30 Days of Night (2007)
Review by Dr. Royce Clemens
There are two kinds of eyesores when it comes to motion pictures. The first kind is when what you’re seeing is so ugly and bad that you’d be more disposed towards a root-canal than to continue watching it. And the other kind, the more elusive and precious kind, is when your eyes are literally sore because what you’re watching is so transfixing and the images so deep that you’ve actually neglected to BLINK.
30 Days of Night is that wonderful second kind. As a critic specializing in horror films (apparently), I cannot tell you how long the wait has been for someone, ANYONE, to kick the vampire movie square in the ass. With few variations, they all play like Lifestyles of the Rich, Famous, Bloodsoaked and Emo. All leather pants and frosted hair and dire pronouncements and wildly convoluted backstories. That someone is Hard Candy director David Slade, who tears the whole model down and starts from scratch. This is one of the best films of the year.
The woefully underrated Josh Hartnett plays Eban, the sheriff of Barrow, Alaska, which is the northernmost city in the United States. Every month, most of the town hops on planes to get the hell out of there, for every winter the sun goes down and doesn’t come up for a month. Among those going on the mainland exodus is Eban’s estranged wife Stella, (Melissa George) who winds up missing the last plane out.
But there’s weird doings of vandalism afoot. Someone sabotages a townsperson’s helicopter. Another townsperson finds all his sled dogs slaughtered. Turns out a stranger (Ben Foster, who’s been impressing the hell out of me this fall after 3:10 To Yuma) is behind it all. But we find that, much like the Silver Surfer acts as herald to Galactus, The Stranger is making the way for a horde of vampires, cutting off all routes of escape.
Now let’s stop and reflect how wonderful, intelligent and unique this premise is. In a town where the sun never comes up, a group of vampires have decided to start the movable feast. It kinda makes you wonder why EVERY vampire movie is set in Los Angeles or Mexico or some other place known for THE FUCKING SUN! At one point, a vampire says to the leader (played by a freaky and unrecognizable Danny Huston) that they should have come there ages ago. Yeah, no shit?
But Slade wisely centers the movie on the human characters, who know full well that they are unequipped to fight this undead menace. No one breaks out a whole bunch of weapons and goes on a vamp killing spree. Their only hope is not to defeat the vampires, but to run out the clock until the sun comes up again. And yes a few do get picked off, but it is handled in plausible and believable ways. Basically, this vampire movie lifts zombie movie conventions, but Slade and his writers imbue them with real emotion, whereas zombie movies regard these developments only perfunctory and use them only to pad out the running time.
In fact, everything from the casting to the art direction goes to great pains to make them relatable. Everyone looks like a normal human being (yes, including Hartnett and George). We know people who look and act like this, and it helps the audience make the leap and cuts down on inane expository monologuing. And these real people live in real homes that look lived in and very much unlike sets. So seeing these larger than life creatures of the night (usually relegated to castles and mansions) standing tall in a living room very much like the one you played in when you were a kid really lends 30 Days of Night the Holy-Shit-This-Is-Really-Happening vibe that makes it so effective.
The work on the vampires, however is not to be discounted. Yes they wear designer clothes, but they hang off of their bodies at odd angles, and they routinely get caked in blood. They don’t even clean the blood off their faces and at one point, Huston’s character uses the blood of a freshly dead victim to slick back his hair. The eyes of these creatures are all black and unlike the vampires of yesteryear with two well-placed fangs, these folks have entire rows of meat-ripping incisors. They remind me of sharks, who are yet another species that devote themselves wholly towards moving and consumption.
One of the biggest reasons 30 Days of Night works is the wonderful camerawork. The film has a palate of slate grays and forbidding whites and the camera itself roams freely about the town. And one of the most effective shots I’ve seen in a movie is an aerial shot of the early part of the invasion as the townspeople futilely try to ward of the impending vampires, and the pure white of the town is sullied by red blood and orange flame. In addition, these things lurk freely about the background, sort of out of focus and scaring the shit out of you. They pull this at odd times, not following pattern. This inspired me to constantly scan the frame, looking for something that would present a danger to the characters. Rare is the movie that forces you to pay attention to it, without going in one ear and out the other. Rarer still is a movie like 30 Days of Night, that makes you WANT to observe everything you can.
It is fitting that a film set in Alaska signifies the practical snowstorm in hell. In 2007, I have seen a horror that isn’t a remake or a sequel. It didn’t bore me with torture or try to make me laugh. It doesn’t wear its inspirations on its sleeve or try to impress me with how many other horror movies the filmmaker saw. In a land where nothing grows, the horror movie may have been given new life. I don’t truck with the whole “SUPPORT HORROR OR DIE!” mode of thinking, but I would if they were more like this. In fact, I think it goes beyond just supporting horror by seeing this.
You’d be supporting yourself.
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