by: JohnSoister
Posted on 01.19.10 in All Horror Films > Vampire
Release Date: 2007

Let’s face it; like telephones and road maps, cinematic vampires have undergone some radical transformations since the days when Bela Lugosi winked at his audiences with, “I never drink… wine.”  While the decade following the Millennium has seen us grow totally comfortable with the technological wonder of iPhones and GPS navigation systems, most bloodsucker movies have actually regressed somewhat, having lost the well-established mojo that made them one of the most intriguing and challenging sub-set in the horror genre.  Except for explicit remakes of Bram Stoker’s classic, gone are capes and cunning, crosses and craftiness, sophistication, subtlety and adult sexuality.  In their place, we have Twilight, Stephanie Meyer’s series that effectively reduces vampire lore to little more than an adolescent wet dream featuring a new generation of vapid Hollywood bloodsuckers: pompador’d, Abercrombie-oriented, James Dean wannabes with neat super-powers, middle-school libidos, and a tendency to spout the kind of drivel that kept TV soap operas going strong for well over a half century.  The film adaptations made from Miss Meyer’s cash-cow have, at this writing, captured whatever passes for the emotive imagination of preteen girls, and that is without a doubt more of a force to be reckoned with than the aggregate of every vampiric personality who ever lived.  Still, a year before the cinematic bottom fell out, David Slade’s 30 Days of Night, a more testosterone-laden take on the theme than could ever be dreamt of in Miss Meyer’s philosophy, did more than hit the big screen; it effectively tore it to shreds.

Set in the remote town of Barrow, Alaska, this adaptation of Steven Niles’s eponymous graphic novel strikes a bleak tone from the moment the opening credits begin to roll, blood-red, across the windswept tundra.  Even before Ben Foster’s wild-eyed Stranger begins sabotaging any and all connections between the town and the outside world – gone are cell-phones, dog teams and the town’s lone helicopter – one immediately grasps the enormity of Barrow’s seclusion.  There are no capes or crosses here, either, but neither are there any of the familiar intimations of young love to offset the growing sense of dread as the Alaskan sun slips beneath the horizon and snowy little Barrow descends into thirty days of night.  While characterization is not Slade’s forte, the man can paint a picture – his visual palette is as deep as the dramatic tension is palpable – and the viewer is enthralled no matter whether he watches the film in a theater or the DVD in the comfort of his own home.

Story-wise, we’ve seen it all before – hell, there are only seven basic plots – but the devil, so to speak, is in the arrangement of the details.  Most of Barrrow’s citizenry make for Fairbanks or some other hot spot during this month-long solar hiatus, so our victims are as neatly isolated as every one of those mini-busloads of randy young adults forced by weather, mechanical breakdowns, ineptitude or just plain old script-driven stupidity to hunker down at that abandoned farmhouse in the middle of Nowhere, Texas, or some other scary Southern state in the innumerable, interchangeable, Crazed-Gimmicked-Up-Killer-On-The-Loose movies of the last 40 years. The Stranger – the hemi-demi-semi ghoul who precedes the thirsty hordes in order to remove any obstacles to stress-free feeding – is a clone of Salem’s Lot’s Richard Straker, who himself is merely Renfield on steroids.  The noble self-sacrifice of the town’s sheriff can be traced (most notably) to the New Testament, while instances of the mano-a-mano resolution between the forces of Good and Evil are to found thousands of years earlier, in Homer.

The newer stuff – perhaps interesting; perhaps not – centers on the reinvention of vampires as mindless, blood-driven predators bereft of human emotion; unstoppable, soulless juggernauts that are no more capable of wit or strategy than teabaggers are of the mature and rational exchange of ideas.  In such a milieu, heightened characterization need not trump action sequences and the film’s big scene – wherein wholesale quantities of near-invulnerable predators savage their prey – is also most memorable.  Unlike the “vegetarian vampires” in Twilight – whose skin sparkles in the sun and who content themselves with animal blood – these ravenous creatures of the night have come to slake their thirst via Alaskan arteries.  They attack without mercy and slaughter the townspeople indiscriminately, with no thought given to the Bella Swans of the area.  (Twi-Hards be warned: there are more than just feelings flying around this scene.  The violence is gratuitous and it doesn’t let up.)  There’s an unholy National Geographic feeling to the sequence, as the camera pans through the carnage from above, forcing the audience to witness the unbridled fury of a vampire feeding-frenzy, without any hope of rescue or respite.  Heck, given the locale, we might just as well be watching packs of polar bears working their way through ice floes crammed with walruses and seals.

Characterization-wise, though, we might just as well be dealing with walruses and seals.  The mass of “action” vampires seems completely disassociated with the human race.  Gone are the suave, sexually ambiguous immortals born of Anne Rice and Stephen King.  Niles’ creatures – with their lifeless black eyes, oh-so-slightly distended facial features, and mouths filled with serrated teeth – are more shark than man.  When they speak – if what they do can be considered speaking – they do so with grunts and snarls and terrible shrieks that will linger in the viewer’s subconscious long after the movie has ended.  As for the leads, Josh Hartnett as local Sheriff Eben Oleson is as wooden as a stake, but Ben Foster’s Stranger strikes the right mix of normalcy and creepiness, and his best moment may be when he says – in that spine-tingly, creepy Cajun accent of his – “That cold ain’t the weather.  That’s death approachin’.” The audience – if not the unsuspecting citizens of Barrow – quickly realizes that this is not just another case of the scene-stealing Ben Foster overcompensating for Josh Hartnett’s doe-eyed stare.

Anjelica Huston’s half-brother, Danny, likewise impresses as Marlow, the undeniably monstrous yet seemingly self-loathing Vampire Master.   That at least the Master is capable of human thought is nowhere more evident than in the scene where a frightened girl whimpers, “Please, God…” and Marlow, who to that point had been sketched in fairly straight lines, turns his dead eyes to the heavens.  “God?” he echoes, before shaking his head and sadly – yet coldly – announcing, “No God.”   For what sort of God could allow such a creature to exist?  It is a subtle moment in a film that spends more time going for the proverbial jugular than it does developing the nuances of its story.

This lack of character development is not a hindrance, though; if anything, it works for 30 Days of Night’s rapid pacing.  Not a magnum opus by any stretch of the imagination, the picture does turn on a fairly novel premise and, as a result, may well be one of the most creative vampire movies to come out in the last few years.  Like 1996’s From Dusk Till Dawn – the picture’s spiritual ancestor – 30 Days of Night is a gritty, unapologetic, in-your-face horror film that is heavy on the world of total darkness, but that skimps on the twilight.

Literally.

• ★★★★★

  Acting:

• ★★★★★

  Blood:

• ★★★★★

  Violence:

• ★★★★★

  Partying:

• ★★★★★

  Language:

• ★★★★★

  Humor:

• ★★★★★

  Predictable:

• ★★★★★

  Girls:

• ★★★★★

  Gore:

• ★★★★★

  Sexuality:

• ★★★★★

  Torture:

• ★★★★★

  Overall:

"No God". One of my favorite horror film quotes. The climax truly rests on these two words. This film has a nice way of trapping you into it's surroundings. The biggest problem i had with the film is that it's an "Action" film, and not a "Survival" film. Sure, i know what the film is based on, BUT...what if, instead, we had a film more like, The Birds. The Birds is the ultimate film that totally immerse you into the struggles of the characters and the enclosed environment surrounding them. The Birds did it perfectly. Maybe i just mostly enjoyed the parts of 30 Days that involved the town's people reactions to what was going on around them. The film focused on suspense, not on action. Less Hollywood faces (didn't want to see Josh in this film) and more situational development would have been key. Still, I enjoyed this film.