30 Days of Night Review

The Vampire Movie genre is a funny thing: it's much older than the zombie movie genre, but has none of it's cohesion or consistent formal conventions. Nosferatu, of course, is a classic: Murnau's vampire was inhuman, loaded with metaphorical value while staying essentially creepy. By all indications, the vampire would be the gold standard of fear in cinema. But from the moment Bela Lugosi stuck a pair of (I assume) funny-smelling plastic fangs in his mouth, the genre was doomed to a future of campy jokes, silly accents and affectations, and really bad wardrobe. You might be thinking that I'm referring to the extremely gay Interview with a Vampire (and I don't say that derisively; the movie is laden with homosexual subtext and, well, text), and I am, but I'm also thinking of the Blade and Underworld Movies, which basically cranked out clumsy vampires by the barrel and cut through them like Chuck Norris cuts through gangs of ninjas. Some films, like Larry Fesenden's Habit, were well-done, but they got caught up in the sexual aspect of vampirism. There's no doubt in my mind that Bram Stoker's Dracula is an extended sexual metaphor, among other things, and I'm certain that the oft-maligned Fessenden was paying tribute to the B-movies of yore like Daughters of Darkness. I'm not going to lie: I love a sexy movie as much as the next guy, but turning a vampire into an object of sexual desire (or mirthful escapades as the case may be) is in direct conflict with it's sense of menace, it's inhumanness, it's pall of fear. Me? I want blood.

I have no idea why the vampire was defanged in this way, but 30 Days of Night set out to undo all the damage done over the last several years. The film is set in the northernmost town in Alaska, during the part of the year when there are literally 30 calendar days of perpetual night. A group of vampires cut off the town's communication and go on a month-long feeding frenzy. Without commenting overmuch on the premise, it's quite refreshing to have one that doesn't involve vampire race wars and the Ultimate Fate of vampire-kind. This is a small town and a small faction of vampires intent on nothing more than sucking all the blood they can.
The protagonist, Sheriff Eben Oleson, is also a key to the threat posed by the vampires. Although he is generally a quick-thinking, capable man, he is far from being the super-cool Blade or Selene, who slay enemies by the dozen with a dry quip and a dry brow. Oleson is not a badass hero, but a protector who is barely able to protect a small group of survivors, let alone a whole town. He great under pressure, but the pressure is so great that at moments he appears to be on the verge of cracking.

But who wouldn't? These vampires are menacing, the way vampires should be. If a porcelain Tom Cruise wearing a puffy pirate shirt accosted me, I'm sure that I would die... laughing. The vampires in 30 Days are not the foppish aristocrats of the night we've become accustomed to, nor are they the leather-clad glorified red-shirts that Wesley Snipes eats for breakfast: they are monsters in men's clothing, razor-fanged, crazy-eyed, blood-soaked beasts with contorted alabaster faces. Everything about them says fear, from their normal-yet-slightly-stressed attire to their gutteral vampire language. The wonderful thing about them is not that it's a unique re-envisioning of the vampire, but a return the core foul thing that predates all cinema. They are part of no underground cabal or society just beyond the scope of human eyes, just a pack of dangerous, hungry scavengers with nothing more in mind than tearing out a throat or two.

All told, the movie is generally unspectacular, but likable nonetheless. It dusted off a few tricks from the horror movie playbook and filled in the blanks with great makeup, good but scant gore effects, and a hasty tacked-on romantic angle. That said, I would watch this movie again and possibly buy the DVD. I like gore effects, great makeup, and the horror movie playbook. I would go so far as to say that I'm skeptical of films that think they can improve on it. Even though this is a perfectly likable little movie in the grand scheme of things, in the here and now, it's a wonderful treat for those of us who have been waiting for a vampire movie with scary vampires in it.