This stylish mashup of vampires, road movie, and Western upends the stereotype of the aristocratic bloodsucker in favor of white trash killers bombing around the south in stolen cars.

When Caleb (Adrian Pasdar), a small-town cowboy, meets a mysterious woman on the street, his plans go bad when the hook up leads to a bite on the neck. When she comes back for him in a ratty Winnebago, the windows blacked out with survival blankets and duct tape, he finds himself in a vampire Manson family.

Mae (Jenny Wright), who turned Caleb as a kind of mate, is relatively new to the life. But Jesse (Lance Henriksen), the ringleader of the family, is a Confederate soldier who's been slinking around the south ever since, reveling in killing and destruction like a vampire version of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. His mate Diamondback (Jenette Goldstein), the ferocious Severen (Bill Paxton), and Homer (Joshua Miller), an old man trapped in a boy's pudgy body, round out the gang.

While his father and sister hit the road to pass out pictures at gas stations and truck stops, Caleb tries to learn to kill but can't. He subsists off Mae, who feeds him from her wrist, risking her own life every time. The violence escalates to a vicious scene in a shitkicker bar, where Severen picks a fight and turns their nightly feeding into a brutal game, but even Mae has a good time with the killing. After, Caleb lets the kid marked for his first kill get away, leaving a living witness who might be able to bring them down.

Near Dark avoids the usual clichés: no fangs, no crosses, no bats, and the word vampire isn't even spoken. Far from living like Lestat or Count Dracula, they're basically homeless, stealing crappy station wagons and torching the scenes of their worst crimes. The only supernatural effect, as the vampires smoke and ignite in the sun, is simple and totally effective.

The film is shot beautifully, with striking images throughout. There's a particularly memorable undead version of a Butch and Sundance shootout, with the vampires holed up in a grubby motel and the state troopers outside, firing into the bungalow. But it's not the bullets the vampires have to worry about, it's the shafts of light they let in.

The actors are well cast and tight (Henriksen, Paxton, and Goldstein had just appeared in Aliens together, and it shows). Henriksen always looks like the walking dead, and Wright has exactly the right kind of feral beauty. And Miller is perfectly creepy as the foul-mouthed kid who ends up setting his sights on Caleb's little sister.

Tangerine Dream's score is regrettably dated, and the eventual finale rings false, selling out the doomed glamour of the first two-thirds for a conventional Hollywood ending. But that first hour, which embraces the dirty outlaw life of the vampires without shying away from the ugliness, is easily worth your time, a vampire Badlands without the voiceover.

Near Dark got blown out of the box office by 1987's other take on vampires, Kiefer Sutherland, Jason Patric, Jami Gertz, and the Coreys as the B-list Brat Pack in The Lost Boys. But Near Dark is, well, darker, moodier, and thoroughly more interesting, an unusual blending of genres that works so well you wonder why no one did it earlier.

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