Near Dark: Families Of Blood And Choice

If it isn’t clear from previous posts, I am extremely picky about vampire movies. Mostly because I feel like they’ve been done to (ha-ha) death, and if I’m being honest, the Twilight series both made serious bank and sort of ruined the concept for awhile. I’m not really a fan of the vampire as romantic figure, like you get with Interview With The Vampire or the Twilight series. The whole “oh woe is me for I live forever and must watch all beautiful things wither and die” schtick? Miss me with that. Films like 30 Days Of Night are more my speed. I like it when they’re threatening.

Needless to say. Near Dark has been on my radar for some time as a highly-praised hidden gem of the genre. But it wasn’t easily accessed on streaming until recently, and so when I saw it was available, I jumped on it immediately. And now having seen it, I definitely understand its cult-classic status; it’s a sharp, gritty Western about the nature of family that deals in blood in a couple senses of the word.

It’s a lazy night in rural Oklahoma, the mosquitos are out, and three good ol’ boys are scuffling and shit-talking like you do when you live someplace where that’s all there is to do. They spy a pretty young lady enjoying an ice cream cone, and one of the three - a strapping young man named Caleb - decides to shoot his shot with her. Her name is Mae and it goes fairly well, but she’s awfully concerned about getting home before sun-up. Caleb thinks she’s got a strict daddy and he’ll just charm her out of trouble, but there’s something vehement, almost desperate about it. So Caleb decides that he’s going to blackmail her. He’ll get her home before sunrise, but she has to kiss him. And Mae kisses him, and then bites him. Hard. Hard enough to draw blood, and hard enough for her to drink. Which she does before leaving a dazed Caleb on his own to recover. And when Caleb finally comes to, he feels like shit - sick, woozy, gagging.

When he stumbles out into the sunlight, he starts to burn.

Along comes a Winnebago, its windows lined with foil, and Caleb gets snatched up by the occupants. There’s Jesse, Diamondback, Severen, Homer…and Mae. Whatever it is they do, they don’t like to leave witnesses, and Severen cheerfully explains that he’s going to cut Caleb’s head off. Mae points out that she bit him but didn’t bleed him out. So now Mae has made him everybody’s problem. They have to explain to him what he is now, and what it’s going to take for him to survive. They’re going to see if he’s got the stomach for it. Meanwhile, back at the family homestead, Caleb’s father and little sister are worried because Caleb’s gone missing. Local law enforcement doesn’t seem too bothered - young man like that, he’s probably just off with a girl or something and he’ll come home soon enough. But they know Caleb better than that. So we have Caleb, and two families. There’s his father and little sister, and then this motley band of…well, nobody’s saying the “v” word, but they drink blood and can’t go outside during the day. It’s not much of a leap.

There’s nothing romantic about these vampires; theirs is a life of one stolen vehicle after another, hiding in barns and garages, sleeping under tarps and never staying in one place for too long. Very few of the usual cliches apply – sunlight’s lethal but they don’t give a shit about crosses or running water or garlic. They don’t even have fangs, but they kill and they drink and they live through almost everything else. The violence is quick and brutal – practiced killers who have learned that this is what they need to do to survive. And some of them, especially Homer and Severen, seem to really, really enjoy it with the glee that comes from realizing that rules are just constructs and there’s nothing stopping you from refusing them. But there’s a raw desperation to them akin to any group of people on the run - they’re just one step ahead of getting caught, they can’t ever settle down in one place, and at the end of the day, what they have is survival and really not much else. Mae seems to see some beauty and wonder in the idea of being alive long enough to be around when the light of distant stars finally reaches Earth, but none of the others seem to find joy in anything other than respite and murder.

Vampire movies with a family subtext are nothing new at all – the idea of one vampire siring another makes it a pretty short leap. But there are a bunch of ways to do it, as The Lost Boys, Twilight, Interview With The Vampire, and My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To can attest. This film pits biological family (the blood part of blood being thicker than water) against a potential family of choice (that, well, drinks blood). Jesse and his brood are very much in the margins, and it could be argued that there’s not a lot of choice involved, but they’re a bunch of people bound by sharing the thing that makes them different from the norm. So there’s some subversion going on here. Usually it’s the biological family who are the terrible assholes and the family of choice who are welcoming and kind, but here, it’s tenuous. Caleb wants nothing more than to return home, but doesn’t think he can, and the family of choice, usually the safe haven for outsiders, is accepting him begrudgingly at best. Either way, it comes down to blood.

This film also came out in the same year as The Lost Boys, but where that film was closer to slick, glossy teen dramas of the time, with a definite comic streak (and a butchering of one of my favorite songs), this is deadly serious, gritty and raw the way exploitation films of the period were; it’s easy to see the influence of this film in the nomadic True Knot of Doctor Sleep and the ultraviolent road trip of The Devil’s Rejects. It takes full of advantage of the sprawling landscape of the Southwest, the long stretches of road only sparsely dotted by gas stations and roadhouses and the sort of dark that swallows people up. Jesse’s brood are apex predators, practiced at existing in the margins where people aren’t likely to be missed.

And for a lower-budget film, it definitely has some moments of visual flair – there’s a shootout in a small bungalow that makes light more dangerous than the bullets flying, and there’s lots of fiery sunrises and sunsets, long lonely vistas scorched by the sun. The soundtrack is lush synthesizer and stabs of action-movie guitar, which serves to both ground it in the 1980s and heighten the exploitation-film feeling. The protagonists are pretty uniformly decent and The Good Guys, a father who wants his son back, the adorable younger sister, and a good ol’ boy in way over his head. But the antagonists have some flavor to them – Severen, the gleefully unapologetic killer, Jesse the dour patriarch who, with Diamondback (very much the mother figure) is just trying to keep their little family alive and off the radar, Mae is sort of a nonentity, mostly defined by her affection and protectiveness toward Caleb, and Homer, who might be the most interesting one – he’s someone who has been a little kid for a very, very, very, very long time, and the resentment and loneliness are palpable.

So there’s a lot to recommend this, and probably my only complaints are that the tension between one family and the other isn’t really as fully developed as it could be. Caleb’s not really running from anything, and the story can’t seem to settle on this new existence being either alluring in its freedom from morality and consequences or a desperate fight for survival that he’s been thrust into. There are elements of both, but they’re never really fleshed out, and I found the ending a little pat and free of meaningful consequences. But apart from that, it’s a hell of a ride and that rare vampire film that I actually like.

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Lovely, Dark, And Deep: Nature Abhors A Vacuum

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep, 

And miles to go before I sleep.

 

- Robert Frost

One of the most common taxonomies of narrative conflict divides it into three: Man against man, man against nature, and man against self. And in my experience writing this thing, man against nature definitely earns its keep. The wilderness is scary – beautiful and utterly impassive, indifferent to the fates of the creatures that inhabit it, including humans. The Blair Witch Project knows it, In The Earth knows it, Yellowbrickroad knows it, even lesser films like Gaia and The Ritual know it. The wilderness is full of things that may very well mean you harm, and it’s easy to lose yourself.

Lovely, Dark, And Deep knows it too. It’s an eerie, deliberately (possibly too deliberately) paced story about the burdens we carry and the mysteries of nature.

We’re introduced to a sprawling expanse of forest known simply as “the backcountry,” and the rangers who patrol it from tiny cabins, on their own for months. It’s the start of the day and everyone’s sounding off by radio to indicate that they’re okay. It passes around to Ranger Varney, and we see him outside his cabin, shouldering a pack, closing up the cabin and ignoring his radio. He’s repeatedly asked to sound off, but he goes about his business. The requests turn to pleas, and Varney tapes a piece of paper over the “The Ranger Is In” sign outside the cabin.

It says “I owe this land a body.”

Sometime later, the backcountry rangers are gathering for the start of a new season. Lennon is a ranger new to the detail, someone who’s worked her way up the ladder to this assignment. It’s what she’s always wanted to do, but the other rangers seem awkward around her. She’s prickly and distant, but she knows how she’s seen by the others. There’s a backstory there and rumors get around. It’s a tough gig working in the backcountry - you’re out in the middle of nowhere, reachable only by helicopter, for months in monastic living conditions. A lot of weird shit happens out there, and people go missing all the time, with only a fraction ever found. As it turns out, one of those people was Lennon’s sister Jenny. It was a long time ago, and Lennon has become a ranger specifically to take this assignment, to patrol the woods where her sister vanished, and do her best to pick up a trail that went cold decades ago. She’s a woman on a mission and she’s used to being seen as crazy or obsessed. And maybe she is, given the distance she’s gone to try and solve her sister’s disappearance. But she’s a competent ranger, if not always good at following orders.

What follows is Lennon moving deeper and deeper into the wilderness, dealing with another missing hiker case (people go missing in the wilderness, but an unusual number go missing out here), clashing with her superiors and realizing that there’s something else out there. It’s not an especially histrionic film, performances and dialogue are believable and low-key, the somber reserve of people who have a difficult job to do. Everyone seems believable and even Lennon, in her rash decisions and tendency to disobey orders, comes across as someone deeply driven by guilt and grief, possibly to the point of obsession. But no scenery gets chewed, there aren’t really any jump scares. It’s very quiet and meditative with brief but effective moments that communicate the sinister strangeness underneath the beauty. This film lets things happen in the background (which I’ve always found more unnerving than showing something in my face and yelling BOO!), and it has an excellent sense of wrongness without going overboard. It’s not overexplained, and it doesn’t need to be because the visuals do a lot of the work, cryptic but evocative.

That said, I do think that the deliberate pace is, in this case, a bit of a double-edged sword. I like it when a film has the confidence to slow down and build a mood, and the pace and relative quiet communicate what it’d be like to spend months by yourself in the actual middle of nowhere. But the deliberate pace also means that the film drags at points, spinning its wheels a little. More escalation wouldn’t have been out of place, but the overall effect is that of gradually sinking into a dream, where reality, grief, and something outside of our understanding gradually come together and it works pretty well on that front.

The end does let it down a little as well. It builds to a climax, but that climax could have used more tension instead of continuing the very even, gradual pace of the previous acts, and the ultimate reveal is maybe a little on-the-nose and over-exposited. The film is very good about showing instead of telling everywhere else, so I think they could have carried that a little more into the end, but otherwise it carries some of the same narrative and tonal DNA as Absentia and Censor, however different the settings, resulting in a nicely creepy meditation on grief, guilt, and letting go.

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Splinter: Mostly Killer, No Filler

I have a hard time with monster movies, because suspension of disbelief is really important for me to get into a horror film, and believable monsters (like, creature-monsters) are tough to pull off on the sort of budget most horror movies get. Cheap effects look cheap, and the cheaper they look the harder it is to suspend disbelief. There are, of course, exceptions - The Thing still gets to me today even though the effects work is dated, and the mediocre prequel - which used reasonably good digital effects - seems bloodless by comparison.

Splinter, then, is very much an exception to the rule. It’s not especially rich thematically, but it IS a crisp, tense siege film with some really smart effects work.

We begin in the expanse of Texas, all scrubland, oil wells and long lonely roads. A gas station attendant tries to stave off the boredom by investigating some noises he hears behind the building. What he finds appears to be a dead dog covered in some kind of spiny growth.

Elsewhere, we get introduced to two couples. Seth, a biology grad student, and his girlfriend Polly are planning to do some camping as a romantic getaway. Except Seth is absolutely the stereotypical brainiac and manages to bungle setting up the tent badly enough that it becomes unusable. There’s some bickering before they agree to get back on the road and find a place to sleep for the night. Dennis and Lacey are on the run from…something, it’s not clear, though it’s probably the cops. Lacey doesn’t look too good. She’s fidgety and strung-out. They’re trying to get to Mexico, but their car (well, the car they’re driving) breaks down and Lacey starts to panic. And along come Seth and Polly. One hitchhiking ruse and armed takeover of the car later, Dennis and Lacey and Seth and Polly are Mexico-bound. Lacey’s mad that Seth isn’t the kind of doctor that can write prescriptions, and Seth and Polly are mad that they’ve been hijacked by armed fugitives.

I don’t know what makes characters in horror movies so prone to hitting animals in the middle of the road, but that’s sure enough what happens and when Dennis gets out to inspect the damage, he notices that the roadkill has some weird spiny growth coming out of it. The car’s undamaged, but they need to gas up, so they stop at the next gas station they find. Oddly, it seems unattended.

And then they find the attendant. Well, what’s left of him, covered in that same spiny growth.

And, as it turns out, there’s something outside as well. So our four protagonists end up barricading themselves in the gas station, while god-knows-what roams around outside, It’s a fairly straightforward setup - there’s the tension of the threat outside, and the tension between the four characters. They can’t leave the gas station, they can’t call for help because Dennis doesn’t want the cops involved, and they can’t stay there forever. So, like any good siege movie, the prime mover here is the need to escape without getting killed. It’s a pretty lean film  - the performances are economic, with each character largely defined by a single characteristic. Seth is nerdy and ineffectual (until the third act), Polly is feisty, Dennis is a criminal, and Lacey is dopesick. That’s sort of it. The dialogue is fine, nothing too caricatured, but none of it is especially nuanced either.

But it doesn’t really pull you out of it either, because the filmmakers handle the classic problem of the monster movie well. Monster movies are tough because you have to show the monster eventually, and when you do, it’s going to be pretty difficult to make it plausible unless you’ve got the best effects houses in the business on the job, and they’re generally not doing horror films. So it’s a balancing act – show it enough to make it a threat, but not so much that the seams show. On that front, this film works admirably, with a mix of makeup, practical effects, sound design, quick cuts, blurry close-ups and tight shots working to both create a plausible, unsettling monster and keep the pace quick and sharp. It’s aware of the limitations but also not especially constrained by them, and the actor(s) playing the monster move with a twitching, jerking physicality that really captures a feeling of a host hijacked by an organism. And just as the makeup alone isn’t doing all the work, to make the creature convincing, the camera tells the story as least as much as the performances and script do. There are a lot of tight and close shots, creating a sense of confinement inside the gas station, and the filmmakers know when to linger on a shot and when to cut away quickly. It’s a very bloody film - splashes and streaks and pools of the stuff - but not an especially gory one. The worst violence happens offscreen and reactions tell us what we need to know. There is the gas station, lit by cold, sickly fluorescents and outside, nothing but yawning dark. To its further credit, it makes very little attempt to explain the threat - there’s a nod to some kind of petrochemical research shenanigans, but just a nod. It’s less important to know how it got here than it is to deal with it being here, and I appreciate that.

There are some pacing issues - it doesn’t waste time (it’s not even an hour and a half long), but even so, the first act feels a little slack compared to the third, when everything comes to a head. It feels like once the four protagonists are brought together, there’s too much time spent on them in the car. That could work, if we were being lead to think this was a hostage film and have the horror elements sprung on us in the second act. That wouldn’t be a bad way to go, but we know right off the bat that there’s a monster out there, so when the other shoe drops in the second act, it feels a little like a foregone conclusion. But it’s a pretty minor quibble.

On balance, this is a really good example of a low-budget horror film that not only doesn’t overstep its limits, but actually makes sort of a strength out of them. It uses its single location well, it’s lean and efficient and has some interesting turns, and the threat never feels implausible or silly. It’s a little slight, but I would really like to see what the filmmakers could so with a richer, more expansive story, because this film convinces me they’ve got the chops for it.

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