An absolute gem of a book, full of stories, anecdotes and gorgeous pictures from a classic movie. I look forward to finding physical copies to give to friends - and finding my copy of the movie to revisit again!

Before Katherine Bigelow got all serious, she made some of the best genre films in the business. Near Dark is nearly forgotten and overshadowed by Point Break in her filmography, but this slim volume will make the uninitiated seek out this hidden gem of a film.

I have to confess I had never seen Near Dark. It totally passed me by. So when I saw this title pop up in the fantastic BFI line of film books, I saw it as a good reason to view the film.

And it's a great film! And the book is quite good. It's quite academical, a bit dry at times, and Stacy Abbott's thoughts and observations maybe aren't exactly mindblowing, but it is interesting to see it all collected in a succinct and clear way.

Not the best in the series, but very competent.

3.5 stars

I saw Near Dark when first released on video and then again a couple of years later to show a friend how good it was. She hated it whereas I still thought it was a brilliant film.
Stacey Abbott's BFI Classics book is a fantastic look at how Near Dark sits as a vampire film but also how Kathryn Bigelow film helps to subvert the genre by taking the portrayal of the decadent lifestyle the vampire leads in most films and literature and places them in the mid-west of America, driving around in a van killing for food and fun.
As with all BFI classics we are provided with how the film got to the screen and how it was received on release. Amongst this overall Stacey Abbott takes a closer look at themes in the film as well as breaking down individual scenes and conveying what Kathryn Bigelow was achieving.
This was read in one sitting and is a great addition to the BFI Classics.

The BFI Film Classics range is a series of monographs on (as you’d might expect) on what the Institute considers to be part of a classic canon. I’ve found the relative merits of the individual books very much depends on the nature of the film chosen but also on the approach chosen by the respective author, which can range from straightforward critical/historical analysis to something a little more wide-ranging and oblique.
The early entrants in the series were, of course, rather predictable but as the series has grown, the choice of films has grown more interesting, and making increased allowance for the quirky and unusual, making room to talk about horror and science fiction — genres that are often snootily looked down upon by cinematic critical circles. But it’s too this latter category that Near Dark undoubtedly belongs.
Near Dark is hybrid vampire-western, released in 1987 and was the second full-length feature by Kathryn Bigelow, who went on to direct Point Break, The Hurt Locker, Detroit and many other commercially and critically acclaimed movies. Near Dark was not so fortunate and was less than successful at the time of release but has gradually and inexorably built up a cult following and critical re-evaluation in the years since its release.
Stacey Abbott is extremely well-placed to discuss the slow burn of Near Dark’s relative success. A Reader at the University of Roehampton, in London, she has been writing about horror and often specifically the vampire genre for a number of years now, including highly regarded and insightful books on the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, its spin-off Angel and the cinematic portrayal of Dracula. Here, she ably contextualises the movie not only against the wider cinematic influences which Bigelow was invoking but also against its immediate competition.
It’s generally considered that the independently financed Near Dark suffered greatly by being released too closely to the similarly themed but considerably better resourced studio film The Lost Boys, directed by Joel Schumacher. This, I’ve always felt, is a comparison that breaks down under closer analysis and aside from the fact that they both feature teenage vampires, there’s really very little to connect the two movies. (Both are great films in their own way, I hasten to add, with The Lost Boys for my money constituting Schumacher’s some of best work, only surpassed perhaps by Falling Down.) Abbott analyses this comparison and presents a shortish but pertinent and insightful analysis into the two films before settling down to firmly focus on Near Dark’s unique qualities.
The main body of Abbott’s thesis is about centring Near Dark as a film about place, about the American landscape. And as such, she places it not in the European vampire tradition of counts and castles or jaded aesthetes of Stoker, Hammer, or even Anne Rice but in the work of Ford, Peckinpah and Hawkes and of the mythic American West. If Near Dark is a hybrid vampire-western, then the emphasis is far more on the western aspects than the vampire ones. The vampires in Near Dark (interestingly, a word that is never used in the film) have little of the European ennui of Dracula and his many imitators, nor have they the dynastic or hierarchical ambitions. The only hierarchy they have is that of the family — patriarch, matriarch, children and they are essentially forces of anarchy, causing swathes of conscienceless bloodlust and mayhem across a barely civilised dustbowl America. In this, they resemble the agents of do-or-die defiance and chaos of The Wild Bunch or of Peckinpah’s other westerns. Compare this with the vampires of The Lost Boys, who in their leather and peroxide, might superficially resemble the vampire-outlaws of Near Dark but are really just a re-tread of their European antecedents given an MTV makeover — complete with hierarchies of thralls, servants and master vampires.
Abbott also takes the time to explore Bigelow’s craft and method and there is an illuminating (no pun intended) analysis of her use of light and dark throughout the movie. In many ways, these techniques might appear obvious within the context of a vampire movie and can also been seen used by the likes of Murnau, Tony Scott and so on, but Bigelow’s use of them is intuitive, significantly different from what has come before and is actually integrated far deeper into the mise en scene of the movie. And Abbott’s discussion of it is both wide-ranging and perceptive and one of the definite strengths of the book.
However, and unsurprisingly, given her past work, Abbott does take the time to discuss the film within the context of vampire lore and themes and it is a characteristically knowledgeable and incisive one. I was slightly disappointed that while discussing the trope of the child-vampire that the film plays with that she doesn’t seem to move much beyond Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. I would personally have liked to have seen her bring in some discussion of Octavia Butler’s Fledgling but perhaps that can be a discussion for another time.
All in all, despite its necessary brevity, this is an accessibly written introduction to both the movie, as well as some of the wider themes of both the American western and the vampire movie. It’s also a good primer for anyone interested in taking a deeper critical dive into Bigelow’s work.

We Keep Odd Hours..."

Released in 1987, 'Near Dark' has grown slowly from a commercial failure on its initial release to a bona fide cult classic. Whilst it's now commonplace for a film to both blend and reference disparate genres, Kathryn Bigelow's sophomore film was quite revolutionary in its transposition of tropes from western, horror, action, road-movie and neo-noir films into a new and satisfying shape. Bigelow's vampires are most emphatically not decadent European aristocrats, rather they are American lowlife archetypes who tear into town, tear up the place and hit the road before sun-up. These badass undead provide a neat subversion of family dynamics and, while their actions are appalling (They actively enjoy killing rather than it being simply an exercise in survival) it's hard not to feel some degree of sympathy for them (Much as one feels some sympathy for the plight of Kinski's Nosferatu). Perhaps the least sympathetic character, in the end, is the half-vampire, Caleb who, in the end, chooses safe domesticity (And in the process tethers one of the vampire clan to mortality) over the dubious freedoms of the outlaw undead life. ***** Thanks to Bloomsbury / BFI and NetGalley for this ARC.

Reading this BFI Classic on Near Dark made me wonder on a larger scale if the rest of the world has really caught up with what I assumed was the weakening barrier between genre, high and low culture - and that those barriers I thought had been dismantled. Near Dark is a neo-cowboy-noir vampire film, it invents genres whilst breaking them, Yes its a nasty, bloodthirsty affair in places, but I always felt its place as a cult classic and possible genre classic was pretty much nailed down when Kathryn Bigelow won her Oscar for directing the Hurt Locker. Even if we hate the idea of the canon, and auteur theory, if you were to use those benchmarks to judge if Near Dark were interesting and important even outside of any of the films content, there is plenty of evidence that it is.

That Abbott spends any of the book having to argue that point I think is a bit of a failure in editorial in this imprint. The taint of imposter syndrome on behalf of the film is there, and I obviously see that as part of the still dominant sexism in the film industry. It is interesting comparing this to the 33 1/3 on Janet Jackson's The Velvet Rope, which, while happily takes on the numerous gendered themes in that album, never feels it has to argue that it deserves its place in the book series or as an important album. I also think this comes from Abbott's position within academia where she has clearly fought for intellectual acceptance of genre film. That also means this reads more academic that a lot of the BFi classics, and she probably spends too much of her precious space justifying rather than properly opening up.

What is here however is a great argument for the film, and particularly its position within 80's vampire movies and as Bigelow as a director who uses light in a glorious way. What is interesting about vampire films as subsections of horror is how they they exist throughout film history so the themes are barometers of various social mores. As an eighties movie Near Dark prods at the idea of family values, of independence, of transgression. I've always found the ending rather ironic, and Abbott also finds it more transgressive than it might appear. It doesn't need arguing that this is also a great film, lets start there. As ever though it still works as a brilliant companion to the film.

I’m glad to see that Near Dark has enough clout these days to merit a BFI Classic. It’s a great film, and Abbott’s monograph does a skilful job of illuminating it. It’s a short book, but it covers a lot of ground, from diving into the (excellent) cinematography to the ambiguities of the characters, without leaving us feeling shortchanged. It made me want to watch the film with fresh eyes, and you can’t really ask more than that from one of these, can you?

The first thing I've read from the BFI Film Classics series, which like all other modern monographs, from Object Lessons to Black Archives, I tend initially to consider as the relevant area's equivalent to the great reviver of the form, the 33 1/3 series on individual albums. But it's immediately apparent that these – or at least this – are much more academic in tone, much more insistent on proving canonicity and being taken seriously. Sometimes at a cost, as in this example:
"In contrast, Mae maintains a gender ambiguity throughout the film that is part of her allure and her transgressive potential. She cannot be reduced to one stereotype but rather embodies a complex fusion of seemingly contradictory characteristics and identities."

I don't disagree with a single thing said there, but I can't help feeling that a little more poetry and a little less university essay would have got the point across more effectively. Still, that's an extreme case; often Abbott does an excellent job of using a few well-chosen words perfectly to remind me of a scene from a film I've not seen in at least a decade. She's excellent on chiaroscuro, how Bigelow paints with light, and despite having seen all of the films involved, I'd never really considered before how Near Dark is in dialogue with the work of then-husband James Cameron, from the casting's deliberate borrowing of a cast dynamic established in Aliens, to the way Terminator 2 would echo Near Dark's barroom scene, right down to another shared actor. She's clearly done her research, even into second-order stuff like the other soundtrack work of Tangerine Dream (though this does make it even more puzzling that, at least in the Netgalley ARC I read, Lance Henriksen is Henrikson throughout).

It was interesting timing to read this – yes, obviously it's Hallowe'enish, but most of the other releases in this wave don't look to be horror films. Rather, because a friend had recently posted a picture of a Near Dark rerelease attempting to ride the Twilight slipstream, and I'd mocked with the best of them at what an absurd misrepresentation this was. But equally, having read this, I can see the correspondences. They're stories of vampires who are American not European, families not lone predators or masters and minions, ambiguous romances with arguably sappy endings that are in fact laced with unease. Of course Near Dark is bloody and dirty against Twilight's twee sparkle, but in a sense it is more of a natural next step than Dracula or even Lestat. So yes, whatever my quibbles – many of which are simply a case of expecting a slightly different book to the book this in fact is, and thus nobody's fault but mine – this has left me wanting to watch its subject again, and knowing that when I do, if not quite looking at it with the heightened senses of a vampire, I will see new things in it. Which must surely be counted as the mark of success.

Also, it's dedicated to the author's Westie, who sounds adorable.

I really enjoyed this book. Near Dark is one of my favorite movies, and to find a study of it, was fantastic. The things that I missed in a favorite movie was fascinating, and it also referenced other movies that I will need to track down and watch. Will need to pay attention to other books about movies now.