film criticism by maryann johanson | since 1997
It’s like a pop culture perfect storm: In the late 1980s, James Cameron directed a music video — the only one he ever made — for Bill Paxton’s band (for the one album they made). It features, among many Cameron players of the time including Paul Reiser and Jenette Goldstein, his then-wife, Kathryn Bigelow, as … more…
Of course, most respected anthropologists and biologists recognize that the New World Vampire, or *vampirus americanus*, differs greatly from the European species, or *vampirus continentalus*, but few films have recognized that the wide-open spaces of the U.S. produce a vastly altered creature than Europe’s dense urban spaces or intimate, if remote, medieval villages. But years before John Carpenter and the team of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez documented the vampires that dwell in the lonely stretches of the Americas, the criminally underappreciated ethnographer Kathryn Bigelow did it — spookily, grimly, hilariously, gloriously — with 1987’s *Near Dark,* in which a coven of nasty bloodsuckers roam the deserted American Southwest.
