Odds are that if you are familiar with director/producer/writer Kathryn Bigelow it will be for her Drama/Thriller pieces like K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson, or for her outstanding work on The Hurt Locker (2008) for which she was the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director, she won the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing, she won the BAFTA Award for Best Direction, and she also earned the Critics Choice Award for Best Director. (This is on top of the awards that the film won on its own.) She is also the directorial force behind the recent blockbuster, Zero Dark Thirty (2012).
The reason why Bigelow has earned a nod here is due to a western horror film she wrote and directed in 1987 towards the beginning of her career. The film was called New Dark and was about a small town farmer’s son who is turned into a vampire and reluctantly joins a traveling group of vampires once he makes the transition. With a tagline like “Blood is our life, Darkness, our feeding ground, and Sunlight, our eternal damnation”, it makes me wish she hadn’t veered off entirely into the area of more mainstream action and thriller dramas, and instead had stuck to her roots in horror.
