A lot of us ohais were cheering Kathryn Bigelow’s Best Director Oscar win for The Hurt Locker last night, not just because she’s an excellent filmmaker and she’s the first woman to win the award (about time!), but also because her first* movie as director was the awesome and influential cult vampire thriller Near Dark from 1987.

Co-starring three cast members from James Cameron’s Aliens (she and the Avatar director first met around this time; they briefly married in 1989), Near Dark is set in modern day Oklahama, where a young guy falls in with a really rough crowd: a “family” of violent drifters with unique dietary needs.

Here’s the blood-soaked, tobacco-chewin’, rip roarin’ trailer:

Like all Kathryn Bigelow’s works, it’s not just a kickass action movie, but also expresses a lot about the way we deal with power and desire, and the way social outcasts deal with the mainstream world. (Very much anticipating True Blood in all kinds of ways.) Now that she has two Oscars, Ms. Bigelow can pretty much make any movie she wants — hope she turns to another vampire flick soon!

Photo credit: Metro UK.

* Kathryn Bigelow co-directed The Loveless, Willem Dafoe’s first movie, in 1984.