Near Dark

Kathryn Bigelow's vampires are a family in a camper van with the windows painted over, and the word is never used once in the entire film.

A farm boy in Oklahoma is bitten by a girl he meets outside a bar and is taken on by the group, who give him a week to make his first kill. They are filthy, broke and permanently sunburned around the edges, which is not how vampires had been filmed before.

The bar sequence is the set piece: the group take over a roadhouse and work through the customers slowly, with Bill Paxton enjoying himself more than is decent, scored to a Tangerine Dream cue that should not fit and does.

It was released within months of The Lost Boys, was buried by it commercially, and is the better film by a distance.

Three of the cast had just come off Aliens, which Bigelow used deliberately.