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.

I Have More Than A Suspicion About What Went Wrong With Suspect

The elders of this world speak of a bygone era, one in which video game arcades were the hottest places to go, Donald Trump was a rich white nationalist instead of a white nationalist with nukes by his side and Creed had yet to become a band. This era was called the 1980's and it was here that a singer by the name of Cher made a run at being a movie star in a number of high-profile films including Mask, Silkwood and Moonstruck. Since then, her presence as an actor in the world of cinema has been limited to just a lead role in Burlesque and voice-over work in Zookeeper but there was a time in the 1980s where she a regular fixture of the silver screen, starring in films like the 1987 courtroom thriller Suspect.