Your Daily Dracula – Danny Huston as Marlow, 30 Days of Night (2007)

Your Daily Dracula – Danny Huston as Marlow, 30 Days of Night (2007)

30 Days of Night

Traditionally, one thing that limits vampires’ ability to wreak havoc is that they have to be back in their coffins by dawn to avoid burning up in the light of the sun.  So what if a whole gang of feral bloodsuckers were to descend on Barrow, Alaska — the Northernmost community in America — during that time of the year when night goes on for a full month?  Comic book writer Steve Niles spun this not-unprecedented high concept (anyone else see Frostbite?) into a thin series which is much improved in this practical, action-oriented horror movie.

Harking back to John Carpenter films like Assault on Precinct 13 and The Thing – which themselves owed a lot to Howard Hawks films like Rio Bravo and The Thing From Another World – 30 Days opens well with deft sketching of the situation as night falls and ominous acts of vandalism (burned cell-phones, murdered huskies, a sabotaged helicopter) indicate evil forces are ensuring Barrow is cut off from the outside world.  A Renfield-like maniac (Ben Foster) with bad teeth causes a scene in the diner while asking for raw meat and gets locked up, then taunts his captors about the slaughter to come. After soap opera stuff about the callow Sheriff (Josh Hartnett) and his peppery estranged wife (Melissa George), plus enough character-building for the stick-figure supporting cast to give their deaths emotional resonance, director David Slade gets down to business by staging lightning-fast, ultra-gory attacks as nasties come out of the night and begin picking off helpless folk at their leisure.

Given that recent vampire films (disappointingly including John Carpenter’s Vampires) have been fairly weedy, especially when they trot out self-pitying style guru monsters (Ultra Violet, Underworld, Van Helsing, etc), it’s a refreshing change to have old-fashioned total bastard undead on the screen again.  Danny Huston makes an impressive pack leader – with a Lee Marvin haircut, goat eyes and a lamprey maw – but mostly the monsters stay in the dark, unglamorous predators who rend victims apart without conscience and take a great deal of killing (no single axe blow decapitations here).

It suffers from a few too many schlock habits – gaping plot holes, barely okay lead performances, a too-abrupt final face-off – but makes excellent use of its icy, desolate locale and offers some moments of gothic poetry between impressive multiple splatterings.

(first published in Venue)