Trivia / Near Dark

---

• Acclaimed Flop: Despite crashing and burning at the box office, Near Dark received high praise from critics for its astonishing cinematography, themes and character work. Nowadays, it has better critical reception than the movie that destroyed it in the box office (The Lost Boys).
• Actor-Inspired Element: Jesse's visual was mostly conceived by Lance Henriksen, from the jagged fingernails, the dirty leather coat with a Confederate flag sewn inside it, the razor-thin appearance and the ponytail. Bill Paxton also ad-libbed a lot of of Old West lingo to Severen's lines ("Finger-lickin'-good!" was apparently one of them).
• Breakthrough Hit: For Kathryn Bigelow.
• Completely Different Title:
  • Latin America: When Darkness Falls
  • Brazil: When Darkness Comes
  • Denmark: The Devil's Daughter
  • France: At the Frontiers of Dawn
  • Greece: Wild Night
  • Hungary: Twilight
  • Portugal: After Nightfall
  • Spain: The Night Travelers
  • Sweden: The Night Has Its Price
  • Taiwan: Kiss of the Night
• Dueling Movies: With The Lost Boys. It lost. A proposed remake was put on hold to avoid this with Twilight.
• Dyeing for Your Art: Lance Henriksen stopped eating in order to make his chest bones visible and drove to the filming set in order to get into character better. Jenette Goldstein had a bad peroxide blond hair-dye done to reflect the fact the characters are poor and constantly on the move.
• Follow the Leader: As noted on the main page, Kathryn Bigelow's intended western was merged with a vampire film, because those had become trendy thanks to Fright Night (1985) and the upcoming The Lost Boys.
• The Foreign Subtitle:
  • Germany: Near Dark: The Night Has Its Price
  • Japan: Near Dark: Moonlit Night Events
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The film is not widely available on streaming, having occasional stints on platforms such as Shudder and Amazon Prime before taken out of circulation. Prospective viewers have even less luck on home media, as the Blu-ray and DVDs have gone out of print. It has since become available both to buy and rent on YouTube, and also pops up on the Criterion Channel from time to time.
  • Additionally, if one uses Vudu's Disc 2 Digital feature, they can also get it for 2 dollars in SD. (standard definition, AKA DVD quality)
• Method Acting: Allegedly there was an instance where Lance Henriksen and Bill Paxton were out joyriding off-set in their on-set costumes and were pulled over by a cop. Lance, who was driving, spoke and reacted to the officer in full-character as Jesse. He ended up scaring the officer so badly that at one point the officer started touching his firearm. They ended up not getting a ticket, however. The DVD extras also have Lance Henriksen telling about his Method Acting experiences like picking up hitchhikers to freak them out by acting as Jesse, and Bill Paxton's own Method Acting leading to him execute some cruel pranks in line with Severen's dark sense of humor. To a lesser extent, the entire main vampire cast did some Method Acting by living the way their characters would (i.e sleeping in a van, only going out at night, staying with their costumes, hanging out together) during the filming.
• Production Posse: Kathryn Bigelow (James Cameron's then-partner) helms, with Aliens co-stars Henriksen, Paxton, and Goldstein co-starring (and Cameron in The Cameo). He had even suggested all the actors for those respective parts. One of the guys in the bar also reappears as the main biker in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
• Throw It In!: Apparently the iconic line "Finger-lickin' good!" uttered by Severen during the bar fight was an ad-lib by Bill Paxton. As were most of Severen's lapses into Old West lingo ("Smells just like a dead polecat!").
• What Could Have Been:
  • Both Johnny Depp and D.B. Sweeney auditioned for Caleb.
  • Michael Biehn was offered the role of Jesse Hooker, but turned it down because he found the script confusing. He later noted that it was one of the few roles he regretted passing on.
  I’m a very linear person – I’ve got to see beginning, middle and end, and if the scenes don’t make sense to me, it’s very hard for me to progress with them. I mean, I had real trouble with movies like Memento and Irreversible, and the flashbacks, stuff like that. Again, it was a mistake that I made, because I would’ve loved to have worked with Kathryn, because she went on to do the movie with Patrick Swayze and Keanu, and there was a call that was made to me about the Patrick Swayze role in that, also. That was a mistake, that I didn’t do Near Dark. I look at it, and I’ve seen it recently, and it’s an interesting film from a first time filmmaker, and she’s a brilliant filmmaker."
  • According to Kathryn Bigelow, one ending considered was for Caleb's younger sister Sarah to follow him and Mae into the sunlight only for her hand to start burning, implying she was bitten by Homer during her abduction and is now infected. However this was eventually dropped as it would have had little impact given she could be easily cured via blood transfusions.
• Word of Saint Paul: Due the extensive Method Acting done by the vampire gang, a lot of the characters' backgrounds was created by the actors. According to Lance Henriksen, Jesse was from the Confederate Navy, and during a giant bloodbath of a naval battle, he fell into the sea, wounded and dying, where he was whisked away by "dark sirens" who then turned him into a vampire. According to Bill Paxton, Severen was a lowlife whom Jesse stumbled into during the 1870s and subsequently chose to turn because he reminded him of his brother who died during the Civil War. The cast also largely agrees Homer, the child member of the gang, was turned during The '50s. Jeanette Goldstein believes Diamondback may have been turned in the Depression Era and may have been a former prized beauty, but Kathryn Bigelow seems to think Diamondback was older than that.

---