20 Things You Didn't Know About Near Dark
11. Vampires In The 1980s
By the mid 1980s the vampire genre was still suffering the hangover of Hammer Horror, with a few exceptions (The Hunger, Herzog's Nosferatu). In the public imagination, gothic was out, replaced by the stark revisionist realism of The Exorcist and The Omen.
The trend continued with The Lost Boys, released the same year and taking a similar approach to reinvention. Other vampire movies of the decade had a broader emphasis on comedy, such as Vamp (Grace Jones as a vampire, yes please), Fright Night (high school shenanigans) and The Monster Squad (kids' horror at its best).
Near Dark totally did away with the damp castles, eccentric professors and rubber bats - these bloodsuckers had more in common with Mad Max than Bela Lugosi.