A bite leaves Oklahoma farmhand Caleb Colton burning in the sun in Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987). The vampires who take him in give him a deadline to learn to kill. Staying with his new family means feeding on people, and Caleb can’t bring himself to do it.
Adrian Pasdar plays Caleb, whose encounter with Mae (Jenny Wright) pulls him into a roaming group led by Jesse Hooker (Lance Henriksen). Traveling with them are Jesse’s partner Diamondback (Jenette Goldstein), the vicious Severen (Bill Paxton), and Homer (Joshua Miller), an ancient vampire with a child’s appearance. When Caleb refuses to hunt, Mae sustains him with her own blood.
Their life plays out along American highways, in motels and roadside bars, with blacked-out RV windows keeping the sun outside. Bigelow builds a Western around predators who travel together, enforce their own rules, and expect a newcomer to participate in the killing. The word “vampire” is never spoken.
That demand becomes especially ugly in an extended barroom massacre. The group kills its way through the people inside, making clear what belonging to this family requires. Daylight puts those same killers in immediate danger: even getting caught outside can leave them burning.
Bigelow co-wrote the screenplay with Eric Red, who also wrote The Hitcher. Henriksen, Paxton, and Goldstein had appeared together in Aliens (1986); Paxton passed the Near Dark script to Henriksen before Bigelow cast them. Adam Greenberg handled the cinematography, and Tangerine Dream supplied the score.
Caleb’s father, played by Tim Thomerson, searches for him, bringing his human family into conflict with the vampires. The film eventually offers a way back through a blood transfusion, while sunlight becomes crucial to the final confrontations.
Near Dark reached theaters on October 2, 1987, a few months after The Lost Boys. It earned about $3.4 million against an approximately $5 million budget, then built a cult following after its theatrical failure.
