FILM 1878: NEAR DARK

FILM 1878: NEAR DARK

TRIVIA: While shooting in the desert, Lance Henriksen relieved the boredom between takes by hopping in his car and taking short drives through the desert, still in costume and often staying in character. According to Henriksen and Bill Paxton, the two were stopped by a policeman who became so unnerved questioning Jesse about his speeding that the officer became visibly uncomfortable, stepping back and placing his hand on his firearm. The obviously flustered officer decided to send them on their way rather than write them a ticket.

Unusual for a vampire movie, the word "vampire" is never mentioned.

Future husband James Cameron suggested to Bigelow that she use the ready-made ensemble cast from his recent hit Aliens (1986), and thus Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, and Jenette Goldstein all appear in Bigelow's film. Michael Biehn had also appeared in Aliens and was considered, but declined to participate.

This film marked Kathryn Bigelow's first solo directorial effort and the film's producer, Edward S. Feldman told her that if she couldn't handle or didn't know what she was doing while filming after five days, she would be replaced. She kept the job.

At approximately 21:13 of the movie, when Caleb in stumbling through the town in Texas, in the background there is a Warner cinema playing Aliens (1986), a movie also starring several of the main characters from Near Dark - including Lance Henriksen (Jessie), Bill Paxton (Severen), and Jenette Goldstein. (Diamondback).

At the start of the bungalow gunfight scene, a cross can be seen in the handle of Jesse's pistol alluding to the idea that these vampires do not follow the same "rules" of traditional vampire mythology.

When Severen and Jesse torch the motor home, Severen asks Jesse if he had remembered about a "fire that they had started in Chicago". It is assumed that they mean the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 that left more than 100,000 people homeless and destroyed businesses. Though apocryphal legend attributes the fire to a cow who kicked a lantern, the cause still remains a mystery.

FILM 1764: VAMPIRE'S KISS

FILM 1764: VAMPIRE'S KISS

TRIVIA: Peter's strange accent is supposed to be a fake accent used by the character because he thinks he sounds more "elegant" and "smarter" (hence the literary agent job). The accent comes and goes throughout the movie and is more prominent when trying to impress people, and less in scenes with people like the psychiatrist.

A popular image macro meme was taken from a still frame from this movie, in the scene where Cage's character is telling Alva that she is the lowest employee on the totem pole.

Nicolas Cage playing Peter Loew ate a real cockroach for this film - it reportedly took three takes. He once said about the experience, "Every muscle in my body didn't want to do it, but I did it anyway."

FILM 1692: WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS

TRIVIA: More than 120 hours of footage was shot, most of which were improvisation from the leads.

Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi wrote 150 pages of actual script but chose not to show it to a single person involved in the film (both crew and cast). The reasoning was to keep things spontaneous and actors to be surprised by the events unfolding before their eyes.

The man who plays Stu is not a actor but actually Stu Rutherford. A part-time business analyst for a Wellington company, LanWorx. He was hired for the film under the impression that he would be working on computers, and that he would play a small part in the film.

Each of the main characters are similar to a vampire from a famous vampire movie: Petyr is analogous to Nosferatu, Deacon reflects Bela Lugosi's Dracula, Vladislav is comparable to Gary Oldman's Dracula, Nick is reminiscent of Edward from Twilight (2008), and Viago is like Louis de Pointe du Lac from Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles(1994).

FILM 1535: THE HUNGER

TRIVIA: David Bowie said that, in order to make his voice suitably hoarse for when he aged so drastically in the movie, he stood on the George Washington Bridge every night and screamed all the punk rock songs he knew.

In The Celluloid Closet (1995), the 1995 documentary about the history of homosexuality in film, actress Susan Sarandon said that the screenplay for The Hunger (1983) originally called for her to be demonstrably drunk in the lead-up to her sex scene with Catherine Deneuve, but Sarandon asked for it to be changed so that her character had only a single sip of wine and then spilled the rest of the glass. She said she wanted to make it clear that her character was choosing to have sex with Miriam instead of doing it because of the alcohol, and also because "you wouldn't have to get drunk to bed Catherine Deneuve, I don't care what your sexual history to that point had been".

David Bowie actually learned to play the cello for his music scenes.

Tony Scott discovered the rock group Bauhaus in a London nightclub and decided to put them in the movie.

In an interview with The Daily Beast in late July, 2014, Susan Sarandon revealed that she had an affair with David Bowie while the two were working on this film.

One day during filming, costume designer Milena Canonero, who is famously dedicated to her craft, disappeared and was nowhere to be found. It was discovered eventually that she had flown to Rome to purchase fabric for a handkerchief David Bowie is supposed to wear. Unable to find fabric she liked in London, Canonero had flown to Rome at her own expense to find the fabric she needed instead.

The age of female vampire Miriam Blaylock (Catherine Deneuve) was six thousand years. The amount of time she had been lovers with John Blaylock (David Bowie) was three hundred years.

Though set in New York, nearly all of the picture was shot in London.

The 19th Century mansion seen in the movie was a house located in the affluent London suburb of Mayfair.

The film spurred a short-lived TV series of the same name The Hunger (1997) which ran for around three years. The series, first broadcast fourteen years after this movie, utilized the same title and vampire lore, but had no plot or character connections with this film.

Director Tony Scott's first theatrical feature.

CAMEO: Willem Dafoe: As a youth at a phone booth.

FILM 1503: ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE

TRIVIA: There was some action in the film at first. But when Jim Jarmusch was asked to add more he instead removed all of it.

According to the script, Eve is 2000 years old and was the druid matriarch of a Celtic tribe. Adam is 500 to 600 years old. Jim Jarmusch decided that Adam and Eve would be aware of each other's true age so he argued they have no reason to state it in the film, but simply informed the actors of the age of the characters. In an extended version of the nude scene, shown in the DVD special features, Adam & Eve do talk about her druidic connections.

The white dwarf Eve mentions to Adam while driving across the city is the star called BPM 37093, also known as Lucy (named after The Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds). Its nucleus is in a cooling down process, which makes the star core pulsate like a giant gong.

Eve books a flight for herself and Adam under the names "Daisy Buchanan" and "Stephen Dedalus," main characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" and James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," respectively. Stephen Dedalus also appears as the sidekick in Joyce's "Ulysses." In Joyce's final novel "Finnegans Wake," there is a famous recurring poem with the line "riverrun past eve and adam."

Some of the many pictures on Adam's wall include portraits of Richard Wagner, Jean Michel Basquiat, Max Ernst & Dorothea Tanning, Marcel Duchamp, Nikola Tesla, Isaac Newton, Christopher Marlowe (who is also represented by the John Hurt character in the film), William Blake, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, William S. Burroughs, Oscar Wilde, Mary Wollstonecraft, Naomi Klein, Susan Sontag, Samuel Beckett, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Arthur Rimbaud, John Keats, Charles Baudelaire, Jalaluddin Muhammad Rumi, Sitting Bull, Black Elk, Geronimo, Joe Strummer, Bo Diddley, Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde, Hank Williams, Jimi Hendrix, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Johann Sebastian Bach, Franz Schubert, Gustav Mahler, Henry Purcell, Nicholas Ray, Claire Denis, Aki Kaurismäki, Luis Buñuel, Robby Müller, Fritz Lang, Bruce Lee, Buster Keaton, Rodney Dangerfield, Harpo Marx and Hedy Lamarr as well as numerous musicians whom Jim Jarmusch has worked with on various films including Tom Waits, Neil Young, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Iggy Pop, and RZA.

One of the books that Eve packs for her trip to Detroit is a catalog of Jean Michel Basquiat's work. Jeffrey Wright (Dr. Watson) played the title character of the movie Basquiat (1996).

All the actors playing vampires wore wigs that were a mix of human, yak and goat hair in order to make them look more wild.

Among the books Eve packs for her trip to Detroit are the play "Endgame" by Samuel Beckett, "Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra, and "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace.