It seems like something good came out of TWILIGHT’s success — it put a stake in the heart of the planned NEAR DARK remake. For now, anyway.
Michael Bay’s horror remake company Platinum Dunes was working on an update of Kathryn Bigelow’s influential vampire movie, but as Dunes producer Brad Fuller tells Empire: “NEAR DARK is probably not going to happen. I think that TWILIGHT was the same type of thing we were going for although NEAR DARK was a much darker, sexier, rated R version of that. But I’m concerned that, conceptually, that NEAR DARK and TWILIGHT are too similar in terms of a vampire movie. For now, that movie is on hold.”
Of course, the themes of TWILIGHT were also too similar to about a thousand other “forbidden love” stories, genre or otherwise, but that didn’t stop them from making it a movie, and a lucrative one…
The original 1987 NEAR DARK was a stylish and violent portrayal of seduction, equal parts Western and horrifying road movie. It starred flying HEROES politician Adrian Pasdar as a farmboy named Caleb who falls in love with a traveling vampire. Once she sinks her fangs into him, he becomes part of her “family”, which includes the reunited ALIENS triumvirate of Lance Henriksen, Jenette Goldstein and Bill Paxton (who hates it when they ain’t been shaved). But after spending a bit of quality time with the roving vamp band, Caleb quickly realizes the lifestyle kind of sucks.
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