies as the canon or the official library or anything that formal. These are all just movies I keep in my hip pocket, movies I've filed away as part of my own personal ongoing film festival as worthwhile and notable.

This is an ongoing list, one without an ending. This is The Hip Pocket.

Near Dark
Adrian Pasdar, Jenny Wright, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, Jenette Goldstein, Tim Thomserson, Joshua John Miller, Marcie Leeds, Kenny Call, Edward Corbett, Troy Evans, Bill Cross, Roger Aaron Brown, Thomas Wagner, Robert Winley, James Le Gros, Jan King, Danny Kopel, Billy Beck, S.A. Griffin, Bob Terhune, William T. Lane, Gary Littlejohn, Paul M. Lane, Eddie Mulder, Don Pugsley, Neith Hunter, Theresa Randle, Tony Pierce, Gordon Haight, Leo Geter, Gary Wayne Cunningham
cinematography by Adam Greenberg
music by Tangerine Dream
written by Eric Red & Kathryn Bigelow
produced by Steven-Charles Jaffe
directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Rated R
1 hr 34 mins

When a young Texas farm boy meets a traveling family of vampires, he’s drawn into their world of darkness.

“Can I have a bite?”

The opening image of the film is a mosquito, photographed in hyper-close-up, as it drinks deeply. Then SMACK! It’s just a smear of blood on Adrian Pasdar’s arm, and we’re off and running with one of the strangest, dreamiest vampire films ever made. To create that image, it took them six months to raise a mosquito that was 100% free of contaminants, which speaks to just how much attention to detail Bigelow brought to her work right at the start. It’s a great visual gag to underline what we’re about to watch, which may still be my favorite overall Kathryn Bigelow film.

The only thing she’d done before this was The Loveless, a film that feels like a student experiment, art for the sake of art. I like The Loveless, but it’s a weird little thing, and I’m not sure it makes the case for her as a director of broader genre fare. I give Ed Pressman credit for recognizing something in her and supporting her as she tried to figure out her next movie. She developed this project with her co-writer Eric Red, and originally wanted to make this a western. She needed this to be a more commercial prospect than The Loveless was, and no one seemed interested in a straight Western, so she pushed Red to re-imagine the story as a western-horror mix.