The best vampire movie of all time hit theaters 30 years ago.
Released the same year as The Lost Boys, Near Dark makes a pretty good case for being the sub-genre’s best. With incredible performances from Bill Paxton and Lance Henriksen, a mesmerizing score by Tangerine Dream, and a super cool horror-western feel, Kathryn Bigelow’s film is not just one of the best vampire movies, but one of the very best exports of one of the genre’s very best decades.
Thirty years after its release, Lance Henriksen reflects on the making of Near Dark in a new interview that just hit A.V. Club, revealing that he and Paxton had so much fun making the movie that they were ready to do another one right after filming wrapped!
“I loved doing that movie. We were a real family,” Henriksen told the site. “Billy Paxton was in it, Jenette Goldstein, and all these people. It was a great movie to work on. Kathryn Bigelow was my first experience with a female director, and it was great. It was a real matriarchal situation.”
“We all loved doing it. The minute we finished that film, I remember Billy and I standing in the middle of the road, and it was literally the very last shot of the movie, and we both had the feeling right away that we should do the prequel right away,” he recalled. “Like, we should start it right now. And we would’ve. If they’d said, ‘Let’s go, let’s do it.’ We would’ve gone. But they never did.”
“We had the whole story. Billy and I sat for hours after hours talking about it, about what could be in it and that kind of stuff. It was great.”
