Nomads is a 1986 American horror film written and directed by John McTiernan, adapted from the novel of the same name by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.

In a Los Angeles city hospital, Jean-Charles Pommier, a French anthropologist, is brought into the emergency room.

At the start of it, after years of travelling around the world and studying the religious beliefs and spiritual rituals of non-Western cultures, Pommier finally settles down with his wife Niki in Los Angeles to teach at UCLA.

His home in the suburbs is vandalized one night by a gang of street punks who travel around in a black van.

They are very interested in his house, and he finds that they have built a shrine in his garage to a murderer who recently killed two girls who lived there.

Despite being afraid of them, he is also fascinated, as he misses his own nomadic lifestyle and has qualms about complying to his wife's wishes and settling down in the United States.

Gérard Depardieu was considered for the central character before Brosnan was cast in his first leading role in a film.

[5] Jay Scott of The Globe and Mail said of Nomads, "... a breathlessly unself-conscious film (there is none of the self-congratulatory stylization of Blood Simple), the tone alternates maniacally between scaring the audience and making it giggle.

And then, via one of the funniest, cleverest and most unexpected conclusions to any movie in history, Nomads comes off the fence it has been sitting on with a bravura jump."

The sharply unpredictable editing, the hypnotic use of slow motion and rack focus (that's when the background and foreground reverse in clarity), the ominous rock music – everything adds up to a debut of singular confidence, full of fun and creepiness.

[7] Variety wrote, "Nomads avoids the more obvious ripped-guts devices in favor of dramatic visual scares.

"[8] Walter Goodman of The New York Times called the Innuat "as menacing as the chorus from West Side Story".