It’s easy to come across a fusty old man, bemoaning modern vampire flicks while simultaneously trumpeting the triumph of those from the past, ‘Bah, Twilight‘s fable about a popular heartthrob of the day discovering their sexuality isn’t a patch on The Lost Boys‘ fable about a popular heartthrob of the day discovering their sexuality’, etc. Vampire movies haven’t changed all that much since they traded Hungarian noblemen for pop-rock/shirtless saxophone soundtracks, have they?
Just look to 1987’s superb and underrated Near Dark, in which a young man in smalltown Oklahoma, meets a vampire girl, gets turned and wrestles with his reluctance to kill. It sounds dreadful – as dreadful as Twilight sounds to some – but it’s a brilliant looking, understated affair in a era of horror films that frequently punched far above their weight class and now look like episodes of Charmed as a consequence.
Check it out, and maybe give Twilight the benefit of the doubt too.
