30 DAYS OF NIGHT

It is one of the not insignificant achievements of 30 DAYS OF NIGHT that it makes screen vampires genuinely scary again. After many years of tragic heroes with fangs, and rapacious, generic undead that might as well be traditional zombies or fast-moving infected folks, the film version of Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith’s celebrated graphic novel presents a pack of vicious but socialized predators that truly seem to be stranded between the human and animal species. Using specific body movement and a guttural invented language, and assisted by fine, freaky special makeup by Gino Acevedo and the Weta Workshop team, Danny Huston (playing vampire leader Marlow) and his ghoul co-stars enact a band of bloodthirsty villains who justify revisiting a horror subgenre that has felt played-out in the hands of many others.














It helps that the movie has as source material that Niles/Templesmith comics series, which sets the action in Barrow, Alaska, a real-life town north of the Arctic Circle that is abandoned by the sun for a month every year. It is also, as the movie begins, departed by a large percentage of its citizenry for that period, leaving the small number left behind, led by Sheriff Eben Oleson (Josh Hartnett), vulnerable to attack—particularly by creatures against whom daylight is a key weapon. As one of the vamps puts it, “We should have come here long ago.”














After the sun sets for the last time, and Eben starts investigating a series of crimes (burned cell phones, butchered sled dogs) designed to make it impossible to call or run for help, the stage seems set for a film-length feeding frenzy. But surprisingly, the vampires’ main attack on the helpless locals is dispensed with in minutes; indeed, it happens so abruptly that it almost feels like a reel has gone missing. The sequence does pay off in a remarkable, long overhead tracking shot that makes it clear director David Slade is as comfortable and skilled at large-scale mayhem as he proved to be with modest, interior terror in his feature debut, HARD CANDY. Then, once most of the town’s population has been dispatched, 30 DAYS settles into a similar claustrophobic groove as Eben and a handful of survivors—including his estranged wife Stella (Melissa George), whom an accident has stranded in Barrow—hide out in assorted buildings to wait out the prolonged darkness and try to figure out a method by which their attackers might be defeated.









The screenplay by Niles himself, Stuart Beattie and CANDY’s Brian Nelson comes up with a consistently varied series of setpieces in which the vampires either stalk their prey or leap at them and drag them off with lightning speed. Eschewing digitally created action for the more intense and visceral kind that involves physical FX, Slade also lets the blood splatter freely, emphasizing the beastliness of the ghouls and allowing for some grisly catharsis when the townspeople fight back and the fiends get theirs. There’s juice to the monsters’ performances, too, along with that of Ben Foster, who makes an edgy impression as a stranger who turns up in town just ahead of the invasion and offers not-terribly-sympathetic warnings of the carnage to come.