31 Days of Horror: Day 3

Day 3: Near Dark (1987)

Oklahoma. One night small-town kid Caleb (Adrian Pasdar), meets drifter Mae (Jenny Wright), who bites him as he tries to make out with her and runs away.  When his flesh begins to burn with the rising sun, she arrives with a family of vampires who take him away in an RV.  Leader Jesse (Lance Henriksen) allows Caleb to travel with them but tells Caleb he must hunt and feed, but Caleb is unwilling.  Meanwhile, Caleb’s father searches for him, inadvertently endangering Caleb’s sister.

Director Kathryn Bigelow had wanted to make a Western, but she and Eric Red (who co-wrote the screenplay) added vampires when funding became difficult to obtain.  Released in October 1987, it was overshadowed by the surfeit of vampire pictures of the period (including Fright Night, Lifeforce, Once Bitten, Vamp, and, released earlier that summer, The Lost Boys), and underperformed at the box office. Yet it found an audience on home video, with the bar scene becoming a classic set piece. 

For Further Reading: Less Than Human by Gary Raisor

​Drifter vampires Steven and Earl arrive in a small Texas town, where they hustle pool and menace the residents until a bar fight ignites a war between vampires and humans, ultimately making the town’s streets run red with blood.  Intense, gruesome, and literate, it deserves a place among such vampire novels as King’s Salem’s Lot, Lindqvist’s Let Me In, and Rosson’s Coffin Moon.