Critics reviews

Near Dark is a genre film of surprising nuance, full of well-drawn characters and moral complexity that catches you unaware with insights on its cultural context.

Bigelow draws on the eroticism of the vampire genre to make the outlaw life seem seductive... The allure of living outside the law would become a recurring theme in Bigelow's films (Point Break, Zero Dark Thirty), but never again did she convey the theme so starkly.

Western iconography, noir-ish lighting, and visceral horror are fused with an affecting love story in this stylish 'Vampire Western', which (unlike Bigelow's rather static debut feature The Loveless) is driven forward at a scorching pace, a subtle study in the seductiveness of evil and a terrifying ride to the edge of darkness.

Outside of Caleb and the Vamp who turns him, there is a minimum of character development and explanation. The word "Vampire" is never used in the film, and when our hero gets up on his horse for the first time, we know the good guys will win.

Near Dark's vampire-Western fusion has been co-opted by movies like From Dusk Till Dawn and John Carpenter's Vampires, but Bigelow's film has lost none of its freshness or vitality. It's the most quintessentially American vampire movie ever made.

With K-19 an unfortunate recent memory, Near Dark is now even more clearly Bigelowís greatest achievement. She would later relive its inherent sexiness and sense of unrelenting momentum in Point Break, but it was in her solo feature debut (a gig hard won from initially reluctant producer Steven-Charles Jaffe) that she laid down the gauntlet in what had always been a male-dominated arena.

There are no gothic extravagances in Kathryn Bigelow's bone-dry, style-rich, noir-steeped vampire western. Instead it comprises a fascinatingly modern take on blood sucking mythology, shedding tradition to examine the creatures as human counterparts...

One regrets the pounding Muzak of Tangerine Dream, but this is on the whole a striking directorial debut, at once scary and erotic, with lots of sidelong touches in the casting, direction, and script (written by Bigelow and coproducer Eric Red).

The feelings here emerge from the texture of the imagery, from the way Bigelow stages her gun battles so that the bullets punch holes in the walls to let in the dread sunlight, and from the velvety intensity of Adam Greenberg's cinematography.

Bigelow has reappeared as the director of a beautifully crafted feature film... that explores some unsettled shadows in the American consciousness. It is an astute blend of genres: a vampire horror film that condenses the nature/culture conflict of the western with the problem of the rootless body expressed in the road movie.

Bigelow’s visual style - rudimentary in her earlier film, “The Loveless" - is often sensational here. She’s made a film whose pop nihilism and occasional wild beauty can raise a few honest shivers.

Kathryn Bigelow... searches desperately for a style, and tosses into the pot touches of film-noir lust, some cornpone family sentiment, blue-colored nights, overexposed days, orange suns that race across the screen, and enough blood and violence so ''Near Dark'' can be sold as a horror film but not enough to risk its R rating. You might call this the scattershot school of film making.