13 Days of First-Time Frights: Near Dark Review

13 Days of First-Time Frights is a series of reviews for October 2019 where Douglas Laman, in the spirit of Halloween, watches and writes about thirteen horror movies he's never seen before. These reviews will be posted each Tuesday and Thursday as well as the last three Wednesdays of October 2019.

Entry #11: Near Dark

She's most well-known in the modern era for the kind of gritty dramas that led her to become the first woman ever to direct a Best Picture-winning movie (not to mention becoming the first woman to win Best Director), Kathryn Bigelow got her start as a filmmaker in the world of genre cinema. Thrillers, science-fiction fare, cop dramas, Bigelow did it all and in the process created a number of iconic movies, including Point Break. Her second ever directorial effort was Near Dark, a vampire Western horror film that also stands as one of her most stylized features even among her unabashedly over-the-top genre movie repertoire.

You Can Thank Sanaa Lathan And Alien Carnage For Making Alien vs. Predator More Watchable Than Expected

Ever since a 1989 comic had created the idea of the Xenomorphs from the Alien movies and the Predators from the Predator movies meeting up and duking it out, 20th Century Fox had carried a hankering for creating an entire motion picture centered around that concept. Despite Sigourney Weaver, the face of the entire Alien franchise up to that point, feeling the idea was a bad idea and would kill the franchise, the studio plowed ahead on the concept, with the results of the fruit of their labors being Alien vs. Predator, a 2004 action horror movie that broke new ground by being the first entry in either the Alien or Predator franchises to be rated PG-13.