Fresh blood

>> 30 Days of Night attempts to resurrect
the vampire horror genre with
some new-ish ideas

by MATTHEW HAYS

The bad guys in 30 Days of Night have a familiar look, sound and bite. It is as though the speed-infused infected in 28 Days Later had been gang raped by the descendants of Count Dracula and a pack of werewolves. Along with the vampire stuff—they only come out at night and so on—they move with the speed of Danny Boyle’s zombies. They certainly look promisingly menacing in the early running of the movie.

It’s a clever idea: what better place to set a movie about monsters who can only work their twisted magic when the sun is down than the far north? In this case, it’s Alaska, where inhabitants endure an entire month without sunlight. Josh Hartnett is the town’s hard-working, decent sheriff, a job he takes on while surrounded by his brother and grandma. There are dire warnings about what’s to come. A babbling vagabond mutters about the apocalypse, but everyone just assumes he’s a loony escaped from the big city.

That is, until the nasties show up. Danny Huston plays their leader—and he does indeed look mighty creepy—a vampire of epic proportions, who wanders around commanding his flock when and where to attack.

The faster-is-better theory of movie monsters worked very well in 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake, where the flesh-eaters moved at a pace that upgraded the more traditional zombie to the MTV era. Dare I say it, by this entry, the idea is no longer quite so unnerving as it was in the early running. There are a series of requisite chills and jumps in 30 Days, but ultimately, we end up with much of what we expected: a group of the uninfected attempt to stave off the meanies by any means necessary. Who will make it to the final frames of the film?

30 Days of Night boasts a final twist that is truly clever, but as nice as Hartnett is to look at, I’m not entirely sure the film carries itself to its concluding moments. This comic-book-cum-film is a valiant effort at pumping some more new blood into the vampire/zombie sub-genre, but alas, it’s not as horrifying as it’s trying to be.

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