Before she became known as the only woman to ever win an Academy Award for Best Director, before the action surf bank-robbing bromance of Point Break, before the Best Picture-winning war drama The Hurt Locker or the controversial action thriller Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow directed a little (though not so little by today’s indie budget standards) hard-to-categorize flick called Near Dark. It’s a melodrama … inside a vampire horror movie ... with a teen romance subplot of star-crossed lovers … within the shell of a biker-filled Western?

Yes. Yes it is.

You’ll note the presence of Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen, and Jennette Goldstein of Aliens fame, released a year earlier in 1986 by Bigelow’s then-husband James Cameron. Their continued ensemble performances do not disappoint — with Henriksen being the most fearsome vampire pack leader of my childhood memory, and Bill Paxton being even more Bill Paxton-y than Aliens Bill Paxton (if that’s even possible).

Paxton was in a great number of the films that shaped my cinematic tastes. He is an actor who — be it villain or hero — always brought more to a character than you'd see on the page, no matter the genre. I'm saddened to think I won't see another role brought to life with that signature lopsided smile.

Near Dark came out within two months of another favorite vampire feature of my youth, Lost Boys, which fared much better at the box office.

Where Lost Boys doesn’t stray too far from the path of typical vampire genre convention, Near Dark goes off the map entirely. Outside of the originality of circumventing some of the tropes of the now-tired vampire trend, or even the blending of the conventions of the other aforementioned genres, Near Dark’s biggest success is its consistency of tone. In no universe should a film containing a stoic cowboy involved in a horse chase with a tinfoil-covered RV filled with a pack of leather-jacket-clad vampires; a semi-automatic shoot out with Texas police; a stand-off with a tractor trailer literally on fire; and a resolution through blood transfusion, reach any level of coherency, let alone consistency of vision.

I felt a lot of affinity for Bigelow, personally, as a role model growing up. Fellow filmmakers (mostly dudes) around my age worship at the feet of Cameron and Carpenter and Raimi, sing the praises of Spielberg and Scorsese. I do too — but it’s nice to be able to throw Kathryn Bigelow — or Gale Ann Hurd as a Producer for that — into the conversation for having just as influential an effect on a generation of filmmakers. Near Dark was her first solo directorial effort. Her prior experience (much like my own), had been as a co-director of genre films, or in music videos. She also got a Master’s in Film. I bring this up because it was a huge influence on me having the confidence to move into directing — to see that her path into filmmaking didn’t exactly mirror theirs, and to see a woman not just working in a space that is typically seen as the ‘boy’s club’ genres of horror, action, and thriller, but to be completely entrenched in it, her films held up as an example of what the best of the medium can actually be.